Wikipedia:Peer review/Brooks-Baxter War/archive1

Brooks-Baxter War
I am mainly needing help with citations. Online sources for this are few and far between. I used a research paper I recently completed and tried to cite excerpts from The Arkansas Daily Gazette I retrieved from microfilm, however I'm sure I did this improperly. Also, I took the liberty of uploading the pictures of Brooks and Baxter assuming that they were both in the public domain. That needs to be double checked. Finally the article needs a good once over to get rid any POV, weasel words, etcetera. --The_stuart 23:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, AZ t 21:54, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

From SG
Very nice start, and lots of thoughtful work has gone into the article. Some quick things just to get you started: Sandy (Talk) 22:24, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Section headings need attention per WP:MOS, specifically capitalization.,
 * Have a look at WP:LEAD in terms of whether you can slightly expand the lead, making it a more compelling introduction. The lead right now is basically one and two-sentence paragraphs.
 * A copyedit may be needed: in the second paragraph, I saw Coup d'état capitalized (Wikilinks can be used with or without caps).  I'm not sure if Reconstruction is a proper noun, or if it should be de-capped?  "The outcome of the Brooks-Baxter war was an early end to Reconstruction."
 * References would be better off as bullets, rather than numbers - the numbers may be confused with notes as used in cite.php (the referencing system used by most Wiki articles). You may want to switch to the bullets as used in my reply here.  (Never mind, I did it.)
 * Do the Arkansas Gazette articles not have article titles? Those should be given, and author if available.
 * Does the Owings article have an exact publication date (not just year)?
 * There are some unreferenced sections.
 * Some of your inline references are before the punctuation, some after, some are missing the space before the ref ... see ... state debt(Owings, 1). Also see, ... Little Rock we ever witnessed”(Gazette #291).   Compare to ... voted early and often. (Gazette #299)   I'm not sure which is correct.
 * I'm not up on Fair Use on images: I suggest you contact.
 * I haven't looked at the prose.

Looking now at some random prose - I picked the Baxter responds section:
 * Normally in order for a coup to be successful the oust official is imprisoned to prevent them from rallying support but, for some unknown reason Baxter was allowed to remain free in Pulaski County. The reasons behind this are not clear.

This passage is problematic on several levels. the oust official --> the ousted official? Unknown reason said twice - redundant. Some commas seem to be missing. Second sentence is entirely redundant; deleting it results in a one-sentence paragraph, which should be expanded or merged into next paragraph.

In the next sentence, we find another redundancy:
 * Baxter set up headquarters in the Anthony House three blocks away from the State Capital.

The next sentence is problematic:
 * Curiously, if ads placed in The Gazette are any indication, the Anthony House continued to function as an upscale hotel during the entirety of the crisis (comma) even though there was fighting going on just outside and at least one man was shot dead while standing in a (the building's) window in the building (Owings, 5).

Curiously is editorializing, which shouldn't be in an encyclopedia. Commas seem missing. There is a lot of redundancy.

This is just a random sample. At the bottom of the page, WP:WIAFA, you'll find a link to Tony's exercises for eliminating redundancy. A thorough copyedit is in order. Good luck ! Sandy (Talk) 22:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Could you mention in the lead that this event takes place in the US for those unfamiliar with Arkansas. Thank you. CG 19:00, 15 December 2006 (UTC)