Wikipedia:Peer review/2008 Maryland Terrapins football team/archive1

2008 Maryland Terrapins football team
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review in preparation for featured article review. I think prose is probably the area in need of the most attention, although I am open to any constructive criticism. I don't think the prose is bad, but I've written essentially all of it, so it really needs a fresh set of eyes on it for a different perspective. Sometimes you can read your own writing again and again and not notice obvious errors.

Thanks in advance. Strikehold (talk) 04:23, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is excellent, and I think it's close to FA. However, I found quite a few small problems or errors related to the Manual of Style and other Wikipedia guidelines. I fixed a few minor punctuation errors and other small things, but I did not read the game descriptions closely enough to catch everything. More proofing never hurts. Here are my suggestions:

Lead


 * The Terrapins were within grasp of the ACC Atlantic Division championship at the end of Week 12, but lost its final two games... " - Should it be "Terrapins ... their" rather than "Terrapins ... its"?

Key losses
 * "Henderson, the brother of Butkus and Bednarik Award winner E.J." - I think I'd make this "E.J. Henderson" for clarity. Sometimes brothers have different last names.

Key returns
 * "Forty-six of sixty-two lettermen returned (74%)" - Generally, the Manual of Style recommends "percent" instead of the symbol in simple cases like this.

Recruiting
 * "was the only four-star prospect to see significant play time in 2008" - "playing" rather than "play"?
 * "a position that had been attrited by the graduation of former starters Christian Varner" - Is "attrited" a word? "Vacated"? "Left empty"? "Reduced"?
 * "but injured his foot and earned a medical redshirt" - "was granted" rather than "earned"?

Quarterback controversy
 * Blockquotes don't need quotation marks, per WP:MOSQUOTE.

Injuries
 * "while 2008 was more forgiving by comparison, it still saw several key players injured" - Since years don't literally see, I might suggest a recast like this: "while 2008 was more forgiving by comparison, several key players were injured... ".

Depth chart
 * Perhaps depth chart should be linked on first use in the text (but not the heads or subheads).
 * Italics are usually used sparingly. I think the depth-chart footnotes would be fine in plain type.
 * "Bold indicates starter as of 28 Sep 08" - The date formatting should conform to the date formatting of the rest of the text; i.e. "September 28, 2008".

Bowl selection process
 * "the latter threw for an additional 2,479 yards.[80][79]" - It's considered good form to arrange series of citation numbers in ascending order; i.e., [79][80]. Ditto for any other sequences like this in the article.

NFL draft
 * "who ran the fastest 40-yard dash time at the combine of 4.30 seconds" - I added an nbsp here to prevent "4.30" and "seconds" from being separated by line-break on computer screens. WP:NBSP says in part, "Wikipedia recommends the use of a non-breaking space (also known as a hard space) when necessary to prevent the end-of-line displacement of elements that would be awkward at the beginning of a new line... ". You might find more of these to fix elsewhere in the article.

Images
 * The image templates will need to include alt text to pass FAC. WP:ALT has an explanation of what this entails and how to add alt text.
 * It would be good to make the image licenses as complete and correct as possible. Image:Broncostadiumoct108.JPG, for example, is tagged because it is still uncategorized. Image:TerpsO.jpg has not yet been uploaded to the Commons. IMAGE:ChrisTurnerMarylandFootballCrop.jpg includes a rather round-about way of linking to the original source. It would be good to change it to link directly to Turner to make it easy for fact-checkers to verify the license.

Awards
 * The dates here should all be in m-d-y format; i.e., September 29, 2008 rather than 29 September 2008, per WP:MOSNUM.

References
 * The date formatting should all be consistent here too. The mix of yyyy-mm-dd and m-d-y will not pass scrutiny at FAC.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article in your areas of interest. Finetooth (talk) 18:29, 7 August 2009 (UTC)