Wikipedia:Peer review/History of the world/archive1

History of the world

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I'm setting up a project to improve Vital Articles (WP:FAVA), and this is the one I signed on for. I'm looking for some help in identifying the major problems of this article, as our goal is GA, and, eventually, FA.

Thanks, ☻☻☻Sithman VIII !!☻☻☻ 01:28, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an extremely broad topic, worth trying but hard to do. If I were tackling this and trying to get it up to GA, I would start with the basics. I'd anticipate that many claims, no matter how carefully stated, might be challenged. To prepare for this, I'd be extra careful to adhere to WP:V and the WP:RS guidelines. Here are a few suggestions, though this is not a complete review.

• Is the article title too broad? Would "Human history since the Early Stone Age" be better? The article is not about elephants or rocks or oceans or the planet's formation, just one fairly recent biological species.

• Should the article include more about Africa, South America, Australia, and pre-colonial North America? Since time passed uniformly for every place on the globe, why does so much of the history seem to take place around the Mediterranean? Why is one kind of history more important than another? Or is the article to some extent based on unstated and unexamined assumptions about what history consists of? Is it not true that about one third of human history was devoted to sleeping, for example? What is history? What qualifies as history?

• Large sections of the article lack in-line citations to reliable sources. My rule of thumb for meeting WP:V is to include a source for every set of statistics, every direct quotation, every claim that is unusual or controversial, and to make sure that every paragraph includes a source. In this article, the first three paragraphs of the "Cradles of civilization" section are unsourced, for example, even though they include claims like "Mesopotamia saw the rise of the city-states in the 4th millennium BCE." Who says so? For GA, you will need to find sources for claims like this or replace them with claims that can be sourced.

• Beware of overlinking. It's generally enough to link a term no more than once in the lead and once in the main text. There's no reason to link things like "Mesopotamia", "Agricultural Revolution", "Plato", or "Socrates" multiple times. Also, it's unnecessary to link common words like "trade", "manufacturing", and "writing". When so many things are linked, the sea of blue is distracting, and the value of possibly helpful links is reduced.

• Many of the citations are incomplete. Citations to web sources, for example, should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and date of most recent access, if all of those are known or can be found.

• While many claims that are apt to be challenged have no citations to reliable sources, a few have an oddly large number of supporting citations. For example, does the claim "Technological advance and the wealth generated by trade gradually brought about a widening of possibilities" require support from 11 sources?

• Are all of the cited sources reliable? For example, what makes Solarnavigator.net (citation 35) reliable per WP:RS?

• The items in the "References" and "Further reading" sections should be listed last name first and arranged alphabetically.

• The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find several dead URLs in the citations and several links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 02:27, 25 May 2011 (UTC)