Wikipedia:Peer review/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/archive1

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I have followed the WikiProject Museum instructions and would like to nominate it for Good Article consideration. Please review all of the changes if possible. Any suggestions and advice will be welcome.

Thanks, Mst48 (talk) 02:33, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

This is outside of my usual area of editing and reviewing, which is historical political biography, but there doesn't seem to be any of that up for peer review at the moment, and I visited this a few years ago and found it at once moving and haunting (as I daresay anybody who has visited has). Since you've expressed a desire to bring this to Good Article status, I'll conduct my review with the Good Article Criteria.

By far the biggest thing preventing this article from being a Good Article in its present state is the referencing. There are several unreferenced paragraphs but, more importantly, the majority of the references that do exist are to the museum's website, which is a primary source affiliated with the article subject. Wikipedia's policy is to use mostly third party secondary sources. The good news is that there are what appear to be quite a few excellent such references listed under "Further reading"; I'd suggest working on referencing the article's current content to those as much as you can, and then adding new content based on those as well. As long as you're changing the referencing, you might consider using reference templates like {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, {{cite news}}, etc.; it's not required for GA, but it's an easy way to make sure that your references are properly formatted.

There are some neutrality issues as well. Portions of the article are written as if from a tourist brochure, and there are some non-neutral statements as well. Some examples:

• "...has welcomed almost 400 university fellows from 26 countries since 1994." (Something like "has been visited by..." would be better, especially if rearranged to be worded in the active voice.)
• "Under Ms. Bloomfield’s leadership...", "She has also played leading roles..." ("Leadership" is a very positive word. Something like "management" would be more useful.)
• "Since its inception, the USHMM has been under constant threat of violence from extremist groups." (Do we know that there has been a constant threat? Might it be more accurate to say that it has been targeted by anti-semitic individuals on more than one occasion?)
• "The outside of the building dissappears into the neoclassical, Georgian, and modern architecture of Washington, D.C."
• "the CoC recently has established itself as a leading non-partisan commenter..."
• "The prestigious Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Conference for Teachers..."

The prose still needs quite a bit of work. I've made some copyedits and stylistic fixes. There are a few outstanding items that require attention, however:

• the lead does not really summarize the article so much as it provides basic data about the museum. Per WP:LEAD, the lead should give a brief summary of the material covered in the article.
• the article says that the collections include "more than 200,000 registered survivors"; I imagine those survivors would object to being kept in the museum's collections.
• the Committee on Conscience is first mentioned in the History section, but isn't explained until quite a bit later.
• when using wikilinks, please make sure that you are linking to the intended target. For example, compare where Ground Zero leads to where Ground Zero leads, and consider which one belongs in the article. I've fixed some of this, but there's room for much better linking in this article.
• the last sentence of the third paragraph in History is long and convoluted; consider rewriting it.
• this sentence doesn't really make sense: "Upon entering, each architectural feature because a new element of architectural allusion to the Holocaust."

Otherwise, the article is well on its way to being a Good Article. Its organization is excellent, though it might be worth considering merging "Exhibitions" and "Collections", since there seems to be a fair bit of overlap between the two. The pictures are excellent, and all appear to be properly licensed, though all of the ones outside the infobox lack alt text, and the alt text of the one in the infobox could use a lot of improvement.

A few miscellaneous things:

• the "See also" section is likely too long, as is the "Further reading". The first should include only links directly relevant to the subject of the article but which are not linked elsewhere in the article, while the second should include material that deals with the subject at a depth or from an angle that a Wikipedia article couldn't or shouldn't (as noted above, ideally much of the material in "Further reading" could make its way into the "References" section).

I'd recommend putting in the work needed to improve the above issues, and then putting it up for another peer review. Good luck! Steve Smith (talk) 00:02, 6 November 2009 (UTC)