Wikipedia:Peer review/Belgium national football team/archive1

Belgium national football team

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article, B-status since February 2014, for peer review because I want to attempt an FA nomination. Over the past 8 months, it has been improved a lot and I think the page is at least GA-worthy. Could someone screen it on major shortcomings for FA? Especially feedback regarding the neutrality and the length (specifically in the chapter "Competitive record") would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance, Kareldorado (talk) 11:30, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Kareldorado, saw this had been unreviewed for a while, so doing now. Will come back with first comments shortly. -- Euryalus (talk) 08:48, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Comments from Euryalus

This is an extremely comprehensive article and looks like an excellent resource. However due to its length and formatting it takes forever to load - will come back to this later in the review. Will go through each section in turn and then offer some general views.

Lead

• Needs a sentence or two on the history of the team, especially as this is a large part of the following article.

• Per MOS, is it possible to slightly declutter the lead by transferring citations for uncontroversial points into the body of the article instead?

• Needed a mild copyedit - did this myself but please let me know if you disagree.

• Sentence clarification - is the team a founding member of FIFA and UEFA, or the Royal Belgium Football Association? if its the Association, this may not need to be mentioned in the lead as it is not directly relevant to the team.

• Supporters club - it would be good to include a sentence on why the supporter's group is called 1895. And is this group's official name in italics?

History (1900-1919)

• No need for the hatnote referring to a later section of the article. Given the article length, it might also be better to shift the results onto a subpage and/or to split the entire history section into a shorter version here and a longer but separate main page (eg. History of the Belgium national football team)

• "ex-player Cees van Hasselt" - not clear where he is an ex-player from.

• Informal results section - might be useful to include the scores from the 3 follow-up games against the Netherlands.

• "It was decided" - not clear who decided this.

• "(Later Amsterdam") - did the Amsterdam shift occur before 1919? If so, apologies for removing this and please restore. If not, it should be mentioned in the History section's most relevant chronological section .

• Copyedit - made some copyediting changes, but please revert if you disagree or if I've inadvertently introduced errors.

• Need a reference for the statement that games were suspended during WWI.

1920s - 1970s

• Gave this a mild copyedit for style, as above feel free to amend if I've inadvertently made it inaccurate.

Golden generation

• First paragraph needs references.

Managers

• Contains two references immediately after the header that aren't attached to any text?

General points

• Length - The article contains 80kB of prose, which is more than a third bigger than the recommended limit. An article this long might be challenged at FAC. One suggestion for reducing it would be to move the "Competitive record" section into a separate article, leaving only a few summary paragraphs here. Perhaps also move “Recent results and forthcoming fixtures” – this won’t affect the amount of prose, but it would fit better there than here, and would reduce the amount of scrolling required on this page.

• Wikilinks - a fair few terms are wikilinked more than once in the article. Per WP:MOS it is preferable to link each name or term on the first occasion it appears, but not on subsequent occasions. I've removed a few but there's several more to go. There's also a couple of links to things that are commonplace, and perhaps don't require them (for example WWI and WWII).

• References - layout is fine, and the article appears well-referenced. Assuming good-faith on content.

• Images - well placed and relevant. Well done on finding or obtaining so many relevant images with appropriate permissions.

Overall this is a great article, should sail through GA/FA with a couple of minor copyedits copyedits and a reduction in size. Well done to all those who worked on it to make it this good over the last eight months! Euryalus (talk) 11:34, 28 November 2014 (UTC)