Wikipedia:Peer review/Mountain Meadows massacre/archive1

Mountain Meadows massacre
Numerous editors have worked on this page over a period of months. We hope to have this featured near the 150th anniversary of the event on September 11, 2007. Please review for the following: Speaking only for myself, I have trouble viewing this article in a dispassionate way, as my edits are perfect. I seek the clarity of fresh eyes, and the enthusiasm of neutral reviewers. Thanks in advance. Robbie Giles 13:11, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Readability
 * Depth of coverage
 * Good article criteria
 * Neutral point of view
 * Grammar and style
 * Other criteria as suggested by reviewers

AndyZ Review
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.
 * Consider adding more links to the article; per Manual of Style (links) and Build the web, create links to relevant articles.[?]
 * Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.[?]
 * [[Image:Brown check.svg|15px]]If there is not a free use image in the top right corner of the article, please try to find and include one.[?] (Done. --Robbie Giles 14:02, 29 July 2007 (UTC))
 * Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -  between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 15 miles, use 15 miles, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 15&amp;nbsp;miles.[?]
 * Per Wikipedia:Context and Build the web, years with full dates should be linked; for example, link January 15, 2006.[?]
 * As per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), dates shouldn't use th; for example, instead of using January 30th was a great day, use January 30 was a great day.[?]
 * Per Manual of Style (headings), headings generally do not start with articles ('the', 'a(n)'). For example, if there was a section called  ==The Biography== , it should be changed to  ==Biography== .[?]
 * Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long- consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Summary style.[?]
 * There are a few sections that are too short and that should be either expanded or merged.
 * Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
 * Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “ All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
 * The script has spotted the following contractions: couldn't, can't, don't, hasn't, hasn't, don't, don't, doesn't, isn't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded.
 * As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2][?]
 * Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.[?]

DrKiernan review
You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, DrKiernan 14:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I think it looks very good from a brief personal glance, and probably could reach FA status. DrKiernan 14:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Review by Remember the dot
This article has some good information, but it is way too long. It needs to be split up into several smaller articles of manageable sizes. See Summary style and Article size. —Remember the dot (talk) 05:14, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * There is debate among those of us currently editing the article. I agree that this article is too long and some of the background material is too detailed. I am working to tighten the prose, but it needs major trimming after verifying that material targeted for deletion is in a companion article. Thanks for your review. --Robbie Giles 13:20, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * How about writing a 30 KB summary of the article, and creating articles such as Background of the Mountain Meadows massacre, Baker-Fancher party, Investigations of the Mountain Meadows massacre, and Commemorations of the Mountain Meadows massacre for the details? —Remember the dot (talk) 18:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Right now, the article is just under 60kb of prose. This is within the "may eventually need to be divided" range in the Article size guideline. I've worked to shorten the background section. Now, the background, including the background on the Fanchers, is just 7 KB, which I think is quite reasonable considering the fact that the secondary sources generally devote a much higher percentage to background, and this subject matter requires a particularly-large amount of context. Since the background is short now, and already represents just about the most compressed summary of the background that I can think of, I think we should leave it intact. Splitting it further would start to cause problems with NPOV forking, since most Mormon apologetic commentators emphasize the "past persecutions" part of the background as a way of explaining the massacre, while Mormon critics emphasize the "blood of the prophets" part of the background as a way of showing how the massacre was inevitable.


 * I think the best candidates for sub-articles would be "Escalating tensions", "Conspiracy and massacre" and "Investigations and prosecutions". Each of these three chunks all have about the same amount of (or potential for) substantive material in them. CO GDEN  19:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikipediatoperfection review
This is an exhaustive and well sourced article. Its main contributors should be proud. It seems to be more or less NPOV. It is, however, extremely long. To put this in perspective, this article is bigger than the article on Hitler. And the article on Hitler is massive. I agree with the suggestions above to break the article into several smaller articles. Particularly the section on the Utah War which already has its own page needs to be drastically scaled back. I tend not to like the policy of shoving virtually everything to separate articles as is often done with larger articles. I think that it tends to be used to sweep the dirt under the rug. However, this article desperately need it.

You have all obviously put a great deal of work into the article. If you do some trimming I think this page deserves to be on the front page around the 150th anniversary. Wikipediatoperfection 09:02, 19 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, this article is somewhat smaller than Adolf Hitler. When considering article size, only the readable prose is counted, and the Mountain Meadows massacre article has about 60 kB, whereas Adolf Hitler has about 72 kB. By comparison, The Lord of the Rings, Alcibiades, and Punk rock, some of the larger articles to be featured on the front page, are each about 50 kB. I'm not saying that the Mountain Meadows article shouldn't be shortened, but the size isn't quite as out-of-proportion as the raw article size would suggest. That number is inflated because of the large number of citations. I think if we reduce the size slightly to 50kB we'll be okay. CO GDEN  17:39, 20 August 2007 (UTC)