Wikipedia:Peer review/Free State of Galveston/archive1

This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because it is a new article and I'd like feedback on the shape it is taking as well as an assessment on where it stands quality-wise.

If anybody has reference suggestions please feel free to offer them. At lot of the info I found on the culture of the era and the people was from a magazine article. Adequate but not great in terms of authoritative stature.

Thanks, Mcorazao (talk) 23:45, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is fascinating and generally well-written. I have a few suggestions for improvement.

Heads and subheads
 * Generally it's a good idea to make heads and subheads unique. Rather than repeating the word "era" in three heads, I'd suggest modifying two of them: "Era economy" to "Economy" and "Era in modern popular culture" to "In popular culture".

Lead
 * MOS:INTRO says in part, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." The existing lead reads well but doesn't summarize "Culture" or "Government and law enforcement". A good rule of thumb is to include in the lead at least a mention of each of the main text sections.

Overlinking
 * The centuries shouldn't be linked unless there's some special reason to do so. Likewise, common words like "oil", "cotton", "barber", and "bank" shouldn't be linked since most English speakers already know what they mean. WP:OVERLINK has details.

Society
 * "The casinos were, of course, regularly frequented by famous Houstonians... ". - Delete "of course"? It's an editorial aside.

Government and law enforcement
 * A good rule of thumb is to include at least one source for every paragraph. The first paragraph of this section in unsourced even though it includes data that is not common knowledge and must have come from somewhere. This paragraph is an exception; most of the article seems well-supported.

The end of an era
 * "the rest of the Galveston economy tanked... " - Slang. "Collapsed"?
 * "The "Splash Day" celebrations restarted, drawing tourists to the coast (this annual event would evolve into an LGBT event in later decades)." - In several places in the article, a complete sentence appears inside parentheses inside a complete sentence. I believe the way to punctuate this is to use a capital letter at the beginning of the complete sentence in parentheses and a period at the end. Suggestion: "The "Splash Day" celebrations restarted, drawing tourists to the coast. (This annual event would evolve into an LGBT event in later decades)." Ditto for similar combinations elsewhere in the article. On the other hand, constructions like "Efforts at historical preservation (notably including those of George P. Mitchell)... " are OK because the words in parentheses do not form a complete sentence.

Era in modern popular culture
 * Generally straight prose is preferable to lists. I'd suggest turning this short one into prose.

References
 * Some of the references are incomplete such as citation 50, which lacks an access date, and citation 51, which lacks an author, a correct title, a publisher, and a date of publication even though all of these are readily available at the given url. A good rule of thumb for Internet sources is to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date.
 * Book references should include the place of publication and the ISBN. This is true of the "Further reading" section as well as the citations in the "Reference" section.
 * Page ranges get en dashes rather than hyphens.

See also
 * I'm not sure it makes sense to add things to this list that already appear in the main text.

Alt text
 * Most of the images lack alt text, which allows readers who can't see the images to learn what information they contain. The lead image has alt text, but it merely says, "Beach Boulevard", from which a blind reader would learn nothing by hearing it read aloud by a machine. It takes a bit of practice to write helpful at texts. You can find details about how to write them and where to put them at WP:ALT, and you can look at recent examples of alt text by visiting WP:FAC.

Image licenses
 * The postcard used in the infobox is quite nice, but the licensing information looks contradictory. The image description says, "Not dated. This copy was mailed, postmarked 1943. From automobiles original view probably not more than 5 years earlier." That would put the date of publication back to about 1938, but it would need to go back to 1923 for the public domain license to be correct. In other words, the postcard and copies of its imagery may still be protected by copyright. The Hotel Galvez image also has licensing problems as noted on its description page at the Commons.

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) 02:32, 5 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Mcorazao responses:
 * Heads and subheads - Done.


 * Lead - Done, I think. I added a very brief mention of some additional stuff. I don't want the intro to get to cumbersome.


 * Overlinking - Done.


 * Society
 * "The casinos were, of course, regularly frequented by famous Houstonians... ". - Done.


 * Government and law enforcement - Done.
 * The end of an era
 * "the rest of the Galveston economy tanked... " - Done.
 * "The "Splash Day" celebrations restarted, drawing tourists to the coast (this annual event would evolve into an LGBT event in later decades)." - Done.


 * Era in modern popular culture - Done.
 * References
 * Some of the references are incomplete - Done.
 * Book references should include the place of publication and the ISBN. - Done.
 * Page ranges get en dashes rather than hyphens. - Not sure how this is done. Need to read up ... Done.


 * See also - Done.
 * Alt text - Done.
 * Image licenses - Investigating ...
 * So regarding the postcard, Infrogmation had a brief forum exchange with the person who posted the picture here. Essentially according to that guy there is no copyright notice listed and so, if we accept that the postcard must have been published between 1923 and 1977, then it would be free of copyright protection. So since we can't get our hands on the postcard this is kind of the best that can be done to verify the license. I am not clear what Wikipedia's standards are on something like this (i.e. this seems to be a good faith effort at verifying the license so is that good enough?). I guess I'm going to call this Done unless there is some stronger standard that needs to be applied.
 * --Mcorazao (talk) 20:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)