Wikipedia:Peer review/Comics/archive1

Comics

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because as the main article on a major topic, it has potential to go all the way to FA. It needs some work, particularly with sourcing, so let's take it one step at a time. Any suggestions you can provide would be helpful (where to look, any books you know of). Anything else you think this article needs to really help it shine, be bold and speak up.

Thanks, BOZ (talk) 15:14, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

• Most of the article is sourced, it was just written back when we had a different referencing style. Most of the points are referenced to and verifiable in Sabin, Perry & Aldridge and McCloud. Hiding T 15:18, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is fascinating and easy to read. Its big problem is complete lack of sourcing for large fractions of the article, which covers a wide variety of complicated ideas that must have come from sources. Here are some suggestions for improvement.

• A good rule of thumb for citations is to source every paragraph as well as every direct quote, every set of statistics, and every claim that might reasonably be questioned. Lots of paragraphs in the existing article are unsourced and include lots of material that is not common knowledge, hence apt to be questioned.

• MOS:IMAGES says in part, "Avoid sandwiching text between two images that face each other."

• MOS:HEAD says in part, "Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer." Thus, "Definition" would be better than "Defining comics", and "Creation" better than "Comic creation", and so on.

• MOS:IMAGES also says in part, "Images should be inside the section they belong to (after the heading and after any links to other articles), and not above the heading." Thus, the "Yellow Kid" image should be relocated.

• MOS:IMAGES also says in part,"Do not place left-aligned images directly below a subsection-level heading (=== or lower), as this sometimes disconnects the heading from the text that follows it." Thus "Adam and Eve" and "William Hogarth" need to go down or to the right.

• "Use" is always better than "utilize".

• The word "the" is generally avoided in heads or section heads unless absolutely necessary. Thus "The 19th century: a form established" would be better as "19th century: a form established".

• Captions consisting solely of a sentence fragment don't take terminal periods.

• Quotations, like the one from Töpffer, of four lines or more can be rendered as blockquotes.

• Sentences normally don't start with digits. You can write out the numbers instead or recast the sentence to move the digits to an inside position.

• External links are not normally embedded in the main text. "The Big Triangle", for example, should be turned into an inline citation that includes the external link (url) as part of the reference section.

• I'd recommend rendering the short list in the "Art styles" section as straight prose.

• I'd avoid addressing the reader directly, as in "For a fuller exploration of the language, please see Comics vocabulary."

• Generally it's better to expand extremely short paragraphs or sections like "In higher education" or to merge them with other paragraphs or sections.

• Page ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens.

• Some of the citations, such as 46, 48, and 49, are malformed or incomplete.

• The dabfinder tool that lives here finds seven links that go to disambiguation pages rather than to the intended target.

• The link checker tool that lives here finds five dead urls in the citations.

This is not by any means a complete line-by-line review, but I hope it proves helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 02:14, 17 August 2009 (UTC)