Wikipedia:Peer review/Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy/archive1

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Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy[edit]

Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy is an article about a current controversy of the George W. Bush administration, that includes leading figures at the White House, the Department of Justice, and the two Congressional Committees on the Judiciary.

This is an unusually detailed request, as I attempt to give a useful overview.
The editors active on the article have collectively stumbled onto a big project, that is in need of (and ready for) some significant changes, and we could use some independant wisdom and advice on smart editorial choices, and have pointed out to us where some attention could be fruitfully applied. Recognize that we might not get consensus on all suggestions, since a lot of people may participate in the article in any one week. I'm unsure if this article fits into a particular working / editorial project, since it crosses a lot of project boundries, and it seems that each of Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Presidents Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Congress and Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Government Agencies are narrower than the scope of this article. I'll post a note on each of their talk pages, in case some people active there desire to comment here. The goal is advice; we're not especially concerned about establishing a rating for the article, since we know this article is going to be changing. Here are some edit statistics for the article, in case anyone cares: WP Page History Stats: Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy

Overview: The article has been moderately stable for the past month, but it needs some significant format and length revisions. It has grown greatly since its first edits late February 2007. The active editors need to split up things and make some sub-articles. (And we're all busy in life, so we should admit that it will take some time to properly respond to and incorporate suggestions.) Talk:Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy will give a hint on what conversations have been going recently. There's a giant talk archive. Speculated Accomplished split-outs are:

(a) the creation of separate article to move the brief biographies of eight (and more) dismissed attorneys to: Dismissed U.S. attorneys summary
(b) extending a chronology or time-line and making that a separate article: Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy timeline The article suffers a bit from being a mixed set of chronology and narrative.

Suggested improved names for those split-offs, and any other split-offs invited.

We, at the moment don't have active disputes or vandalism occuring, which is rather remarkable, but this may change as the issue itself changes. Since this is a currently unfolding event, we can expect more information to show up on the article at unexpected times. Since the topic is controversial, and notable, it is amazingly well sourced, as neary every editor has had to "prove" their contribution with sourcing...mostly to reliable sources.

Known issues, comments welcome on these and other topics:
Size: 128 K bytes. Huge. We know. (a few days after posting the peer review request, one section was moved into a daughter article: Dismissed U.S. attorneys summary. Discussion about moving others continues.)
Stability: It's an ongoing current event, and controversial, but fairly stable, considering that.
Prose: With a lot of fingers in this pie, no single editor has really gone through and copy edited and re-written the entire article from top to bottom. Yet also, a lot of the article is carfeully written so as to rely properly on the cited sources. Not a small undertaking to re-factor the article, especially as there's significant new information every week.
Footnotes

  • Although some paragraphs or sentences give multiple footnotes, sometimes it actually does take several sources to have a supported claim, given the secretivness and evasiveness of the administration on the topic.
  • Some footnotes are to the same source, but appear more than once because they have not received the name="some name" tag

Formatting of the article

  • Since it's big article with many issues, it happens we've chosen a very non-standard introduction above the table of contents to highlight just a few of the expanding number of issues. It's probably time to push this below the table of contents, since it is way over three or four paragraphs desirable for an introduction. (Proposed change subsequently implemented.)
  • What's the standard on footnoting in the lead/introduction? We've found it desirable to footnote copiously there too, since we can't rely on the body of the article to stay the same in a month or two, and because the topic is controversial.
  • Comments on the Neutrality or lack of one is invited.
  • Suggestions on what sections to split off. See narrative further above.

Editorializing: We're wondering what if anything should be done, that there seem to be obvious truths about the controversy that can't be explicitly stated, according to policy, namely the Bush administration's motivations, since there are rather few citable facts on that front. Only citable editorials, and cited "some say" and "opponents say" statements.
Links: A template for links to videos of Attorney General Gonzales's testimony on April 19, 2007 was created. It links to C-SPAN's recordings of the hearing. Also it was discovered an useful and apparently reliable publisher using YouTube, that divided up the entire hearing into "Senator-question-period-sized segments. What is the view regarding such a creation and reliance upon YouTube.com links? We hope readers think this is an exceptional case and good use of YouTube. The template is: Template:Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy_Gonzales_April_19_2007.
Acilliary category and navigation template comments invited:

Thank you in advance for thoughtful comments and effort on this review. -- Yellowdesk 14:34, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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