Wikipedia:Peer review/United States/archive3

United States

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I've listed this article for peer review because I think it's fit for consideration for FA status.

Thanks, --occono (talk) 20:49, 23 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

S Marshall

This is an excellent article to call a peer review on, because it's one of the highest-visibility pages in the encyclopaedia. Good call.
Unfortunately, I should think that if submitted to FAC in its current state, it would fail criterion 1c because major parts of it are short of sources. Don't get me wrong, a lot of sources are cited, but they're concentrated in some parts of the article. The "politics" section, in particular, has a number of paragraphs with no sources at all, one after the other.
It may also fail criterion 2b because of the length of the table of contents. A different structure might be preferable there?
In order to pass criterion 3, for accessibility reasons, it's mandatory to add alt text to the images. See WP:ALT.

Comment: The nominator is not a contributor to the article (which has thousands of edits from multiple editors). The article is currently undergoing heavy work, and as such is not suitable for peer review at present. I am suggesting to the current active editors that the request for review be withdrawn until the article has reached a stable state. Brianboulton (talk) 10:15, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: I agree with all the points raised above - this needs many more refs and alt text. There are tricks for only displaying parts of the headers in the TOC that may be useful here. Here are some other general suggestions for improvement.

The topic is so large that I think the article has to be pruned in spots of trivial clutter - for example, the various areas given in Geography, climate, and environment seem a bit much, especially when this is also covered in a note in the infobox
Units need to be given in both English and metric units - the {{convert}} template is useful here. See things like The total land area of the contiguous United States is approximately 1.9 billion acres. Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at 365 million acres.
The sources used seem fairly random - I would expect on a topic like this that there are many top quality books that can be cited, but instead the article uses sources like Information Please and eMarketer.
The hardest criteria for FAC for most articles to meet is 1a, a professional level of English. This needs a good copyedit to polish the prose.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:25, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]