Talk:Timothy M. Carney/GA1

GA Review
The #REDIRECT [[edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Montanabw (talk · contribs) 20:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I will review this article and will be back with a template and initial comments soon. Montanabw (talk) 20:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Comments:

1. On a quick initial run-through, I would like to see abbreviations and honorifics removed, such as the second photo caption "amb. Carney" - abbreviations and honorifics in general should be avoided where possible.

2. The personal life section would do better to be early in the article, and more on his background, such as what colleges he attended, what degrees he holds, and so on.

3. I am seeing a bit of close paraphrasing that needs to be fixed, see these examples:,  , ,   Some copyediting should do the trick.
 * ✅ did this to the best of my ability as far as I could see in the examples given

4. I would also shorten long quotations, rather than a 2-3 sentence quote, give a short intro in your own words and then just a sentence. Otherwise, format it into a blockquote if the whole thing is really needed.
 * ✅ you handled this one

5. Footnote #7, "Intelligence Failure? Let's Go Back to Sudan" is a deadlink; may need to go to wayback to get it.

6. Footnote #13 "Afghanistan News". 2009-09-04. Retrieved 2014-04-11. goes to a summary page, needs link updated.

All for now, more to come. Montanabw (talk) 06:27, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Having heard no feedback from anyone, I am going to put this article on hold for a bit. I could like to see some initial copyediting begin and a review of the issues I have raised to date.   Montanabw (talk)  04:08, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your superb review. I will endeavor to fix what I can and deal with each of the issues you have pointed out. Kindly give me until next week as I am presently on an important business trip and just won't have time til I get back to deal with this. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 09:20, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * No worries. I'll ping you before I abandon things altogether.   Montanabw (talk)  19:26, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Good evening. I have dealt with Issues 1 and 2. Issue 3 will require some careful examination of the paraphrasing problem, for which I apologize. Footnote 7 is in fact the only version available on the net that I could get to. I could put of course the actual Washington Post details from that article in, but then it would be a straight bibliographical footnote without any link (as it is not available through WP any longer). I felt it was more important to be able to read somewhere the firsthand statements made in that op-ed piece, but I am happy to do it either way. The rest I will deal with next week. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 22:20, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Good evening. I think I have now dealt with the main copy/edit matters of Issue No.3 and also with the quotation cited in Issue No.4. I kept the entire quote for context and because it was made by a U.S. Senator, so not to be taken out of context. Let me know if there is anything else I can do -- I have previously set forth the issue with the article citation. If you feel it ought to be directly from the Washington Post, we can do no better than a simple citation without link as this article does not exist in WashPost archives any longer (at least not freely). Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 21:35, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Mansoor, you are making good progress. I would link to the Washington Post if there is no link to the other site via the Wayback machine. If there is an archive page with a preview, I'd do a link and at the "subscription required" parameter (or something similar). It's not a perfect solution, but it will be good enough. I have a few more things you need to work on: Montanabw (talk)  00:59, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

1. Clarify "military parents": Were both of his parents in the military? Either way, which branch(es)?

2. Link locations, Bad Tolz, Germany, Ft Bliss, Texas and Taipei, Taiwan. (Taipei perhaps not critical, but the other two locations are not known with any precision to a general audience).

3. What is a "S.B." degree? Don't you mean a B.S. degree? And either way, spell it out (e.g. "Bachelor of Science" or whatever).

4. What kind of degree did he get from Cornell, or did he not get a degree there? If no degree, was it because he dropped out or because he wasn't in a degree-granting program?

5. Start killing adjectives, you don't need them and they are a wee bit unencyclopedic: i.e "avid photographers", "devastating earthquake", etc...

6. You rely heavily o the Kennedy source. I recommend that you create a bibliographic entry for it, and then cite to individual pages (the page numbers after the footnote doesn't really work.

More to come. Montanabw (talk) 00:59, 4 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Good evening, I have dealt with each of the remaining points except the Kennedy source as a bibliographic entry. I'm not familiar enough with Wiki tools to know how to do that. Perhaps you would be kind enough to teach me and/or put that in place yourself. I used the only similar style I knew from certain edits made to another article in which I participated. The reference is a key one for this article as it covers the entirety of Carney's career and life, and is a reputable source. All the rest I have now dealt with. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 21:34, 4 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I'll tweak Kennedy to set it up, but you will have to add most of the page numbers, I'm not going to do that part... ;-) basically, page rages like "4-16" or whatever are rarely going to cut it, (particularly for something simple, such as that he attended Cornell) a page range of 2-3 pages is a little iffy, a single page or two is best.  I did the single page ones for you, kept some of the smaller ranges, but you have to fix the bigger ones yourself.   Montanabw (talk)  23:19, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
 * working on this now... will take a bit of time to go through and refresh my memory from the initial read I did.


