Wikipedia:Peer review/Bergen, New Netherland/archive1

Bergen, New Netherland
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because:

It presents an overview of 17th century history of what would become (a part) State of New Jersey and attempts to present it w/o too much reference to contemporary civic boundaries/structures. In other words, the chronology is taken more from the perception of the inhabitants of the period, placed into a somewhat wider context, rather than municipal histories (such the "The Histoy of....., or "The Story of....) common to town/county historical societies. Both text and images support a balance between specific and broader reasons why region developed as it did.

Text is fairly straightfoward information, comprehensive, generally well-referenced, and with no apparent grammatical/spelling errors. Without regard to the "importance" of article, what is required to change the rating to a GA?

Thanks, Djflem (talk) 08:14, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting piece with nice illustrations and maps. I have a few suggestions for improvement.


 * The lead should be a summary or abstract of the main text. Ideally, it should at least mention the main idea in each of the main sections, and it should not include material that is undeveloped in any of these sections. The existing lead says nothing about Halve Maen, the Lenape, and other sections, and it discusses the name origin, which is not mentioned in the main text. Please see WP:LEAD for more ideas about how to re-do the lead.
 * Section headings don't normally include links. I'd suggest unlinking Halve Maen and the rest of the linked heads per WP:HEAD.
 * Image:Perzik.jpg needs a caption.
 * Per MOS:UNLINKDATES, dates in the main text are no longer autoformatted. I ran a script to unlink them.
 * The citations have problems. Some of them use the "cite" family of templates. This is a good idea, and I'd suggest using those templates for all the rest of the citations, many of which are incomplete. If possible, you should try to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date for the on-line sources. Please see WP:CIT.
 * A top-to-bottom copyedit would probably catch and fix small errors. For example, a sentence in the lead says, "Some say that it so called for any of number of towns in the Netherlands or the city in Norway" This sentence seems to be missing a word or two, and it lacks a terminal period. A bit further on, "prompted by the settlers return" should be possessive, "settlers' ".

This is not a complete review, but I hope these few comments are helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 01:12, 6 November 2008 (UTC)