Wikipedia:Peer review/New Mexico/archive1

New Mexico
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because I want to get it to GA status.

Thanks, ~ Nerdy Science Dude  (✉ • ✐) 15:58, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a good start on a difficult topic but is not yet ready for GAN partly because it has sourcing problems and does not follow Manual of Style guidelines in several important ways. Here are a few suggestions for further improvement.


 * The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article. A good rule of thumb is to include in the lead at least a mention of each of the main text sections. If you imagine a reader who can read nothing but the lead, you'll have a better idea of how to write it. WP:LEAD has details.


 * Significant parts of the article lack sources and therefore cannot be verified by readers. For example, the second paragraph of the "Geography" section is unsourced; the second paragraph of the "Transportation" section is unsourced; the "Politics" section is unsourced; "Culture" lacks sources; "Architecture" lacks sources. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source per paragraph as well as any statistics, direct quotations, and claims that have been questioned or are apt to be questioned. A example of a claim that is sure to be questioned is "New Mexico is commonly thought to have Spanish as an official language alongside English...". What reliable source says so?


 * The article is more list-y than necessary. The Manual of Style suggests rendering lists as straight prose when feasible. (See WP:MOS). The lists of national forests, national parks, national monuments, and so on, would be easy to render as straight prose of three or four paragraphs, for example. I'd also suggest rendering the two tables in "Important cities and counties" as straight prose to achieve a better layout.


 * The Manual of Style advises against creating text sandwiches between images or graphics, and it advises against illustrations that extend across section boundaries. For example, the chart of historic populations should be placed entirely within the Demographics section, and it should not make a text sandwich with the population graphic on the left. For another example, the image of the Santa Cruz church should be made to fit within one section instead of overlapping a section boundary.


 * Images should not displace heads, subheads, edit buttons, or text such as "Main article: History of New Mexico" in the "History" section.


 * The Manual of Style advises against extremely short paragraphs and extremely short sections. "Freight", for example, is much too short as are "Primary and secondary education" and "Colleges and universities", "Urban mass transit", "Oil and gas production", "Economic indicators", "Aerospace", and "Catholic church hierarchy". One-sentence orphan paragraphs like "As of January 2010, the states unemployment rate is 8.5%" are also a no-no. Both kinds of too-short problems can be fixed either by expanding or merging, whichever seems more appropriate.


 * The organization of material within sections is puzzling in places. For example, "Law and government" begins with a sentence about the constitution of 1912 then leaps to a death-penalty law in 2009. It would seem more logical to me to put the death-penalty sentence last in the section, after the general things that follow from the constitution. Adding the death-penalty law also raises the question of why it is the only one mentioned here; surely other important laws were passed between 1912 and 2009.


 * You might review articles on other states to see how other editors have handled similar projects. For example, South Dakota is a GA article about a U.S. state.


 * The article lacks information about the geology of the state. I would suggest adding the basics either to the "Geography" section or to a separate "Geology" section. "Oil and gas production" might be moved into the new Geology section and merged with other material.


 * The link-checker in the toolbox at the top of this page finds several dead urls in the citations. These will need to be fixed or replaced.

This is not a complete line-by-line review but should give you plenty to work on. Good luck with the article. Finetooth (talk) 04:20, 13 June 2010 (UTC)