Wikipedia:Peer review/Lolcat/archive1

Lolcat

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I wish to know what could be done to improve its quality; hopefully someday it could be a Good article.

Thanks, Cybercobra (talk) 06:39, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

• Coverage: Add sections on
  • language usage, popular uasge like " (to)2", "ur", "teh (the)" "s_>z"etc [1][2]
  • the article seem cat-centric: also talk about dogs etc
  • Are there other popular themes like Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat?
• Dates need references; eg "The domain name "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005."
• "while others don't" is spoken English, not written.

--Redtigerxyz ^Talk 12:12, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is fascinating and amusing. I think it has GA potential, but it needs more work to get there. Here are my suggestions for improvement.

Lead

• MOS:INTRO says in part, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." - The existing lead is more like an essay introduction than a summary of the main text. A good rule of thumb for leads is to include at least a mention of each main text section and not to include anything that is not mentioned in the main text. I'd think about mentioning the early cat-card people like Frees in the lead as well as parodies and off-shoots and anything else that is added as the article expands. It's often a good idea to re-write the lead when the rest of the article is finished.

Format

• I'd suggest combining the two short paragraphs at the end of the section.

History

• The citation-needed tag for Henry Pointer should be addressed. The information must have come from somewhere, but where?
• "The word "Lolcat" is attested as early as June 2006... " - Is "is attested" the right phrase here? Perhaps "was used"?
• "Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as... - Tighten by deleting "through usage on"?
• "The News Journal states that... " - Specify the city and state of the The News Journal?
• "Ikenburg adds that the images have been... " - Who is Ikenburg?
• "The first image on "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" was posted on... " - Title case is preferred even if the source uses all caps; i.e., "I Can Has Cheezburger?"

Offshoots and parodies

• It would be helpful if you could elaborate a bit on LOLCODE. The one-sentence orphan paragraph is a bit of a teaser.

Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat

• The project to translate the Bible into lolspeak might also be expanded. How is such a project possible? How far have they gotten? What does a well-known passage look like in translation? Would a selected blockquote be good here?

Images

• The images lack alt text, designed to make the images accessible to readers with visual impairments. They are not especially easy to do at first but are worth doing. WP:ALT has details.

Other

• The dabfinder that lives here finds two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.
• Citation 1 has a dead url.
• Citation 20 is incomplete. Ditto for Citation 10 and others. A good rule of thumb for Internet sources is to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date, if all of those can be found.
• Blogs are not usually considered reliable sources. In this particular case, they might sometimes be, but it would be better to replace citations to personal blogs with citations to published media such as newspapers, magazines, and books. Speaking of books, it would be good to track down at least the one on Henry Frees and any others that touch on this subject and to cite them, where possible, instead of personal blogs and web sites.
• Newspaper and magazine names should appear in italics.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 18:14, 6 September 2009 (UTC)