Wikipedia:Peer review/Galveston, Texas/archive1

Galveston, Texas

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because we would like additional feedback and recommendations prior to good article review.

Thanks, Postoak (talk) 17:12, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is most interesting, broad in coverage, nicely illustrated, stable, and neutral. I don't think it's far from GA, but it needs further work to make the grade. It doesn't hurt to work with the eventual goal of FA in mind, and WP:FA#Geography and places is a good place to find FA articles about cities. Here are some suggestions for improvement.

Lead

• The existing lead is reasonably good, but since the lead should be a summary or abstract of the whole article, it would be good to add at least a mention of the government and education sections.

Mentioned both sections in lead. Postoak (talk) 03:16, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

"Verifiablity

• In general, the article seems well-sourced. However, fairly large chunks, especially in the early sections, lack sources. In the History section, the first sentence of the second paragraph is sourced, but the rest of the paragraph, starting with "The first permanent European settlements on the island were constructed around 1816 by the pirate Louis-Michel Aury... " is unsourced even though it contains material that is not common knowledge. It must have come from a source or sources, but they have not been identified. The next paragraph is unsourced even though it contains specific numerical quantities that must have come from a source or sources: "along with several associates purchased 4,605 acres (18.64 km²) of land for $50,000 from the Austin Colony... ". The sources should be identified. In the "Growth" subsection, the paragraph that begins "During this era, Galveston was also home to a number of state firsts... " gives no source(s), but the quite specific data must have come from somewhere. A good rule of thumb is to provide a source for every claim that might reasonably be questioned, every direct quote, every set of statistics, and every paragraph. The entire "Storm of 1900" subsection is unsourced even though it includes this claim that is certain to be questioned: "Even post-Hurricane Katrina, this event holds the record as the United States' deadliest natural disaster."

Proofing

• Quite a few little things need attention. Sentences like this one in the "Architecture" section are missing words or don't quite make sense for other reasons: "In 1880, the house was bought by Edwin N. Ketchum who police chief during the 1900 Storm." This sequence in "Arts and culture" is another example: ". The Galveston Ballet is regional pre-professional ballet company and academy serving Galveston county." All of the imperial measures in the article need also to be given in metric units. I added a few missing ones, but I see others such as "Ike produced waves and a rising storm surge of about 14 feet" that need to be fixed. Superscripts are tiny in some places and should be expressed like the others at this size: ⁵. The abbreviations in the Education and Transportation sections should not be bolded. A proofreader or copyeditor would probably catch and fix most of these small things.

Geology

• A possibility for expansion would be to say something about how the island came to be and what it consists of. Is it just made of sand, or does something more substantial underlie it? If it's only sand, what keeps it from washing completely away?

Storm of 1900

• Aside from the 1900 hurricane and Ike, have other named storms hit the island during recorded history? Was the original seawall effective in any instance? What is the statistical likelihood of a major hurricane striking Galveston in any given year?

General

• Extremely short sections are generally frowned upon. I think you could reasonably merge some of the shorter ones such as "Public libraries", "Media", and "Fire and police departments" with other sections.
• The dabfinder tool that lives here finds 10 wikilinks in the article that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.
• The link checker tool that lives here finds at least four dead urls in the citations.

Images

• It's best to arrange the images to avoid text sandwiches like the one in the "Architecture" section and, if possible, to avoid section overlap, as happens with the Moody Plaza.
• The images lack alt text. This might not be an issue at the GA level, but if you are aiming for an eventual FA, it will be an issue. Alt text describes images or their content for readers who can't see the images. You'll find an explanation at WP:ALT, and you can look at ongoing reviews at FAC to see how other editors are handling the alt text questions.

References

• Quite a few citations are missing needed data. Citations 50 and 52, for example, are nothing but urls, and others lack access dates. A good rule of thumb for citations to Internet sources is to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date, if all of these are known or can be found.
• Title case is preferred in Wikipedia articles rather than all caps, even if the source uses all caps. Thus "GALVESTON'S SISTER CITIES" in citation 101 should be "Galveston's sister cities".
• The date formatting in the citations should be consistent. If you use m-d-y for most of them, you should change all of them to m-d-y rather than yyyy-mm-dd or other formats.

I hope these comments prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 20:40, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the thorough and helpful review. I will begin to incorporate your recommendations as soon as possible. I sincerely appreciate the time you've given to assist with the article. Thanks again, Postoak (talk) 20:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)