Wikipedia:Peer review/Kinston Indians/archive1

Kinston Indians

I hope to have this article brought up to FA status. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Kinston eagle 20:44, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Review by Midnightdreary

This is really a great article; you've definitely done a lot of work and it's to be commended. I'm going to focus on only a few sections but give you an overwhelming amount of specific details about those sections. Here we go...

• Lead: This section problem could use the most work. I'm sympathetic because I'm terrible at writing intros myself. Consider some of these suggestions... Try adding a third sentence to the very first paragraph. A short paragraph like that comes across as choppy, and it's important to make a solid first impression! Maybe the founding date? Remember that, as per WP:LEAD, the intro should introduce the important points in the article to follow. I interpret this to mean that anything in the intro will be expanded upon if they continue reading. So, information about the history of the name and the management should be somewhere in the sections below in more detail. By the way, the line "2007 marks the twenty-first season that the Kinston team has been known as the Indians" is a bit of a throw-away in my opinion, the info about the name compared with the Durham Bulls needs to be said elsewhere. Actually, there's a lot of "only such and such team did something longer" and it's a little annoying to read (no offense). You might consider leading with "one of the longest" and then mention who beats them for the record when you expand on it in the body of the article. Am I making sense? Really, when you're re-working the lead, think in your head that you are squishing the entire article down to about three paragraphs that can stand on their own if a reader chooses not to read any further. For example, if there is a lot of weight in the "History" section (which there is), there should be more weight given in the lead.

• History: "Baseball" is wikilinked here. It should be in your intro somewhere (maybe try minor league baseball in that first line?). Kinston doesn't need to be wikilinked here because it's already linked a few paragraphs above. Your sentences are occasionally a little long here, especially in the first paragraph, mostly due to wordiness. "Quickly found themselves in the cellar"? What does that mean? What "onfield problems" does the next sentence refer to? "Professional nine" is not encyclopedic. "Kinston enjoyed" may be breaking WP:NPOV. Here's one: "In 1984, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. To this date, he is the only former Kinston player to have been given that honor." Try combining to one sentence (the two short ones here are implying a show-offy emphasis, definitely close to a NPOV problem, in my humble opinion). Oh, and the photo caption on those tickets should have a space after the colon. Phew.

Under "Coastal Plain League", you could use another citation midway through the section (maybe split up the two at the end?).

Under "Carolina League" - how many years without a team? Here's an example of wordiness: instead of deciding to move the team, maybe say he just moved the team? It also comes across as too anecdotal rather than encyclopedic. A couple sentences later seems worse, "something never before seen on any of the town's previous nines - black ball players." First, I'd consider "African-Americans" (but I'm not an expert on PC terms) but also the dramatic flair of the sentence isn't quite the correct tone for an encyclopedia. I'm also curious about "verbal and psychological abuse." That's a deep accusation, abuse vs. ridicule or hardship, for example. Is that from your source? Later, "Unfortunately for Kinston..." is definitely breaching NPOV. Basically, be careful of word choice throughout ("explosive"? "youngsters"?) - if you use these essentially color terms, you're kinda stepping outside the encyclopedia world and into sports writing. I'm skipping around here. "The Eagles would fail to win any more championships during this second period of Carolina League play, but they were in the hunt during most seasons and managed to make the playoffs following six of the thirteen seasons" - Cut out the middle of that sentence about being in the hunt. Later, "powerful" team is a breach of NPOV. Tell me more about this "working relationship" with the Yankees, otherwise I fail to see how those sentences are relevant.

The paragraph that talks about the 1970s having a decline in attendance needs more citations split into it. Also some excess color terms throughout. Careful with talking about all their talent; it really looks like NPOV or WP:OR, which is why additional sourcing (and possibly, at this point, quotations) is needed. Too much background on Ray Kuhlman not relevant to this team (he has his own article). Again, instead of saying "decided to", just say what he did. Don't call him "Ray" either. And definitely add more citations to this paragraph too (especially after "remembered fondly").

(Taking a quick breather... and here we go again...)

The last four paragraphs of the history section are getting stuck with very long sentences again. I know you're trying to be thorough and cram lots of information into a single article and I appreciate that. But I think that's what's inviting you to go with these long sentences so that you can cover a lot of ground. Just give it a read-through (try it out loud) and see if there are any that are going too far. Similar problems here with color words ("yardstick") and potential NPOV problems. Actually, the sentence about the yardstick might as well be tossed out. It's one of those "show, don't tell things." Saying the team increased in value speaks for itself without the interpretation. "An incredible array of... talent" a line or two before is also definitely an NPOV problem. I'd also toss in a couple more in-line citations midway through the last couple of 'graphs. That fair use image doesn't seem to have a fair use argument and, I think, is either unnecessary to illustrate the topic or could possible be easily replaced by a free image. Oh, and stop using the word "enjoy"! =)

• Grainger Stadium: Nice, brief summary here. Remove the bold names, though. You need sources for the second half of it, too, especially for claims like, "the second oldest..." and who is referring to it as "Historic Grainger Stadium." Actually, I almost think you'd be better off taking out that copyrighted image of the championship and putting the image of the crowd at the stadium (from Grainger's main article) in this section.

• Current roster: This might be a better place for all the detail about the current management staff, maybe as a subsection. By the way, the page for WikiProject Baseball seems to suggest this higher up in the article. I don't necessarily agree, and they don't seem particularly rigid in that suggestion, so use your best judgment here.

• Bibliography/Footnotes: This was a little hard to follow (for me, but I didn't get the best night's sleep, so...). Consider what was done over at "The Raven" (currently at GA status) to make citations a little easier to read.

• I hope I was helpful. I tried to be explicitly thorough because this is already at GA status and I know you want to bring it up to FA. I think the biggest problem is the color terms and possible challenges of NPOV. More in-line citations will also protect verifiability if another editor makes additions that splice into the middle of a large single-source chunk. I hope I didn't come across as harsh! Best of luck in getting this to FA! --Midnightdreary 13:28, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

• • Thank you for all the work that went into this review. I appreciate it. I will try cleaning up all the areas you talk about throughout this week. Kinston eagle 13:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

• • Well, I've started to tighten up the prose in many places per your suggestions (nearly 2K bytes of material were removed), but I still have quite a bit more to do. That will have to wait til tomorrow though since I'm getting tired now. Much of the non-encyclopedic prose arose from my having written this for another medium and then trying to wikify it after moving it here. I do disagree with removing the line about "verbal and psychological abuse" during the integration year as death threats would certainly seem to qualify as "psychological abuse" in my mind, and the verbal abuse covers all manner of racial taunts without having to fill the article with the ugly details. I like the way the bibliography and footnotes were integrated together in The Raven, but it doesn't seem as though that approach would work well here with all the newspaper and program articles. I'm going to look around at some other sports articles that have been heavily sourced and hopefully find something that will work with these types of sources. Thanks again. The problems seem so obvious once you pointed them out to me. I really needed the fresh eyes to look at this. Kinston eagle 03:09, 5 September 2007 (UTC)