Wikipedia:Peer review/Harrisburg, Illinois/archive1

Harrisburg, Illinois

• 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 April 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because, it has alot of potential, and I need help not only cretiquing the work, but helping make this page better. Any controbutions you want to add to the page, rewording or so forth to help avoid POV problems or Plagarism problems are completely welcome. This article could be a very well done article on a town of it's size with none equal to it's caliber. In which there aren't very many. Thanks, Ruhe1986 (talk) 01:06, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Harrisburg sounds like an interesting place. Sad to say, the article has serious problems. They can be fixed, but it will take hard work and considerable writing skill.

Plagiarism

• You asked for advice about plagiarism. Checking more-or-less at random, I found this in the "Government, health care, and education" section: "The City of Harrisburg operates its own water distribution system. It has a storage capacity of 6,000,000 gallons in elevated tanks. The water processing plant has a capacity of 4,000,000 per day, while average daily consumption is about 2,500,000 gallons. The city's water treatment plant has a design capacity of 3,125,000 gallons per day. It's average load id 1,200,000 gallons per day." This is sourced to a commercial company's profile for Harrisburg. The source says: "The City of Harrisburg operates its own water distribution system. It has a storage capacity of 6,000,000 gallons in elevated tanks. The water processing plant has a capacity of 4,000,000 per day, while average daily consumption is about 2,500,000 gallons. The city's water treatment plant has a design capacity of 3,125,000 gallons per day. It's average load id 1,200,000 gallons per day." As you can see, this part of the text in the Wikipedia article has been copied entirely from the source document, even including the typo "id" instead of "is" in the phrase "average load id". This is plagiarism and also a copyright violation. Please see WP:COPYVIO and a recent dispatch on plagiarism for more complete explanations and ideas. You should carefully compare all of the sourced claims in the article with the source documents to make sure the article has no more instances like this.

Sourcing

• While sections of the article appear to be well-sourced, other sections or large blocks of text lack sources. A good rule of thumb is to source every paragraph, every set of statistics, every unusual claim, every direct quotation, and anything that is not common knowledge and is reasonably likely to be questioned. Specific examples of claims that need sources are the entire second paragraph of Industrial origins", the first of the two Kennedy quotations in "Slow economic decline", the second and fourth paragraphs of "Post-coal economy", most of the "Harrisburg neighborhoods" section, and the first paragraph of "Climate". I see more examples further down in the article.
• I have by no means checked all of the sources, but a random sample makes me uneasy. The sources need to support the claims made in the article, and at least some of them don't seem to do so. For example, the first sentence of "Media" says, "The Harrisburg Daily Register has been providing coverage of news and sports for southeastern Illinois since 1869." The citation links to the newspaper's web page, but it says nothing about 1869, or at least I don't see it. No one is apt to doubt the newspaper's existence, but the 1869 claim is not common knowledge and might easily be questioned. Where did the date come from?

Copyediting

• The whole article needs the attention of a skilled copyeditor. I found and fixed 25 or so minor errors, but I see more. In the "Industrial origins" section, for example, a sentence says, "Several planning mills and flour mills also dotted the city." This must be a misspelling of "planing". The next sentence begins, "Robert King, an early proprietor, opened a brick and tile factory on South Main st. in 1896... ". Here "South Main Street" should be spelled out with a capital S on "Street". Two sentences later, the text reads, "The Snellbaker and Company Saw Mill and Lumber Yard opened in 1895, as well did J.B Ford Harrisburg Planning Mill the same year." Here "Planning" should be "Planing" and "well" should be deleted. All of these little errors need to be tracked down and fixed.

I hope these comments prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 00:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC)