Wikipedia:Peer review/Paulo Francis/archive1

Paulo Francis
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because…

The article deals with someone who spent much of his working life in the USA but is barely known outside his native Brazil. I feel it needs to be put into a more general perspective; also, it must some be "streamlined" to comply with usual standards as far as English grammar and vocabulary are concerned. A list of references perhaps should be provided.

Thanks, Cerme (talk) 20:09, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Thanks for your work on this article. Normally the disputed neutrality tag at the top of the article would disqualify it frm having a peer review (fix that first, then work on the rest of the issue). However, a quick look at the article reveals numerous other issues, so here are some suggestions for improvement. Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch &gt;&lt;&gt; &deg; &deg; 23:07, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The current lead is only two paragraphs, each of one sentence, and needs to be expanded. The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself
 * For expansion, my rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. Please see WP:LEAD
 * I would also avoid short (one or two sentence) paragraphs as they interrupt the flow of the article
 * Per WP:CITE references come AFTER punctuation, and are usually at the end of a sentence or phrase - so fix things like Developing ambitions of following a career in the stage after that travel, Francis tried his hand as an actor in Rio de Janeiro during he early 1950s, but, although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he failed to show talent enough to go on[3]. 
 * Article needs more references, for example the paragraph starting with In 1971, Paulo Francis moved to New York City as an international correspondent, on a Ford Foundation fellowship... has no refs
 * My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
 * Some external links in the article need to be converted to inline citations / references. See for example In the wake of the late 1968 "coup inside the coup"—the takeover of the already existing military dictatorship by diehard generals—he was arrested four times, on the slimmest of pretexts.[23]
 * Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. cite web and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
 * Make sure that all references used are from relaible sources
 * I know nothing about this man, but the language is very POV and needs to be WP:NPOV. For example who says this magazine was "legendary"? one of the editors of the legendary culture magazine Senhor...? Or this whole sentence except for the direct quotations Eventually he dropped out from Columbia—or perhaps was simply unable to receive a graduate degree because he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject about which he was always less than candid[4]—showing a trait that was to plague him to the end: the inability to perform sustained intellectual work, and a tendency to bank instead on his flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots), something that made him prone to "mistakes,[5][6] imprecision, garbled recollections"[7] - a trait of what was to become his personal "method": "the absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] becoming eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".[8] (and why are there two footnotes / refs inside a direct quotation? - numbers 5 and 6)
 * Any chance for a WP:FAIR USE image of him (hard to get a free image of him now, since he is dead).
 * The article has a large number of typos and grammatical errors (perhaps because English is the second language of some of the editors ??). For example a follower of Trotsky is a Trotskyist or Trotskyite (not a "Trotskyst" as one header uses) and a critique is not the same thing as a critic (the former is what a latter produces). This needs a copyedit, but the other issues need to be addressed first.
 * Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in all peer reviews, in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)
 * Disambiguation finder tool (on this PR page) finds two dabs - see here