Wikipedia:Peer review/Montana/archive1

Montana

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because there seems to be great divisions about what should and should not be on this page moving forward. The page is clearly lacking, but some basic comments on each section should help out a great deal to point out what should be the obvious.

Thanks, Dsetay (talk) 20:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Comments by Sp33dyphil

• The lead should be expanded.
• There are various improperly-formatted {[Cn}} templates and lots of unreferenced paragraphs.
• MOS calls for the inclusion of alt text.
• There are various bare URLs and at least one dead link.
• "Law and government" and "Politics" should somehow be merged.
• "Culture" should come under "Demographics".
• There are lots of issues here. I suggest having a look at other GA/FA geographic articles before improving Montana in your user space. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 03:34, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this important article. Here are a few suggestions for improvement, some of which overlap with what Sp33dyphil says above.

• Most importantly, the article needs inline citations to reliable sources in order to meet WP:V. Entire sections of the existing article make claims that are not supported by any source(s). The "History" section is an example, but there are others. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every unusual claim, every set of statistics (including dates), every direct quotation, and every paragraph. If one source supports an entire paragraph, the citation should be placed at the end of the paragraph.

• When the article is fully sourced and the final form is pretty well settled, the lead should be rewritten to be an inviting summary of the whole article. Nothing should appear in the lead that is not discussed in the main text sections, and all of the main text sections should be mentioned in the lead in some way, if possible. For a long article like this, a lead of four paragraphs would be normal. WP:LEAD has details.

• To avoid a choppy feel and look, it's best to avoid extremely short sections or subsections like "American Indian reservations". The two main possibilities for fixing the problem are to expand or merge. The reservation material would probably fit nicely into the "History" section, for example.

• Try to place images entirely within the sections they illustrate. Avoid displacing edit buttons or heads with images or allowing them to overlap section boundaries. Avoid creating text sandwiches like the one in the "Economy" section.

• Lists are sometimes useful, but the Manual of Style recommends using straight prose paragraphs rather than lists where feasible. The short lists of sports teams could easily be rendered in prose, for example.

• Many of the citations are incomplete or malformed. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, URL, date of publication, and date of most recent access, if all of those are known or can be found. Since many of the citations use the "cite" family of citation templates, you should stick with that format for the rest.

• The link-checker tool at the top of this review page finds seven dead or suspicious URLs in the citations.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

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) 03:44, 5 February 2012 (UTC)