Wikipedia:Peer review/London Borough of Croydon/archive3

London Borough of Croydon
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because since previous GA reviews the article has improved a lot. What was said in the previous reviews of the article have been taken on board. Images have been deleted, lists removed, lead extended etc. I personally believe that the article is good enough for GA status but of course want a second opinion on this. I would like to see how you react to the lead section and the public services part in particular. If you think anything needs to be improved for GA status please just say.
 * Previous peer review

Thanks, Pafcool2 (talk) 00:10, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Clearly a lot of work has gone into this article. It is generally well-written in the sense that the sentences are well-formed and make sense. It is reasonably well-illustrated, and I like the maps. It's certainly broad in coverage. However, problems with sourcing alone prevent it from being, at the moment, a viable GA candidate. What follows is a fairly skimpy review but lists the things that jumped out at me.


 * The article includes unnecessary detail in places. Readers from all over the world are reading the article, but they probably do not need to know the details of a pilot scheme encouraging more off-peak travel on the local rail system, or the names and playing fields of all the football teams. I'd try to trim some of this, not throw it out completely, but find ways to summarize more succinctly. Something like "X football teams, including A, B, and C, play matches in Croydon. B won the Z championship in 2005." Or something like that. Be more selective, is what I mean.


 * The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find eight dead urls in the citations and three links in the text that go to disambiguation pages rather than their intended targets.


 * Some of the citations are incomplete, #53, #54, and #57, for example.


 * Are the sources reliable? Do they meet the guidelines of WP:RS? For example, what makes Croydon Online reliable? Its disclaimer says in part, "Croydon Council uses reasonable efforts to include and up-date information on this website, it does not however, make any representation as to its accuracy or completeness." That doesn't necessarily mean that it is unreliable for some kinds of information, but it would be better to find carefully edited sources (history books, for example) where possible.

Politics of Croydon Council
 * Everything looks pretty good before this section, but here things deteriorate. Three of the four paragraphs are without support by reliable sources. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every paragraph, as well as every direct quotation, every set of statistics, and every unusual claim. In this section, even the paragraph with sources does not provide a source or sources for the last three sentences even though they contain information that is not common knowledge. This leaves the impression that they represent original research as discussed at WP:NOR.


 * "Thirty-seven Labour and 31 Conservative councillors were elected in the 2002 elections, plus a lone Liberal Democrat, bolstered by a subsequent defection of a councillor who had originally been elected as a Conservative, defected to Labour, went back to the Conservatives and spent some time as an independent." - This sentence is too complex. In what sense was the lone Liberal Democrat bolstered by a subsequent defection?

Civic history
 * No sources.

Government buildings
 * Much of the section lacks citations to reliable sources.

Geography and climate
 * The paragraph appears to be sourced, but it really isn't since the source only applies to the claims in the last sentence. I'll stop commenting section by section on sourcing except to say that similar problems occur further down in the article.

Landmarks
 * I'd break the giant paragraph into three or four paragraphs for ease of reading.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 01:14, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments: I began the last peer review by saying: "The article, with 9,500 words of text (excluding tables and images) is way, way too long", and I ended: "Please give careful consideration to how you can slim the article down." In fact, in the two-and-a-half years since that review, the article has expanded by another 700 words. So when you say that "what was said in the previous reviews of the article have been taken on board", this is true only up to a point. To put things in perspective, this WP article is longer than that for the United States. The massive overdetailing is a critical issue, and if the article is to progress, this aspect has to be addressed. Brianboulton (talk) 11:25, 15 February 2011 (UTC)