Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/United States/2

United States

 * • [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/United_States/2&action=watch Watch article reassessment page] • GAN review not found
 * Result: delisted It appears that, despite recent work on the article, some information is uncited, e.g. many statements in the Etymology, History, Government, Literature and Food sections. Problems with the comprehensiveness of some citations have also been noted. Jezhotwells (talk) 13:06, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

This article was listed as a good article in 2005, but modern nominations are expected to have at least one reference per paragraph. The article has several paragraphs, and even full sections, without references. I realize this is a vital article, and that the GAR may be disputed, so I opened this as a community reassessment directly, instead of as an individual reassessment Cambalachero (talk) 18:21, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Etymology: second paragraph
 * Independence and expansion: First 3 paragraphs
 * Cold War and protest politics: First and third paragraphs
 * Government, elections, and politics: All paragraphs after the first
 * Parties and ideology: Second and third
 * Crime and law enforcement: First paragraph
 * Literature, philosophy, and the arts: Third and fifth
 * Food: First
 * Rather than saying that "X, Y, and Z" paragraphs are unreferenced, could you give examples of statements that are unreferenced that need to be referenced? Cuz right now, your criticism is too vague to be fixed  Purpleback  pack  89  ≈≈≈≈  23:16, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I would assume they are meaning the statements in the actual paragraphs. For instance what is the source of "Columbia", a once popular name for the United States... AIR corn (talk) 02:02, 21 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for notifying the United States Wikiproject, could you also notify as he seems to the main editor and anyone else you think may be interested in fixing this article. The actual GA criteria for referencing is not at least one per paragraph and is actually below a lot of peoples personal expectations. At the minimum it just requires inline references for "direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons". However, in a popular article like this most statements could perceivably fall under "likely to be challenged". It should also be reasonably obvious what reference applies to each statement. AIR corn  (talk) 02:02, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Delist The unreferenced portions are more than originally posited. The whole of the 2nd paragraph in "Geography and environment" is cited to this, yet it only supports the last paragraph. Same with the next paragraph. It could be argued that these fall outside the GA criteria. However the last part of the "Independence and expansion" paragraph follows the same pattern and there is definitely information there that should be supported by footnotes. In fact most of the history section I looked at is inadequately sourced, with the sources supplied only supporting limited sentences in the paragraphs. There should be plenty of books out there that could be used to reference this information. I feel that there is too much work to do to get it up to scratch quickly and the best course of action would be to delist it and allow interested participants the time to find quality sources to back up the information presented. AIR corn (talk) 01:24, 2 March 2012 (UTC)