Wikipedia:Peer review/Minimum wage/archive1

Minimum wage
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because several editors have worked on it for the last few years, and we want to nominate it for GA and eventually FA status.

Thanks, LK (talk) 06:54, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments: This article has accumulated thousands of edits over the years, yet in WP terms it still looks very much like work-in-progress. Possibly this is a case of too many cooks...? I don't know. I haven't had time to study the prose in detail, but there are some fairly obvious issues that require attention before the article could seriously be considered a contender for either GA or FA status:-
 * For an article of this length and detail, the lead is inadequate. It needs to be expanded into a proper summary of the whole article.
 * Although the article carries over 90 inline citations there is considerable under-citation within the article. There are several citation tags throughout the article, some from as long ago as February 2010. Some whole paragraphs - even whole sections - are uncited, and there are many instances of paragraphs ending with uncited statements. As a rough guide as to what is the acceptable level of citation I would say that every paragraph requires at least one citation, and that every paragraph should end with a citation.
 * Citations should be to specific pages, not to whole books
 * The formats of the citations that you have require a lot of attention. As aminimum, each reference should show title, publisher and, for online references, last access date. Authors and dates should be given where possible. Citations should be in a consistent format; bare urls such as are given in 33, 34, 55  and others are not acceptable. For information on how citations should be formatted you can consult WP:CITE. You may find using citation templates is helpful.
 * There are at least two dead links.
 * A bibliography would be a considerable help in enabling an overall assessment of the sources to be made.
 * Scanning through the prose, I see instances where bullet-point lists have been used. This is notably in the "Debates" section; these lists should be converted to standard prose.
 * The graph caption should help readers to interpret the graph. At present it is uninformative.
 * Why so many "See also" entries? What specific use are these to readers of this article?
 * Likewise, are all the External links necessary?

I suggest that these fairly basic points be worked on, and perhaps a copyedit, before the article is submitted again to peer review. It's an important article, well worth persevering with, and I look forward to seeing its further development. Brianboulton (talk) 18:18, 23 September 2011 (UTC)