Wikipedia:Peer review/Yellowstone fires of 1988/archive1

Yellowstone fires of 1988
What does the article need to ensure it summarizes the event? It is complete as I can make it overall, without getting too wordy or going into peripheral areas that might lose focus of the main subject.--MONGO 21:55, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
 * It's a fine article, already Good Article quality in my opinion. The writing style is on a high school level: overall clear and understandable, but unnecessarily wordy in places.  (I made a few edits to reduce wordiness and to hyphenate adjectives such as "long-term" and to correct a split infinitive.)  In order to improve the focus of the article, I would consider splitting off the "history of fire fighting in the United States" section into a separate article. Shalom Hello 21:06, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
 * No to splitting. It is necessary to have the information there in order to fully understand the history of fire management policies and how they interplayed in Yellowstone. That might need further clarification in itself.--MONGO 21:11, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I've cleaned up some of the prose, as have others if you care to rexamine and let me know how it stands now.--MONGO 16:41, 12 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi, MONGO. I've done a "Yellowstone fires of 1988" version of the lead now (as an alternative to "Yellowstone Fire of 1988"), for you to check out and see what you think. Copyediting the lead, I'm getting a little worried about the overall structure, because some of the lead paragraphs (which I presume answer to sections, more or less, in the article proper?) seem to be about several different things within the one paragraph. I've rescrambled them quite a bit, while also keeping an eye on what they correspond to in the article. But seeing as the article is so long and full, I'm having some trouble getting a good aerial view of it. What I'm trying to say is, a) please check that my lead edit hasn't messed up the logic of the article proper, and b) please take a look at that logic and see if you can dot the i's and cross the t's a bit more to keep the "storyline" clear for the reader. Specifically: a couple of section titles don't seem to cover their sections very well. The section "Yellowstone forests overdue for a large fire" doesn't say anything about overdueness, except by not-really-clear-enough implication--I couldn't have told, without the header, that overdueness was what it was meant to convey. To me, the dynamic of the section itself suggests rather the message "Fire suppression efforts made the fire spread," which is a little weird, and presumably not true. The section "Major fires" is also a surprise, turning out to be about the way the 1988 conflagration grew and established itself. I thought from the name that it was going to be about the history of big forest fires in Yellowstone, or in the western US, or in the US. I'll take another look later. In haste, Frutti di Mare 10:43, 13 August 2007 (UTC).
 * The lead is much better now...thank you. I also moved the article from Yellowstone Fire of 1988 to Yellowstone fires of 1988 to reflect your changes. Altered the headings as well, changing Yellowstone fires long overdue.... to Contributing factors of the fires (might need further tweaking). Also changed headings Major fires to Major fires in Yellowstone in 1988 and Manpower and equipment to Fighting the fires. I really appreciate your assistance with this article and I'll go through it some more and try and improve the prose and flow of the article.--MONGO 14:15, 13 August 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, Davnel03 17:22, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The lead of this article may be too long, or may contain too many paragraphs. Please follow guidelines at WP:LEAD; be aware that the lead should adequately summarize the article.[?]
 * The lead is for summarizing the rest of the article, and should not introduce new topics not discussed in the rest of the article, as per WP:LEAD. Please ensure that the lead adequately summarizes the article.[?]
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 * Per What is a featured article?, Images should have concise captions.[?]
 * There may be an applicable infobox for this article. For example, see Template:Infobox Biography, Template:Infobox School, or Template:Infobox City.[?] (Note that there might not be an applicable infobox; remember that these suggestions are not generated manually)
 * Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), when doing conversions, please use standard abbreviations: for example, miles -> mi, kilometers squared -> km2, and pounds -> lb.[?]
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 * This article may need to undergo summary style, where a series of appropriate subpages are used. For example, if the article is United States, than an appropriate subpage would be History of the United States, such that a summary of the subpage exists on the mother article, while the subpage goes into more detail.[?]
 * 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.”
 * The script has spotted the following contractions: didn't, wasn't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded.
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