Talk:Speak Mandarin Campaign/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Tezero (talk · contribs) 20:39, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't like to do this, but I'm going to fail this GAN; I'd rate the article as C-class. You're not a bad person, and the article isn't wholly without merit; there are just numerous issues that stand between this and something I'd be comfortable passing. They're fixable, but only with a significant amount of time. Most seriously:
 * The introduction's way too short. It should be 2-4 paragraphs and cover the basics of each section in the article.
 * The lead picture may not be free-use.
 * The entire Specific Yearly Campaigns section consists of mostly short paragraphs that sometimes sound like advertisements. It ends on a particularly sour note: "DADDY & MOMMY MANDARIN STORYTELLING COMPETITION 2008 Presented by Eduplus Language Centre and supported by Speak Mandarin Campaign and National Library Board, the Daddy & Mommy Mandarin Storytelling competition is a unique opportunity for the whole family to learn, play and perform on the stage together!" There's gotta be a way you can rework stuff like this, and I can't think of a single way it's appropriate to use an exclamation point in main-body text on Wikipedia.
 * It's also visually unpleasant and overly divisive to start paragraphs with simple bolded words. I would suggest level-5 headers, but you don't even need that. Just remove those words altogether.
 * Large swaths of the article are unsourced, especially in 1983, 2000, 2007/08, and Implementation.
 * The last two sentences of Criticism being unsourced (and using weasel words) is particularly problematic, since this will by nature be a controversial section.
 * De-capitalize the second two words of the title "Specific Yearly Campaigns."
 * Italicize My paper. I thought you had literally started talking in the first-person there.
 * All of the Mandarin-language titles of the campaigns under "Specific Yearly Campaigns" should be formatted like the article's title, with pinyin.
 * Outcome needs to be much longer. The table and short paragraph don't adequately cover what the reader will want to know about how successful the campaign has been.
 * Most of the article's citations are formatted incorrectly, some of them not at all. Forgetting the authors or dates of a couple of sources is understandable; using bare URLs is not.

If you want to keep working on this article—I would guess that you do because of your concurrent connections to similar articles—I would recommend seeking a peer review in addition to addressing these issues. Tezero (talk) 20:39, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your review. To clarify, the Singapore linguistics articles were written by a group of Nanyang Technological University students for an assignment. Impressed by the quality of the articles, I decided to nominate and polish them. I was wondering whether there really should be detailed information on specific yearly campaigns or a summary of such information would be better. What do you think? --J.L.W.S. The Special One (talk) 03:46, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I'd go with a solid, full-length paragraph or two for each section. The existing bullet points and short paragraphs are discouraged here. With that said, this is pretty good considering it was written by a presumably non-native English speaker unaffiliated previously with Wikipedia. Tezero (talk) 05:43, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually most Singaporeans are native English speakers. But my students did their best to conform to the wikipedia style Francis Bond (talk) 09:14, 21 April 2016 (UTC)