Wikipedia:Peer review/Mets–Phillies rivalry/archive1

Mets–Phillies rivalry
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because it is already a GA and I would like to attempt to nominate it for Featured Article. Since I've only done one FAC nom before and it wasn't successful, I'd like to see where improvements are needed here before a FA nom. KV5 ( Talk  •  Phils ) 22:31, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Comments from
 * You said you wanted to know what to work on before taking to FAC, so I looked at the sourcing and referencing with that in mind. I reviewed the article's sources as I would at FAC.
 * Current ref 18 needs a page number
 * The title of the book is the catchphrase that he coined; I would have thought this was sufficient...? KV5  ( Talk  •  Phils ) 02:09, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, it's just a reference to the entire book .. that's fine. Ealdgyth - Talk 02:17, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
 * What makes http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/ a reliable source?
 * Newspapers titles in the references should be in italics. If you're using cite news, use the work field for the title of the paper, and the publisher field for the name of the actual company that publishes the paper
 * Current ref 32 is just a bare url, it needs title, publisher and last access date at the least.
 * Standardize whether you are italicizing website names or not.
 * Per the MOS, link titles in the references shouldn't be in all capitals, even when they are in the original
 * Hope this helps. Please note that I don't watchlist Peer Reviews I've done. If you have a question about something, you'll have to drop a note on my talk page to get my attention. (My watchlist is already WAY too long, adding peer reviews would make things much worse.) 15:10, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Besides my comment, the above are all done. KV5  ( Talk  •  Phils ) 02:09, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Clearly a lot of work has gone into this account of an intense baseball rivalry. The article seems comprehensive and is generally well-written. However, my main thought is that it has structural problems that stand between it and reaching FA. For one thing, the lead is not a good summary of the entire article. More importantly, the overview of the rivalry and its causes tend to get lost in the many details of individual heroics and individual seasons. To fix these problems, I would consider adding a new top section (just below the lead) about the rivalry and similar rivalries (moving some of the material in the lead to this new section) and moving the "Causes" section into the new section as well. After that could come the material about individual players, years, feuds, and dust-ups.

In addition, I would consider shortening some of the main text sections by eliminating details unrelated to the central idea of a rivalry. Here's an example from the Jim Bunning section: "Through the first four innings, Bunning totaled four strikeouts through twelve batters. In the fifth inning, Phillies second baseman Tony Taylor preserved the perfect game with his strong defensive play. A diving catch and a throw from the knees kept Mets catcher Jesse Gonder off of the bases." These details would be relevant to an article about Jim Bunning or an article about this particular game, but they seem unnecessary in an article about the rivalry. Ditto for details such as the fact that Bunning had seven children and threw his perfect game on Father's Day; that is interesting but seems to have nothing to do with the rivalry. It seems to me that Bunning's perfect game is relevant to the extent that it annoyed the Mets but that most of the material in the Bunning section is irrelevant. Another section that seems largely unnecessary is "1995–2000", which says almost nothing about the rivalry. Would it be useful to reduce this section to a couple of sentences and combine it with the one above it under the revised head, "1991–2000"?

My main suggestions are to trim unnecessary detail, alter the article's structure to emphasize the rivalry, and then re-write the lead. Here are a few more suggestions.


 * Time: In the lead is a phrase, "which remains the only perfect game in Phillies history to this date". Using phrases like "to this date" (also things like "current streak" in the infobox) poses problems in an encyclopedia article since "now", "current", "today", and similar words describe no specific time. It's generally better to use language that doesn't have to be frequently updated to be accurate. Something like "through 2009" would be better than "to this date". Ditto for "in recent years" later in the lead.


 * Layout: Images generally should not bump into or displace third-level heads or overlap two sections. See, for example, Jim Bunning and Mike Schmidt; both displace subheads. John Franco displaces an edit button and overlaps two sections. Some of the other images in the article violate one or the other of these guidelines. WP:MOS has details.
 * Neither WP:MOS nor WP:LAYOUT say anything about these requirements. I have never heard this in any of the other featured content that I have written. KV5  ( Talk  •  Phils ) 21:01, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Lead
 * The lead should be a summary of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of the main text sections. The existing lead says nothing about Tug McGraw, racism, regional proximity, or William Shea, for example. The lead should not include important information that is not mentioned in the main text. The existing lead includes things like the curse of Billy Penn that don't appear in the main text.

References
 * The date formatting in the citations needs to be consistent, either m-d-y or yyyy-mm-dd but not a mixture of the two.

Bibliography
 * The books need the place of publication.

Images
 * The image of Tug McGraw is a bit odd in a couple of ways. It's unflattering; it's undated; it's awfully small (23 kb) for a self-made image; it's author, whose account on the Commons has apparently expired, might have incorrectly licensed the image as "public domain". I'd suggest looking for a replacement for this one.

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) 20:31, 12 January 2010 (UTC)