Wikipedia:Peer review/Jonestown/archive1

Jonestown

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for June 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
My immediate goal is to bring this article to GA standards. Any criticism furthering this goal would be appreciated. I'm also interested in how much emphasis should be placed on the classified documents and conspiracy theories related to the topic.

Thanks, Viriditas (talk) 03:31, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm noticing some interesting issues with the citations. For example, the article says "Another note, found 25 years later, was buried among reams of unrelated paperwork. The document ... was attributed most likely to Richard Tropp" but the citation for that sentence says that the providence of the letter is unknown. Also, obviously, two sources are very heavily relied upon. Shii (tock) 21:34, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Note: The rules for nominating for Peer Review require articles to be clear of major cleanup banners. This article has such a banner, dated June 2009, relating to the reliability of its sources. This issue should be addressed by editors before peer review. Brianboulton (talk) 00:26, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: I have no idea about the reliability of sources used, but this seems to be fairly well referenced, so here are some suggestions for improvement.

• This is a long article and the lead seems a bit sparse to me and could be expanded to four paragraphs. The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article, so my rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. Please see WP:LEAD
• There are several places with short (one or two sentence) paragraphs (including the lead). This interrupts the flow of the article and these should be combined with others where possible, or perhaps expanded.
• I am guessing the image licenses are OK for GA, but if this goes to FAC I would make extra sure that the free license from the SDSU Jonestown project website is really free. My guess is that many of the image copyrights belong to the original photographers and thus they may not be free (depsite what the website says, note I am also not an image copyright expert).
• Per WP:MOS#Images, images should be set to thumb width to allow reader preferences to take over. For portrait format images, "upright" can be used to make the image narrower. You might also consider using the {{Multiple image}} for some of the many portraits.
• The MOS also says not to sandwich text between images
• WP:HEAD says not to repeat the name of the article in the headers if at all possible. So, for example, "Jonestown established" could just be something like "Establishment" and "Jonestown life after mass migration" could just be "Life after mass migration" or perhaps just "After mass migration". We already know this article is about Jonestown.
• I would also consider adding years or dates to the headers to provide more context.
• Make sure to provide context to the reader - for example Jim Jones is not mentioned in the first paragraph of Origins and is only mentioned by last name in the second paragraph. I think the lead introduces him, but usually names are wikilinked twice (lead and first mention).
• The "Notes from non-surviving residents" section seems a bit too large to me and I do not see why it has to have so many long direct quotations. I would probably summarize the several notes about willing assets to the Communist Party of the USSR in a sentence or two, something like "Several notes dated November 18, 1978 were found, which left bank accounts to the Communist Party of the USSR. These were from ...."
• Statements like though the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigated the Jonestown mass suicide and announced that there was no evidence of CIA involvement at Jonestown. need a ref. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
• Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V

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 poeer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)