Wikipedia:Peer review/Thomas Bailey Marquis/archive1

Thomas Bailey Marquis

I've listed this article for peer review with a view to taking it on to Featured Article status. I particularly want to seek an opinion on this series of edits made by the GA reviewer. The article copyeditor and others at Talk:Thomas Bailey Marquis#Discussion regarding style have criticised some of these changes on style grounds. An opinion on whether or not you agree that some of them should be rolled back or modified would be appreciated.

I would also like an opinion on this edit. It may well be correct that Weist obtained the information from family tradition, but the statement is entirely a surmise by the editor (this is self-admitted "I am guessing that the writer worked from family lore") and it does not seem proper to me to make this statement in the article.

Thanks, SpinningSpark 16:40, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

On the edits by the GA reviewer:

Many of the changes are unobjectionable, but a few are, to my mind, clearly worse. For instance:

• "Marquis' body of work is valued by historians for his descriptions of their way of life, and because he recorded the life stories of several Plains Indians": It's not clear until "Plains Indians", at the end of the next clause, who "they" refer to; the previous version had those clauses the other way around so it made more sense.
• "few were interested in the Indian version of events, even though there were no survivors from the US side of the Custer fight." becoming "few were interested in the Indian version of events (no American soldiers survived the Custer fight)." Full disclosure: I irrationally hate parentheses.
• "St. Joseph" was changed to "St.Joseph" despite the fact that elsewhere in the article it is still rendered as "St. Joseph". As far as I can tell this is simply wrong. Our article on the town itself, for instance, consistently renders it "St. Joseph"

Like those on the talk page, I also generally preferred the prose of the article before the changes: it is definitely dryer now than it was.

As for the change to the discussion of the derivation of the surname: if Weist reports it as fact and not family lore, it is not the place of wikipedia to either a) assert that it is family lore and not fact, or b) attribute that to a source which does not in fact say that.