Wikipedia:Peer review/University of Arkansas/archive1

University of Arkansas
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because there are a few dedicated members maintaining the page (for which I am very grateful), but it has failed to achieve "featured article" status in the past and currently has a B rating on most project's quality scale. I would like to know what changes, updates, or additional information need to be incorporated into the page to make it the highest quality possible.

Thanks, mmcnell

Finetooth comments: This is a good start but is a long way yet from reaching Good Article status. The main problems that leap out at me are lack of sourcing in many sections, incomplete or malformed citations, and a lead that is not a true summary of the whole article. Here are some suggestions for improvement.


 * It's often useful to look at featured articles to see how other editors have handled similar topics. You'll find a few FAs about universities at WP:FA.


 * Much of the article is still without references to reliable sources and is thus in violation of WP:V. For promotion to GA or higher, it would need to meet WP:V throughout. A good rule of thumb for making the claims in the article verifiable is to provide at least one source for each paragraph and to provide a source for each direct quote, every set of statistics, and every claim that is apt to be questioned. The existing article lacks sources for whole sections such as Campuses and academic divisions, Campus, Football, Men's basketball, Calling the Hogs, Clubs and organizations on campus, and so on.


 * The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of the main text sections in the lead and not to include anything important in the lead that is not mentioned in the main text. The existing lead discusses tuition, for example, which does not seem to be mentioned in the main text. The lead does not mention sports, traditions, and some other sections. If you can imagine a reader who can read nothing but the lead, you will see how to write it. WP:LEAD has details.


 * The Manual of Style suggests rendering lists as straight prose when possible. The existing article has too many lists. The whole Greek life section, for example, consists solely of a list of organizations that most readers would expect to find on any major U.S. college campus. I would consider replacing the list with a short prose summary of Greek life at Arkansas. The "Notable people" section does this well; probably that section began as a list of names. Likewise, I would suggest not simply listing the degree-granting academic divisions on the Fayetteville campus; render this as prose somehow, maybe by reducing the list to a single sentence saying something like "The Fayetteville campus has 14 degree-granting academic divisions such as the Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing." WP:MOS has details.


 * I would not include the entire alma mater and fight song in the article. This is too much detail for most readers.


 * Although some articles benefit from image galleries, most are better off with a link, placed in the "External links" section, to a gallery on the Commons. If such a gallery exists, you can link to it with the Commons template. Readers who want to see more photos of the school can click on the link.


 * Many, if not most, of the citations in the Notes section are incomplete or malformed. For Internet sources, the citation should include author, title, publisher, date, url, and accessdate, if all of these are known or can be found. Also, it's doubtful that all of the sources cited meet the guidelines of WP:RS. What makes adam-carr.net reliable, for example? You might find the "cite family" of templates helpful in formatting the citations. WP:CIT has details.


 * The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page show that seven of the urls in the citations are dead and that three links go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.

This is not a complete review, but it should give you plenty to think about. Good luck with this project. Finetooth (talk) 23:36, 25 May 2010 (UTC)