Wikipedia:Peer review/Economy of Iran/archive1

Economy of Iran

 * A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for January 2009.
 * A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for January 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because…it is a GA and would like to know what is missing to bring it to FA status.

Thanks, SSZ (talk) 23:16, 27 January 2009 (UTC)


 * It's a good article for sure. The biggest thing that separates it from a FA is the quality of the references. There are a lot of them, but they are all online and are of relatively low quality in many cases. The most important thing would be to seek out the most reliable references on the topic which are likely to include some dead tree sources. Book sources won't help you with the latest updates, but you have online sources for that. That should also help by giving you a chance to look over what other sources on the topic consider important and what they prioritize. For example in the Services section, the Social protection subsection seems out of place. Since it's a government program it's not really considered a contribution to the economy, and besides, why consider just the social protection and not the rest of the government's affect on the economy? Most sources don't do that except in the case of nationalized industries that do produce GDP. Another specific comment, per WP:LEAD the lead section should be a summary of the most important information in the rest of the article and for an article this size should probably be at least three paragraphs, not more than 4. - Taxman Talk 18:25, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting article. My comments below focus on sections from the lead to the "Agriculture" subsection. I am too pressed for time to continue line-by-line to the end, but I hope you can extrapolate from my comments ideas that you can also apply to the lower sections.

Lead
 * The lead should be a summary or abstract of the rest of the article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of the main ideas in each of the article sections and not to include information that is undeveloped elsewhere in the article. Please see WP:LEAD for more details.
 * "Yet this increased revenue has not eased economic hardships, which include double-digit unemployment and inflation - inflation climbed to 26% as of December 2008." The Manual of Style says, "A hyphen is used only to mark conjunction, not disjunction (for which en dashes are used)... ". I wouldn't recommend the frequent use of en dashes to substitute for terminal periods or commas. You'd be better off making two sentences out of this hyphenated sentence by using a terminal period after "inflation".
 * "Iran's educated population, economic inefficiency and insufficient investment - both foreign and domestic - have prompted an increasing number of Iranians to seek employment overseas, resulting in significant 'brain drain'. - Here I'd suggest recasting as "Iran's educated population, economic inefficiency, and insufficient foreign and domestic investment have prompted... ".

Heads and subheads
 * Generally, only the first letter of the first word of the section heads and subheads start with a capital letter unless other words in the head are official names (proper nouns). Thus "Centralization and Privatization" should be "Centralization and privatization", and some of the other heads need the same kind of fixing.

History
 * "In a country that has traditionally been both rural and agrarian, agricultural production has fallen consistently since the 1960s (by the late 1990s Iran was a major food importer), and economic hardship in the countryside has driven vast numbers of people to migrate to the largest cities." - Rather than putting a complete sentence in parentheses inside another complete sentence, I'd recast. Suggestion: "In a traditionally rural and agrarian country, agricultural production has fallen consistently since the 1960s. By the late 1990s, Iran was a major food importer, and economic hardship in the countryside had driven vast numbers of people to migrate to the largest cities."
 * "The rates of both literacy and life expectancy in Iran" - Remove "both".
 * "Iran remains highly dependent on its one major industry, the extraction of petroleum and natural gas for export, and the government faces increasing difficulty in providing opportunities for a younger, better-educated workforce, which has led to a growing sense of frustration among lower- and middle-class Iranians." - A bit too complex. Suggestion: Put a terminal period after "workforce" and start the next sentence with "This has led to a growing... ".

Five-Year Economic Development Plan (2005-10)
 * "points the direction in which the trade sector" - Remove "in".
 * "has been to improve social justice and the overall situation" - The term "overall situation" is vague, and the sentence includes several redundancies. Suggestion: "has been to improve social justice by regulating the domestic market and maintaining a supply of basic commodities.
 * "The latter would need improving the" - Suggestion: "The latter would require improvements to... "
 * "the huge financial burden on subsidy payments" _ "of" rather than "on"
 * "6,000 MW" - Spell out abbreviated terms on first use like this: "6,000 megawatts (MW)". Then MW is fine on second and subsequent uses. Ditto for similar abbreviations such as PPP, IMF, and GDP that occur later in the article.
 * "of which $1.3 trillion" - The Manual of Style suggests holding terms like this together with an nbsp code placed between the digits and the unit. This keeps them from being separated in an awkward way by line-wrap on computer monitors. I see quite a few similar constructions involving tons, dollars, and rials in the article. Please see WP:NBSP for details.
 * "will be invested in industry sector" - Suggestion: "in the industrial sector"
 * "end of the current Iranian year (began March 20, 2008)" - Words like "current" are vague. - Suggestion: "end of the Iranian year that began on March 20, 2008"
 * Since this is an Iran-centric article, should March 20, 2008, be expressed as 20 March 2008? Ditto for all the other full dates in the article.

Centralization vs. privatization
 * "The sale of state-owned factories and companies proceeded slowly, however (mostly because of the opposition by a nationalist majority in Majlis - the Iranian parliament), and most industries remained state-owned in the early 21st century (70% of the economy as of 2006). - Too complex. Suggestion: "The sale of state-owned factories and companies proceeded slowly, however, mostly because of opposition by a nationalist majority in Majlis, the Iranian parliament. Most industries, comprising 70 percent of the economy in 2006, remained state-owned."
 * The state sector is" - The Manual of Style advises against using bolding in the main text. It also prefers straight prose, where feasible, rather than lists. Tables are fine for things that really do not work as prose, but the list in this section would be better as prose.

Agriculture
 * "along the rivers in the Zagros and Alborz mts." - Spell out "mountains".
 * What to link and what not to link is always a judgment call. I see quite a few examples of what I would call overlinking. Common terms like "road", "banking", "industry", "trade", "services", "tea", "fruits" and many others that most readers will already understand should normally not be linked. Links can be distracting rather than helpful. Please see WP:OVERLINK for details.

References
 * The Manual of Style advises against collapsing boxes for the Reference section.
 * Where possible, the references should include author, title, publisher, publication date, url, and access date.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 20:56, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Wow, very impressive review. - Taxman Talk 21:01, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Will heed your advice. Thanks to Finetooth and Taxman for your contribution and time. SSZ (talk) 06:35, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Llywrch comments: As both Taxman & Finetooth note, this is a well-written article; I'll probably use it as a model when I find the time to work on Economy of Ethiopia. So I have only some minor comments:
 * First, & probably most important, is there a reason why you didn't quote the Iranian government's own reported figures in the article? Unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, I would assume a country's governmental reports are a reliable source. (Yes, they will vary at times from what the IMF & the CIA report -- but both of them start with the government's own reported data, & tweak it based on their own experience & biasses.)
 * In the section "Agriculture", the last sentence of the third paragraph reads: "In the rivers entering the Caspian Sea are salmon, carp, trout, pike and sturgeon." The use of "are" feels awkward -- How about something along the lines of "The rivers that drain into the Caspian Sea are fished for salmon, etc."
 * You have unwanted carriage returns in the footnotes with URLs, which breaks the external links. (I fixed a couple.)
 * Speaking of footnotes, is there a reason you put them in a scroll box? Or is this a new MoS dictum that I am blissfully unaware of? -- llywrch (talk) 19:33, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * An important Postscript -- After I wrote the above, I realized that there was a significant omission in this article -- nothing about organized labor in Iran. (Not surprised: Category:Trade unions of Iran has only one article.) Although this can be addressed with an overview section 2-3 paragraphs in length, I don't think this article should properly be considered FA status without it. -- llywrch (talk) 19:48, 4 February 2009 (UTC)