Wikipedia:Peer review/Henry H. Rogers/archive1

Henry H. Rogers
For several years, I have been working on the article on industrialist and millionaire Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840-1909), a working class youth born and raised in Fairhaven, Massachusetts (a whaling town). In the spirit of Horatio Alger, he struck out with a small savings to find his fortune, worked hard and sacrificed, and became one of the principals of Standard Oil. As of a 1996 publication, he was considered one of the 25 most wealthy men of all-time in the United States. An unusual aspect of this fellow is that he was a generous but low profile philanthropist, even as his ruthlessness in business earned him a poor public image and the nickname "hell hound".

Although much has been written on this fascinating man, who was the Virginian Railway's co founder and financier, there has only been one true biography published to-date. The more I have learned about him, the more I want to learn (and perhaps write) more. While working on his article, I created a new one on his wife, Abbie G. Rogers, and some of the content is duplicative. After Abbie died, he cultivated friendships and financially mentored Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and did tremendous behind-the-scenes work with Ida Tarbell and Dr. Booker T. Washington. I have added Rogers related information to the articles on each of these famous people.

I would appreciate any help to improve this article. I hope other Wikipedians will also find this man to be as fascinating as I have. I think the article has even more featured article potential than the one on the Virginian Railway's other founder, William N. Page.

The article is too long. One idea I have is that we can move most of the details about his children to the separate article about his first wife and place one of those messages (ie For details on his first wife and children, see related article Abbie G. Rogers).

One last note: This article (like those on the other famous people named above) is one of those on Wikipedia which is pulled into many other web resources (mirror sites?). If you doubt this, just do a search (Google, Yahoo, etc.) on Henry Rogers, and you will see the many websites which use the current text in Wikipedia as their source. So, our efforts here may especially help Wikipedia continue to grow as a reputable and quality resource on the Internet. Please help make Henry H. Rogers a better article.

Thanks to all, Mark in the Historic Triangle of Virginia Vaoverland 22:50, September 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * It looks pretty good, but I did not have a chance to read it all, so I'll just give some general advice on what it needs to be a featured article. 1) Separate the references and external links into a references section that includes all the resources actually used as references to add or fact check material in the article, and leave the rest in an external links section. Format the references with full citation information such as author, publisher, date, etc as in Cite sources. Inline citations for important point using a format such as footnotes or (Hubbard 1909 pg 35) help with the verifiability of the article and really make a strong case for a featured article. 2) Many short paragraphs and sections throughout. The break up the prose and make for poor flow and highlight areas that either need to be expanded or merged with related material. There should pretty much never be a subsection without a full paragraph. That's all for now, but if you finish those let me know and I'll see if there's anything else that would keep this from being a successful FAC. - Taxman Talk 15:51, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I have moved out the sections about each of his children to their mother's article, and I will work on these items. Vaoverland 01:29, 14 September 2005 (UTC)