Wikipedia:Peer review/Mario Vargas Llosa/archive1

Mario Vargas Llosa

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it has passed GA and has an active group of editors who could take it to FA: see Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem.

Thanks, Wassupwestcoast (talk) 00:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

From SG

There is a naming confusion (to those familiar with doble apellido in Spanish) that can be solved by rearranging some text. In the lead is:

He has been married twice, and his children include the writer Álvaro Vargas Llosa.

When I hit that part of the lead, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the apparent error in the son's last name, looking at his article, and doing some google research on my own before I kept reading. That stands out like a sore thumb to anyone who understands naming conventions in Spanish. It wasn't until I continued reading the article that I later discovered that:

A year later, in 1965, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa.

which explains why his son has the same last name he does. If the text about the son is moved out of the lead (does his son belong in the lead anyway?) to after we're told that he married his first cousin, who shared the last name Llosa, then the reader won't be confused about what looks like an incorrect name for the son. Also, the wife and sons are mentioned in two different sections of the text, so flow needs to be improved:

He has three children with his second wife, Patricia Llosa: Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, a businessman; and Morgana, a photographer.

There are WP:MOSNUM issues (incorrect spelling out vs. digits), incorrect use of WP:HYPHENs vs. endashes (one sample, ... translated into multiple languages--marking his international ... ), WP:PUNC issues (placement of punctuation in logical quotes), inconsistent use of WP:ITALICS on foreign phrases,

We're not told why "Vargas Llosa punched Garcia Marquez in the face in Mexico city".

There is inconsisteny in the handling of Spanish language. The article should either always use Spanish, with English translation in parens, or always use English, with Spanish translation in parens.

I've gone through and changed all the book titles to Spanish (adding English in parenthesis where necessary). I left the headings in English because that's how they're Wikilinked to the main articles. Lincolnchan98 (talk) 07:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

An example of inconsistent use of WP:ITALICS (and a missing accent mark) ... to form the tripartite coalition known as Frente Democratico ... further, acronyms should be defined on first occurrence ... as the center-right FREDEMO coalition candidate, ...

Textual redundancies should be eliminated, see the exercises on the userpage at Tony1 (talk · contribs), example: in 1964 they divorced. A year later, in 1965, Vargas Llosa ... suggest an independent copyedit.

Is this supposed to be hyphenated, I'm not sure? ... out-voting works by the veteran ...

Wikilinking needs attention.

I ran a script to fix WP:FN footnote placement issues, but editors should be aware that footnotes go after punctuation.

I don't think this capitalization in the infobox is correct: Writer, Journalist, Essayist, Politician

The infobox has his wife's birthdate as date–present, see WP:MOSDATE regarding avoiding "to present" construction.

SandyGeorgia (Talk)

This is useful thanks! I'm pleased that your script only spotted one misplaced footnote (I've been fixing those!) — also someone else (Jeanenawhitney) has been running a script which has been messing up en-dashes in several MMM articles. I'm trying to put it right... Geometry guy 21:29, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I've not come across that editor; maybe refer her to Brighterorange (talk · contribs), who has a script that works correctly to fix endashes, and ask him to run through all the articles once they're further along ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:21, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

From Kaldari

A couple suggestions regarding the notes and references:

• For FA-quality articles, it is customary to only include general references in the References section (i.e. books and major journal articles completely devoted to the subject), while listing newspaper articles, minor journal articles, and citations for books in which the article subject is mentioned but not the main focus, only within the notes section. For an excellent example of what I'm talking about, please study the notes and references sections of the Emma Goldman article. Along these lines I would move references like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles out of the References section and just list them in their entirety in the Notes section (like you have with the Noam Cohen article). A good rule of thumb is that if the source is cited more than once, it probably belongs in the References section, while if it it's only cited one time, it's probably better to list it entirely in the notes field. The idea being that the References section should act as a sort of general bibliography for people doing research on the subject. Hope that makes sense.
  • Hmm. I can see the logic of that. On the other hand, I generally try to move references out of the inline citations, to avoid having the text cluttered when I'm working on it. So the References section becomes more of a Bibliography or "works cited" that contains (nearly) everything cited within the article. Perhaps then another way of doing things would be to add a short "Further reading" section with two or three important sources? --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 20:28, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
    • I've seen both versions of referencing types pass at FAC. Just make sure the article is consistent; either everything in References or only books. Karanacs (talk) 20:37, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
    • I'm generally not much of a fan of Further Reading sections, especially for articles where most of the important references for the subject are already listed in the References section. An alternative strategy is to create an actual Bibliography section instead of separate References and Further Reading sections. See Mary Wollstonecraft for an excellent example. Also, keep in mind that as your article gets close FA status, you're going to be making fewer and fewer major edits and more minor edits, so having "cluttered" mark-up is somewhat less of a consideration than it is for articles actively being developed (rather than honed for FA). Kaldari (talk) 20:48, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

• Also I would suggest adding Spanish language tags to the references which are in Spanish (see the Terra Actualidad article for example).