Talk:Madison, Wisconsin/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Miyagawa (talk · contribs) 12:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately this article qualifies under the quick fail criteria due to the presence of one or more maintenance tags (I noticed some cite needed tags). However, rather than shut this down without much comment, I thought best to give editors a bit of a hit list for when renomination occurs. I nominated an article in the exact same way back in the early days, and someone generously did the same thing then which made the improvements much easier to achieve (although someone else did them than I!).


 * The lead needs to be a summary of the entire article. At the present size, it doesn't come close to achieving that. The best bet is to look at articles of other cities already at GA to see the sort of coverage they give to the rest of the article and the general structure.
 * Throughout the article there are uncited paragraphs. When giving an article a quick skim, I at least expect to see the end of each paragraph to have an inline citation (since this means that the rest of the paragraph is cited to at least one citation). Obviously if the source doesn't cover elements of the paragraph, then these need to have their own individual citations as well.
 * Specifically check where there are citation needed tags, and insert relevant citations there to cover the information in the article. Or rewrite the article to match new citations.
 * Citation formats - they should all be completed as much as they can be, and with the same date formats across the article. I notice a couple of different formats in there, and a distinct lack of access dates. Also watch the italics for sources - where they are news based sources, use italics. Otherwise don't - there are both things that should be in italics that aren't and things that are in italics that shouldn't be there.
 * Size of the article. Generally you should start to look at creating subarticles for articles when the main article hits around 60k to 80k in size. The article at present is 100k. What you'd do then is create a new article focusing on a single section and then splitting it off. For example, this is already done in the Art section. I think personally that the Culture section is the best bet for an article split as it seems to be the biggest, but you might need to do more than one. Better explanation here: Splitting.

So, closing this nom now, but hopefully these points can be picked up and the article renominated at some point down the road. Miyagawa (talk) 12:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)