Talk:David McDowall (criminologist)/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 06:49, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Reviewing. This looks like a typical start-class article on an academic. There is nothing about his life prior to higher education, nothing about what motivated him to work on his specialty, nothing about his activities in college, nothing about who his mentors were. There is nothing about his career beyond a bare-bones summary of his academic positions, such as one would find already on his own cv. There is nothing about teaching accomplishments that might have led him to become a distinguished teaching professor. The research section is more detailed, but it is just one paragraph, with one sentence each about three individual studies and a pull quote about someone else. There is nothing here putting his work into context -- whose prior work he built on, what the impact of his own work was. This for a person who has written three whole books, each with over 500 citations on Google scholar and, I assume, multiple published book reviews detailing their content and significance. There's nothing about how he might have influenced J. Quant. Crim. while editing it. And there's nothing about the honors listed in his cv, some of which are significant (and others of which are deservedly omitted here). The sources are also problematic: numbers 1-6 are either primary (associated so closely with the subject or his employer as to be usable by WP:BLP only for non-controversial factual material, such as might appear already in his cv) or not at all in-depth about him and his works. Numbers 6 and 10 are not usable as sources at all: they are publications by the subject, not works about him. That leaves four newspaper articles which are enough to show notability (as does his distinguished position, citation record, and editorship), and useful for what they are, but not really of the intellectual depth I would expect to summarize the life work of an academic. I think this is very far from Good Article criteria 3a (especially) and 2b (secondarily). But I will leave this review open for now, rather than immediately quick-failing it, in case there's a response. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:49, 30 October 2016 (UTC)


 * I realize there's a lot of work to be done in order to give this any semblance of a change of passing GA review, and I've already made some steps, albeit small ones, toward doing this. However, I think I should point out that the books attributed to "David McDowall" that I think you're talking about are partly (maybe entirely) not by him: A Modern History of the Kurds, The Lebanon: A Conflict of Minorities, and The Kurds: A Nation Denied are all by a British guy with the same name. Everymorning (talk) 20:24, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks for the clarification. But, since it requires a lot of expansion and will be, essentially, a different article once that happens, how about I fail the GA now so that you don't have it hanging over you? There would be no prejudice against a second GA review once the expansion is complete. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:21, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Sure, that's fine. I just wish the guy who reviewed this article in peer review had told me how much stuff I needed to add before bringing it here... Everymorning (talk) 22:04, 30 October 2016 (UTC)