Wikipedia:Peer review/River Out of Eden/archive1

River Out of Eden

I rewrote this article a month ago. I tried to find some guidelines on "articles on books", but found none. I am requesting a peer review in the hope that someone may enlighten me on the process. This is a somewhat strange book. It is a short one, compare to most books by Richard Dawkins. It is not as much a book as a set of five chapters on topics in Darwinian evolution. Each chapter is really a summary of current theories on the topic and of Dawkins' own earlier books. As a result, I did not include things like "acclaims", "criticisms", etc., because these should really go to the respective books summarized here. So, instead, I further summarized his five chapters and added abundant links to other wiki articles whenever appropriate. Fred Hsu 05:38, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For one, this article doesn't seem very encyclopedic. It's more of a book report, summarizing the sections of the book. For an encyclopedia article, there should be a lot more focus on the relevance of the book. Try to find information on how the book has influenced other books, how it was received, etc. Ideally less than 10% (to pick an arbitrary amount) should be on the book itself. After all, synopsizing and analysis are really a form of original research, which is generally discouraged here. Looking through other featured articles on books, that percentage might be closer to 20 or 30, but in any case, it's much too high for this article. Jun-Dai 06:10, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, AZ _t 23:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both. I'll conduct more researches. I will give the automated review a try tonight. By the way, unlike other peer review requests, this is NOT meant to be the first step towards FA-dom. I just wanted to gather feedback on the right way to write these types of articles. Fred Hsu 02:26, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, the automated review has already been generated. I fixed a few things in the article per automated review. Fred Hsu 03:01, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]