Wikipedia:Peer review/Navajo Nation/archive1

Navajo Nation
This peer review discussion has been closed. This article was last assessed in 2007 and was listed as "B". I'm afraid I have to demote this to a "C", since it has quite a few unsourced claims (see Talk:Navajo Nation/Comments). I've been messing around with it getting the structure in a fairly decent order, but would like to get input from people who come to this article without any prior knowledge (obviously, I might take some things for granted which others might not find obvious). I have quite a few offline-sources on my shelf. Thank you for your comments.

Thanks, Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 20:31, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Unfortunately, the article is not ready for a lengthy peer review, which is "intended for high-quality articles that have already undergone extensive work, often as a way of preparing a featured article candidate." From what you say, you came upon the article when it was already long but lacking inline citations. I find it harder in some ways to repair such an article than to start from scratch because I don't like to delete other people's work. However, it's not always possible to find sources for something that someone else has written; after I make a good-faith effort to find sources for what seem to be supportable claims in articles that interest me, I don't hesitate to delete unsourced material for which I can find no source(s). To improve this article, you may have to track down sources and also do some judicious deleting. If any other editors have an interest in the article, you can always discuss large changes with them on the talk page. The book list on the existing talk page could be quite helpful, but unless the author of the book list knows which claims are supported by which page or pages of the books in the list, it will be extremely difficult to backtrack and add inline citations. A good rule of thumb is to provide a citation to a reliable source for any claim that has been questioned or is likely to be questioned, any set of statistics, any direct quotation, and every paragraph (except, usually, those in the lead). If one inline citation supports an entire paragraph, the citation can be placed right after the terminal period of the last sentence of the paragraph. As things stand now, most of the article violates WP:V and runs the risk of being deleted.


 * Some of the few citations provided are incomplete. Citation 14 is an example. A good rule of thumb for citations to Internet sources is to list author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and date of most recent access.


 * As far as organization goes, the article has too many extremely short sections and subsections. The tiny subsection called "Executive", for example, consists of a single sentence. If I were rewriting this, I would attempt to include all of the material under "Government" in one set of paragraphs with no subheads. I would probably try to arrange the material chronologically starting with the pre-U.S. governments (if reliable sources can be found) and working my way up to the contemporary government and its subdivisions. Along the way, it might become necessary or helpful to create a subcategory or two, but I'd only add them if I thought they were really needed. However, it's too early to decide on an ideal structure since it's not clear how much of the existing material can be retained or how much new material may be discovered and added.


 * What makes citation 14 reliable? The source appears to be a middle-school paper written for a class. On the face of it, this would not seem to meet WP:RS even if the claims are true. Please find reliable sources for the article's claims.
 * The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article rather than an introduction. A good rule of thumb is to at least mention in the lead the most important ideas from the main text sections. WP:LEAD has details.


 * The tools in the toolbox at the top of this page find two dead urls in citations and four links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.


 * I hope you will consider bringing this important article back to PR when it's well-sourced.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 02:20, 5 November 2010 (UTC)