Talk:Idaho/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Dana boomer (talk · contribs) 15:17, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I'll be taking this article for review, and should have my full review up shortly. Dana boomer (talk) 15:17, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this article does not meet the WP:Good article criteria at this time. The main problem is the significant lack of referencing, but there are also many other issues. Here are some more specific thoughts:


 * The lack of referencing is the most pervasive issues. References are needed for statistics, opinions, and potentially controversial facts. Some specific areas that need additional references include the sections on Climate, Demographics, Economy, Counties and Politics.
 * The image layout needs work. There are huge amounts of white space and text sandwiched between images.
 * The bottom part of the article, from Important cities and towns down, turns into a series of lists. These should be turned into prose, wherever possible. For example, in the National Conservation Areas section, it would probably be best to remove all but the top five or so most important parks, and instead replace the list with a prose description of how many parks there are, how much land they cover, how many tourists per year use them, a general description of the recreation/conservation/etc activities that happen there, etc. This would give the reader much more information than a list of blue links. This is just one example, the other sections that are nothing more than a list of blue links also need work. The list of lakes further up in the article is another example of a place where it would be easy to turn an uninformative list of links into a paragraph or two of prose that would be much more useful to the reader.
 * Law and government section - This section is very choppy, with tiny subsections and a bunch of one and two sentence "paragraphs". The executive, legislative and judicial branch subsections could easily be merged into the state government section, which would make the prose flow better and would make it easier to remove duplicated information.
 * Ten dead links; some are tagged and some aren't. See here for details.
 * Other reference issues:
 * What makes #7 (StarGemstones.com) a reliable source?
 * What makes #19, 22 (American Forts Network) a reliable source?
 * What is #34 ("Zuivelzicht" April 25, 2007)?
 * References should at the very minimum have a title, publisher and, for web references, an access date.

Faustus, I see that you nominated several other articles at the same time as this one. While I appreciate your enthusiasm, it does not appear that you edited the articles, or at least the ones that I checked. It is generally better for editors who have worked on a particular article to be the ones to nominate it, and it also often works best for new GA nominators to nominate one article at a time, so that they can see how the process works, get tips, and then apply their new knowledge to their other articles. The other articles that you nominated that I looked at have many of the same problems with a lack of referencing and poor layout and formatting. I would suggest withdrawing them (or all but one that you are really interested in working on), and perhaps work with another experienced editor, or at a process such as WP:Peer review, until you really understand the GA criteria. Please let me know if you have any questions, Dana boomer (talk) 15:38, 17 November 2012 (UTC)