Wikipedia:Peer review/Valenzuela, Philippines/archive1

Valenzuela, Philippines
This peer review discussion has been closed. I know that I've been doing a lot for researching and improving the article for the past few years by adding stuff and even re-writing whole chunks of sections. I wanted to see if the article is now A, GA or FAC-qualified or I still need to emphasize few points.

I would like to mention that there is already a first peer review for this article right before it was moved from Valenzuela City > Valenzuela, Philippines in 2010. Books that are used in here either have no ISBN (don't know why) or some data are missing. I know that there are some major grammar and punctuation inconsistencies but I think I can work with that in the future.

Thanks, &mdash; JL 09  talkcontribs   11:25, 7 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Few of the references have dead links which I have tagged last December 2011. I'm still working on replacing citations and references.--&mdash; JL 09  talkcontribs   11:26, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Finetooth comments. A lot of work has gone into this interesting article, but a lot more will need to be done to improve it to, say, GA status. What follows is not a complete review, but rather a short list of things to think about.


 * Quite a few paragraphs lack inline citations to reliable sources. The first, third, and fifth paragraphs of "American era and Japanese occupation" are examples, but there are many others. It's a good idea to provide a source for every set of statistics, every unusual claim, and every direct quotation, and also every paragraph. If one source supports all of the claims in a whole paragraph, put the citation at the very end of the paragraph.


 * As a general rule, where quantities are given in metric and imperial units, the primary units should be spelled out and the secondary units abbreviated. In the first sentence, for example, the distance would be 14 km. I like to use the convert template, which automatically spells out and abbreviates in a way that conforms to the Manual of Style.


 * Virtually all of the quantities, including temperatures and areas, need to be rendered in both kinds of units. I see quite a few that still need conversions.


 * There's a good deal of overlinking in the article. My rule of thumb is to link special terms on first use in the lead and perhaps again on first use in the main text. For example, Spain, Bulacan, Metro Manila, Pío Valenzuela, and many others are linked multiple times. Common words like "physician" and "murder" should not be linked at all. Occasionally there are reasons to link something more than once or twice in an entire article, perhaps in the infobox and in a caption as well as in the lead and the main text, but those are exceptions to the general guideline.


 * The color-coding in the "Feasts and holidays" table may not make sense to color-blind readers. I would consider removing the colors and flagging the city-wide holidays with a text symbol or drawing notice to them in some other way.


 * In places, this long article seems to me to include unnecessary detail. Will many readers find a complete list of the city's ZIP codes useful, for example? Is the table of traffic counts really necessary?


 * The article has too many lists. Generally, the Manual of Style recommends using straight prose paragraphs rather than lists, where feasible. For example, "Landmarks and attractions", could be rendered in prose paragraphs without bullets or bolded subheads.


 * The link checker finds 20 or dead or problematic urls in the citations, here.


 * I would set the image size to "thumb" for most of the images rather than bumping them up. Exceptions to this general guideline would be the lead image in the infobox, which is usually set to 300px, and maps, which often need to be bigger than "thumb" for readability.


 * It's best not to displace heads, subheads, or edit buttons with images.


 * Images should be placed within the sections they illustrate and should not overlap section boundaries.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 21:42, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
 * When all other changes have been made, you might ask someone from WP:GOCE to copyedit the whole article. Small grammar errors occur here and there that look to me like second-language mistakes, though the prose is otherwise generally OK. An example from the "Ecology" section is "Thomas Hodge-Smith noted in 1939 that Valenzuela is rich of black tektites occurring in spheroidal and cylindrical shapes and are free of bubbles." The phrase "in black tektites" would be correct, and the sentence would be better if it ended with "that occur in spheroidal and cylindrical shapes and are free of pebbles". Here's an example from "Feasts and holidays": "Listed below are the most notable feasts in Valenzuela that gained media as well as international attractions." I think "attention" is the word you mean, rather than "attractions", and I would rewrite to avoid the redundancy in "most notable" plus "gained attention".
 * 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 view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)