Wikipedia:Peer review/Pennsylvania–Reading Seashore Lines/archive1

Pennsylvania–Reading Seashore Lines

 * A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for June 2009.
 * A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for June 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because I like to know if I did it right.

Thanks, N2icv (talk) 00:54, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: You've collected a lot of interesting data about this railroad, and that is a good start. Here are a few suggestions for further improvement.


 * MOS:INTRO says, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." The existing lead should be expanded to become a true summary rather than an introductory sentence.


 * Generally, measurements in Wikipedia articles are expressed in both imperial and metric units. Thus, "... the trains were in sight of each other for 11 miles between... " should appear as "... the trains were in sight of each other for 11 mi between... ". It's tedious to convert a lot of these by hand. Fortunately, the convert template will do the math and the spellings, abbreviations, and formatting if you plug in the right values in the right places.


 * It's a good idea to render as many lists as possible as straight prose. The Manual of Style says in one place, "Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs." The existing article has a lot of lists.


 * Bolding is used sparingly, usually just for the repetition of the article title in the first line of the lead and then, automatically, in section heads. MOS:BOLD advises against using bold letters for emphasis elsewhere. All the bolding should be removed from the "Further reading" section, for example. Ditto for "BUT NOT THE P-RSL" in the "History" section. It also should not be in all caps, which is also not used for emphasis in Wikipedia.


 * The Manual of Style frowns on extremely short paragraphs and extremely short sections. You can either expand the orphans or merge them with other paragraphs or sections. This would apply, for example, to the one-sentence orphan paragraph at the end of the "History" section and to the two-item list in the orphan section, "Timeline".


 * It's not clear what "ETT No. 8-A In effect 27 Oct, 1963" refers to. Readers will want to know what ETT means.


 * Some of the material lacks sourcing. A good rule of thumb is to cite every set of statistics, every claim that might reasonably be questioned, every direct quotation, and every paragraph. An example of a paragraph with no sources is the first paragraph of the "Diesel locomotives" section. The names of the train colors are not common knowledge and must have come from a source.


 * MOS:HEAD says in part, "The initial letter of a title is capitalized (except in very rare cases, such as eBay). Otherwise, capital letters are used only where they would be used in a normal sentence". Thus, "Atlantic City Railroad" is correct, but "Passenger Trains" should be "Passenger trains".


 * To get more ideas about how to improve an article, it's often useful to look at articles that have been promoted to GA or FA status. You can find lists of high-quality railroad articles at WP:RR.

I hope these few suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 20:53, 6 July 2009 (UTC)