Wikipedia:Peer review/Caversham, New Zealand/archive1

Caversham, New Zealand

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for March 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I started the article a couple of weeks back and I think I've got it successfully to B-Class. Just looking for some pointers to get it from there to A-Class (or to shore up any gaps if it's not yet a B). Any advice welcomed.

Thanks, Grutness...wha? 01:24, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: A good start, nice photos. I have several suggestions for further improvement.

• A good city article usually includes sections about government, weather, culture, the economy, parks and recreation, and some additional categories in addition to the ones in the existing article. Two good sources for ideas about what to include in articles about cities can be found at WP:USCITY and WP:UKCITIES. It's also useful to look at city articles like Bath, Somerset that have made FA. You can find all of the city FAs at WP:FA#Geography and places.

• Images are best set at "thumb" rather than a specific pixel width. The image in the infobox is an exception, and it looks fine. The others are all too big. MOS:IMAGES gives details.

• Metric units should also be expressed in imperial units per WP:UNITS. I like using the {{convert}} template, which gets the math and the abbreviations right. I added one conversion template to the Geography section, so you can see how this works.

I didn't mention another little trick, the adj=on parameter that adds a hyphen. I added two of these just now to two of your templates in places needing a hyphen. Finetooth (talk) 15:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

• The Manual of Style generally frowns on orphan paragraphs of only one sentence. Two solutions are possible: expand or merge. The orphan "Other suburbs nearby include Forbury, South Dunedin, Kensington, and Lookout Point" for example, could easily be merged with the paragraph above it.

• A good rule of thumb for supporting an article through citations to reliable sources is to source every paragraph as well as every set of statistics, every unusual claim, and every direct quotation. Many paragraphs in the existing article are unsourced. Most of the Geography section is unsourced, and most of the Demography section lacks sources.

• Use italics sparingly. Something like "Otago Benevolent Institution" should appear in ordinary type, not italics. WP:MOS#Italics has details.

• The Demography section is a kind of hodge-podge at the moment. It includes information about schools, sports, and other topics not usually found in a demography section. If the New Zealand government publishes statistics about the demographics of Caversham, they could be included here. The Bath, Somerset article has a demography section that illustrates how this can be handled. Unrelated material belongs mostly in sections not yet created.

• Some of the citations such as #11 and #13 are incomplete.

I like the "cite family" of templates for organizing citations. You can find them at WP:CIT and copy and paste any of them into your sandbox or into the article itself in edit mode and fill them in inside a pair of ref tags. I'd be happy to add one of these to the article by way of example if you'd like me to. However, if you choose to use the cite templates, you should use them consistently throughout the article, so it's a choice with significance. Finetooth (talk) 15:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'm not personally a fan of them (I find they take up a lot of space in the edit window and harder to follow the flow of the paragraph you're trying to edit), though I can see their utility for uniformity. For now, though, I think just leaving them in "raw" form is easier. Grutness...wha? 21:53, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

This is not a complete sentence-by-sentence review that deals with prose issues, but I hope it proves helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 03:32, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that - I've made a start on several of these things - the images are now set at thumb (I'm glad to see that I cans et my preferences to see them at a larger size, since the standard 180px seems impossibly small to me, but that's neither here nor there). I have used {{convert}} for all instances of metrics/imperial. And I've made an attempt at completing the online references (though I probably haven't done that properly). The italics are removed (I hadn't even realise I'd italicised those!) I've also expanded and/or merged several of the orphan-sentence paragraphs.

The other things (Demography section, expansion of sections, further references) will have to wait until I have a little more time. One question, though - you link to examples for how to expand articles on cities (e.g., WP:USCITY), WP:UKCITY). Note, though, that Caversham is simply a suburb in a larger city - what proportion of those guidelines applies to an article on an individual suburb, rather than on a whole city?

I don't think there's any fixed answer to that. The US and UK guidelines are not identical, and editor judgment plays a large role in all cases. What goes into an article to make it eventually comprehensive without unnecessary detail depends on the individual case. If a particular suburb has no sports venues or teams, for example, there would be no use trying to add a sports section to match a set of general guidelines. If you'd like me to review again a few weeks or months down the road, I'd be happy to. Just give me a ping. Finetooth (talk) 15:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

OK - thanks for that, and for your suggestions. Grutness...wha? 21:53, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again for the help. Grutness...wha? 07:24, 23 March 2009 (UTC)