Wikipedia:Peer review/Saint Joseph Parish (Mountain View, California)/archive1

Saint Joseph Parish (Mountain View, California)

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I am attempting to fill out concise, useful, and authoritative information on the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Jose in California, and I am modeling the parish information after this article. This is a fairly large undertaking on my part, and I would appreciate some guidance, input, and feedback.

Thanks and Best Regards, Alvincura (talk) 02:39, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a good start but has a couple of big problems (and some smaller ones) that need to be addressed. Here are my suggestions:

• The first big problem is the scanty sourcing. Many paragraphs are unsourced even though they contain material that is not common knowledge. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for every paragraph as well as sources for statistics, direct quotes, and any claim that is apt to be questioned. WP:V has details.

• The second big problem is that in places the language of the article too closely mirrors the language of the sources. For example, in the History section, the text says, "The land was donated by John Sullivan whose teams hauled the lumber from Watsonville. It was a small church accommodating 150 people until 1884 when its capacity was increased to 250." The source says, "The land was donated by John Sullivan whose teams hauled the lumber from Watsonville. It was a small church accommodating 150 until 1884 when it's capacity was increased to 250." Except that the "it's" mistake was fixed in the article, the two are identical. Even if the source material is in the public domain, which can't be assumed, it's not good practice to copy except when quoting short passages and placing them inside quotation marks with a citation to the source. Standard practice is to paraphrase in your own words what a source or sources say about a topic.

• The lead should be a summary of the main text sections of an article. A summary is not the same as an essay introduction. A good rule of thumb is to include in the lead at least a mention of each of the main text sections and not to include anything important that is not discussed in the main text. WP:LEAD has details. You might move some of the material in the existing lead into a new section called "Overview" or something like that and then re-write the lead as a summary.

• Links to external sites should not be embedded in the main text. For example, St. Joseph Catholic School should not be linked in the lead; on the other hand, it's fine to add it to the External links section.

• Footnote numbers do not normally appear in the heads and subheads; I would move citation 4 down into the "Succession of pastors" section itself. To do this, you might need to add a sentence to the beginning of the section that says something like "Below is a list of individuals who have led St. Joseph Parish since its founding", then add the citation at the end of that sentence.

• All of the dates in the citations should have the same format. If you prefer yyyy-mm-dd, you should use that for all of the citation dates. The alternative for U.S.-centric articles would be to make them all m-d-y.

• Honorifics like Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms., and academic titles like Dr. are generally not used in Wikipedia articles. It's usually enough just to use the person's name or, where necessary, to add a brief description after the name; e.g., John Smith, a heart surgeon. I'm not sure about "Rev.", but since these seem to be identified throughout the article with titles like "vicar", "deacon", or "pastor", Rev. seems unnecessary.

• The first word is normally spelled with an initial capital letter, but the other words are lower-cased unless they are proper nouns. Thus "Architecture and Design" should be "Architecture and design".

• One thing that would make the article stronger would be to include data coming from sources outside the parish. These might be newspapers, magazines, books, government agencies, review boards, or any other reliable sources that have commented on any significant aspect of the parish.

• The history stops at 1948. Did anything important happen to the parish since then?

• It's often useful to look for good or featured articles on similar subjects to see how other editors solve the same or similar research and writing problems. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami is a featured article that you might find interesting.

This is not a complete line-by-line review, but it's a start. I hope these suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 01:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)