 * Oh, while you are at it, this is an American, so can you kindly use MDY date format? (November 4, 2014, not 4 November 2014) Thanks!  Montanabw (talk)  23:32, 4 November 2014 (UTC)


 * That's just a manual text edit, just rewrite "2 December 1999" to be "December 2, 1999."  The US versus UK formatting question is basically in this case to match the spelling and date formats to the nationality of the person. You can do it!   Montanabw (talk)  23:56, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

I did a little more minor formatting and cleanup along the way. If you disagree with any of my edits, feel free to discuss, I'm not wedded to by copperplate prose. Also, found this article which might be interesting. Found some stuff that needs sourcing. Montanabw (talk) 23:56, 4 November 2014 (UTC)


 * An interesting article by Carney, perhaps will have useful material: http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/04/the_perils_of_diplomatic_disengagement


 * One more source with material I think is worth incorporating for comprehensiveness: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/13/AR2007011301372.html    Montanabw (talk)  00:04, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Apologies for a few days respite in between but we had some very large weather related travel disruptions here this week that threw schedules into the fire. I will do my best to finish the remaining issues off during this weekend so you may complete your review. Many thanks for your patience. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 13:54, 8 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I have added to the Haiti Democracy Project section this evening, and added relevant referencing. I will also add in the citations at the various places you have requested them -- forgot to add this point on my first message. Other than the Kennedy source single page notations, is there anything else missing now? Best, --Mansoor Ijaz

Looks much better. Fix the Kennedy page cites, and also, current footnote 14 has some red flags, probably a typo in there. I'd advise a run-through of all the citations to be sure all possible parameters (title, author, etc.) are all on each. I'd like to see you peek at the sources above and see if there is material you can incorporate; Carney in his time was a rather controversial figure, and we want to be sure the article is balanced and comprehensive. I felt the sources I posted may have material useful to flesh out things a bit.
 * ✅ one reference was very worthy of inclusion. The other did not have material that would be of significant use here.

You are pretty close to done here. A few things:

1. The ref "Intelligence Failure? Let's Go Back to Sudan" [washingtonpost.com] is still a deadlink, may need to find an archive or something. (see http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webchecklinks.py?page=Timothy_M._Carney)
 * working on this one
 * a web search on the title of the article shows that it is a Washington Post article, but it has the following annotation in Google search: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt. A robots.txt file is a text file that stops web crawler software, such as Googlebot, from crawling certain pages of your site. The file is essentially a list of commands, such Allow and Disallow, that tell web crawlers which URLs they can or cannot retrieve. So, if a URL is disallowed in your robots.txt, that URL and its contents won't appear in Google Search results. The only solution I can see is either we leave the link that is there so the article content can be seen, or just make a regular entry without link for the details of the article. Your thoughts?


 * If the Wayback machine cannot retrieve it either, and even a snippet with a "teaser" to an archive on the WAPO site does not exist, then remove the URL altogether and just cite it to the print version. I'll accept that as AGF.   Montanabw (talk)  01:05, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a copy of the WP article here, although it might be a copyvio. § FreeRangeFrog croak 17:43, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

2. I'd also expand the lede a bit now, summarize a bit more of the body text, think in terms of three paragraphs, not two.

Keep working at it, you're almost there! Montanabw (talk) 23:35, 11 November 2014 (UTC)]]


 * Just get those page numbers for the Kennedy source ✅ and address the deadlink per my advice above ✅, and you'll be done! Nice work so far Montanabw (talk)  01:11, 15 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your feedback. I've taken care of the deadlink. Will finish off the page numbers during the weekend. Much appreciate your review -- you improved the article quite significantly. I look forward to future collaborations. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 01:55, 15 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Good evening. I have now fixed all the Kennedy source page notations and added in the other source you recommended as I found the right place to include some of that material. I have added a bit to the LEDE and a bit to the section titled "Other assignments". Thank you again for your review. I hope we now pass muster and I'm happy to fix any other things you feel need fixing. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 23:05, 17 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I am making some minor wikignoming edits to the article, if they are acceptable to you, then I can pass this for GA. I found the Petterson citation also needed to be moved to the bottom with Kennedy, as multiple pages were cited; I presume all not otherwise noted were to page 71.   Montanabw (talk)  17:11, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

I willpass this article, though if you disagree with my minor edits, we can discuss. Montanabw (talk) 17:15, 18 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Montanabw. It was a pleasure to work with you on improving the article and bringing it to GA standards. I am happy with all of your edits, as they definitely strengthen the overall quality of the article and subject matter -- particularly from a sourcing and references standpoint. I look forward to future collaborations. Best, --Mansoor Ijaz (talk) 17:59, 18 November 2014 (UTC)