Talk:Richard Nixon/GA1

GA Review
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I am reviewing this article. I have removed two "refimprove" banners from November 2007 and February 2008, as I don't think the present level of citations warrants these. However, there are areas of the article which are under-referenced, and I will indicate these during the course of this review. Brianboulton (talk) 15:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Review
There is much good material in this article, but I think it has been brought to GA prematurely, and needs a good deal more work before it can be promoted. These are not, in my opinion, matters that can be dealt with in a seven-day hold period, so regretfully it must be failed for the moment. I am sure that with more time, and attention to the points raised here, the article will eventually reach GA.

The particular issues of concern are:-

1. Prose: the standard is uneven – good in parts, in need of much attention in others. I have not done a complete prose review, but the following points relate just to the lead:-
 * "...practiced law with a family friend." - suggest "in partnership with a family friend"
 * "Amidst the outbreak of war in the early 1940s" has a number of problems. First, the "outbreak" is a happening, not a sequence, so "amidst" is not appropriate. Second, "the early 1940s" is unnecessarily vague. The war actually broke out in 1939; the US entry to that war was 7 December 1941. So I would begin the sentence with something like: "After the entry of the United States into the Second World War, in December 1941,...”
 * I’d delete the words "as a lieutenant-commander". Although he rose to this rank, he began his service as a lieutenant (see this)
 * The sentence beginning; "He was elected to Congress..." is unnecessarily complicated. It could be simplified to: "In 1946 he was elected to the US House of Representatives, representing California’s 12th Congressional District; in 1950 he was elected to the United States Senate".
 * He was not "chosen to be Vice President". He was chosen by Eisenhower to be his running mate, the Republican Party’s candidate for Vice President. These points of accuracy are very important for non-American readers.
 * "...a position he began serving the following year" should be amended to "a post to which he was elected..."

I strongly recommend that, as well as dealing with these issues, the whole article is copyedited, also checked over for MoS. The following issues in the lead should also be dealt with, although they are not specifically prose matters:-
 * The phrase "and developed an interest in music" is curious, since this topic is not otherwise mentioned in the article. It is of tangential importance only, since it did nothing to shape his life or destiny, and to have it as virtually the first thing mentioned about the man is distinctly odd. I would remove it.
 * "Nixon successfully negotiated a ceasefire with North Vietnam, effectively ending the longest War in American history." This is a highly questionable assertion; the Paris Agreement didn’t end the war, merely American involvement. See this – I think this sentence needs rewording.
 * It is not correct to refer to conviction by the Senate for "the Watergate scandal". Conviction would have been for his role in the cover-up, not the scandal itself.

2. Referencing and citation: I removed the previous citation banners because they looked out of date. However, citing of sources, or rather the lack of such citation, is a serious problem for this article. I have added banners to two sections which have no citations, and have added at least thirty individual citation tags in the rest of the text. Most of these relate either to quotations, opinions ascribed to people, or to utterly unsourced facts. It is essential that these are attended to.

3. Some general problems
 * Law practice, marriage and military service: This is a biographical article about a president, and I wouldn’t have expected to find these three aspects of his life stuffed into a single brief section. Information about his legal practice could be added to the end of the Early life section; there should be a sub-section headed "Courtship and marriage" which should discuss his relationship with Pat Nixon in more detail (and could include family details), and his military service, much expanded, should have a subsection of its own.
 * Bald link to smoking gun tape should not be in text
 * Not all the on-line references are properly formatted
 * Book source formats should be standardised and should all have publisher information – name of publisher, date, location, and ISBN. Ideally there should be a bibliography.
 * Of the listings at the end, I would say that neither "Cold War" nor "Notable Cold War figures" are necessary parts of this article.

I am interested in following the progress of this article, and will watch out for it. Of the six GA criteria the fails are prose and verifiability. The others - breadth, neutrality, stability and images are fine. Brianboulton (talk) 22:46, 30 August 2008 (UTC)