Wikipedia:Peer review/David Irving/archive1

David Irving

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I haven't yet contributed to this article but I noticed it is really excellent and unbiased. It deserves to be FA, it's just too long. Please help me identify which parts should be shortened and if there are any other changes that should be made.

Thanks, Shii (tock) 02:42, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: I'll try to help with a few things, but I don't have time to go through the article closely to see exactly how to trim.

• At 151 kilobytes, the article is much too long. The upper limit for reading comfort is about 100 kilobytes. If I were thinking of preparing the article for FA, I would aim to cut it by one-third.

• Reading quickly through the article, I see many long quotes that would be candidates for reduction. Some of these appear in the "Notes" section. Is all that detail really necessary in an encyclopedia article?

• The "External links" section seems excessively long. I would eliminate any entries that are already cited in the main text.

• I would look carefully at all of the parts of the article that are unsourced or incompletely sourced. For example, the first paragraph of the "Author" section includes only one inline citation, and it supports only a single claim occupying half of a sentence. The rest of the paragraph contains many claims that are not common knowledge and that might be questioned. Something like the claim of 40,000 pounds in damages, for example, needs a source. Another example would be the short "Göring" section, which lacks a source or sources.

• The article is well-written. However, if I were thinking of working this up to FA, I would have to be sure that the existing text included no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. This would be an enormous job because it would involve tracking down the cited sources, reading them, and checking the existing text against them. Unless you can track down the main contributors and enlist their help, you will essentially be starting from scratch.

• The link checker at the top of this review page finds quite a few dead urls in citations.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 00:52, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments

• I noticed when I reopened the PR after the bot closed it that the headers do not always follow WP:HEAD - some repeat his name, for example.
• The image File:Did_six_million_really_die.jpg‎ of the book cover is fair use but does not have a fair use rationale for this page. I am frankly not sure how it meets WP:NFCC in this article - how is the reader's understanding of Irving increased by seeing the cover of a book Irving did not write?
• The Persona non grata and Arrest and imprisonment in Austria sections need more references, and Post-release has zero refs.
• Avoid direct external links in the text - Time in Prison has an EL to his book written in Prison
• Avoid short (one or two sentence) paragraphs and sections - does Arrest and imprisonment in Austria really need three subsections?
• The article uses {{cquote}} but according the documentation at Template:Cquote this is for pull quotes only, and this should probably use {{blockquote}} instead.
• The article reads like a quote farm in places

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 peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:42, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

These are great comments. I will see what I can do to improve this important article to FA. Shii (tock) 06:04, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

• Hi Shii, the article is not hugely long at the moment; 8747 words readable prose, which is within the norm for FA, though personally I would try to get it below 7,000 if possible. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 09:52, 2 December 2010 (UTC)