Wikipedia:Peer review/Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness/archive1

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to see if we can make any improvements so it can get back its GA status

Thanks, JDOG555 (talk) 04:44, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This article is about an interesting place I'd like to visit. It's well beyond "start class", but it will need quite a bit of work to regain GA status. Here are a few suggestions.

• The lead should summarize the whole article, and this one doesn't come close. My rule of thumb is to mention the main thrust of each of the text sections and not to include anything important in the lead that does not appear in the main text. WP:LEAD has details.

• Large parts of the existing article lack inline citations to reliable sources. For example, the Geography section is completely unsourced as are the Canoeing, Fishing, and Hiking subsections. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every set of statistics, every unusual claim, every direct quotation, and every paragraph. If one source supports all of the claims in a paragraph, the citation should go at the end of the paragraph.

• Quite a few of the citations are incomplete or malformed. For citations of web pages, include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and date of most recent access, if all of those are known or can be found. Since citation 1 uses "cite web", it would be a good idea to use the "cite" family of templates throughout.

• Extremely short sections and paragraphs produce a disjointed layout and make it hard to fit images inside the sections. Images should not overlap section boundaries or displace heads or edit buttons. An effective way to solve these problems is to merge short subsections. For example, "Recreation" would work better, I think, as a section with no subsections, just paragraphs.

• The "General references" section is of little use, in my opinion. If those works are important to the topic, try to include them in inline citations that support important points.

• If you can manage it, place directional images so that they look into the page rather than out. The loon does this already, but File:Voyageur canoe.jpg is facing out of the page, and so are the camping canoers. They would both look better on the left looking in.

• Rather than making a list of notable people, I'd try to fit these three items into the "Human history" section in chronological order. These three items need sources, and more details about these people would probably be interesting.

• The "Human history" section has a large chronological gap between the end of the 18th century and the 1920s. Did nothing noteworthy happen in this region for 120 years?

• This is not a complete review or anything like a line-by-line critique. When you're done making changes, you might ask for a copyedit from an editor at WP:GOCE. I see small errors here and there as well as deviations from the Manual of Style; for example, I added a needed hyphen to the first sentence. For another example, the lead image in the infobox needs a caption.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 02:28, 2 January 2012 (UTC)