Wikipedia:Peer review/United States Tax Court/archive1

United States Tax Court
What can be done to push this article towards featured status? Does it need images? Discussion of any other aspects of Tax Court operations? bd2412 T 18:19, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Automated peer-review
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question. You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Morphh   (talk) 13:04, 26 June 2007 (UTC) 13:04, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * 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== .[?]
 * 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.”
 * 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][?]
 * Done Morphh   (talk) 1:19, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * 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.[?]

Morphh's review

 * I think the Notes section should be renamed to References and the References renamed to Notes (see WP:GTL).
 * Made the change Morphh   (talk) 1:18, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * The section "Life cycle of a Tax Court case" has too many one/two sentence paragraphs. Perhaps this can be pulled together into something more structured.
 * Third sentence needs a source. While I agree, this may be considered POV or Original Research.
 * Taken out for now - yes, very POV, and not more true than of other federal clerks. bd2412  T 19:52, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I expected to see a little bit about the criticism of a separate tax court outside of our normal judicial system, which I believe has been criticized by tax protesters (not certain of this... just remember hearing something about it). It seems to be briefly but not overtly mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead and lightly in "The Court and its jurisdiction" but it doesn't really discuss the controversy with it.
 * Consider UStaxation tag.
 * Added the tag (and adding the Tax Court to the template). bd2412  T 20:09, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * The second part of the third sentence almost seems like it should be part of the first sentence. The first sentence should be a solid definition of what the Tax Court is.  The current first sentence doesn't do that for me.  It tells me how it was created but it doesn't say.. "it is the court for tax disputes".  I guess such can be implied by the article title but it should be further defined.
 * The section "Genesis of a Tax Court dispute" has a lot of "emphasis" quotes. It even had some bolding, which I changed to italic but I'm not even sure it should be that.  Is there a reason for all the quotes and such?
 * I reordered the first paragraph and added a history section as well. Don't know about the bold/italics. bd2412  T 00:39, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Famspear's comments
I don't know if I can or should "review" this article, since I contributed so much to it. Is there a rule on this?
 * No rule that I'm aware of! bd2412  T 20:02, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I will provide a few comments. I agree with Morphh's comment about the third sentence of the article (the reference to law clerks, etc.). I agree with the article's statement about the law clerks, but the statement is opinion and is really appears unencyclopedic. I would say it could even be deleted, but sourced at a minimum if it's kept.

On the note about the Tax Court being outside of our normal (i.e., Article III) judicial system, I agree that this is something that some tax protesters have argued. From a legal standpoint, however, the validity and jurisdiction of the Tax Court, as an Article I court is well-settled. I believe the Court of Federal Claims is also an Article I court. Even bankruptcy judges, who are a "unit" of the Article III district courts, are themselves considered Article I judges if I recall correctly. Judges of the Tax Court, the Court of Federal Claims, and the Bankruptcy Courts do not have life tenure; they serve a specific term of years. I would suggest keeping discussion of tax protester arguments on the Tax Court out of this article if possible, as such arguments tend to give misleading undue weight to theories that the courts have ruled have no legal merit. Something on that could be added to Tax protester constitutional arguments, if desired.

I pretty much agree with editor Morphh's other comments. Yours, Famspear 15:38, 26 June 2007 (UTC)