Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Peer review/Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

I happened to stumble upon this article and it appears to be well written. I haven't contributed anything with the exception of a requested inline citation but I think this article may soon be worthy of GA status and thought it could use some feedback. I will alert those who have contributed significantly to the article about this review. --Oneworld25 16:10, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Review by Awadewit

I'm happy to see that people have been working on the Paine article. Unfortunately, it is not yet of GA caliber. Here are my suggestions to help it achieve that (and perhaps more, someday):

• First off, this article cannot be considered for GA status yet because it contains so few citations. Also, those citations are almost all to web-based sources. There is no reason to do this for a person who has been written about as extensively as Thomas Paine. I wrote my Master's Thesis on Paine's Age of Reason several years ago and I can tell you that the books listed in the Bibliography of the page itself are good (I think I've read them all) - why aren't they being used as sources? Instead, we have sites like "ushistory.org."
• Listing his occupation as "pamphleteer" seems a little reductive, don't you think? You might think about including "revolutionary" or something along those lines.
• The lead jumps around a lot and its represenation of the Rights of Man is dubious at best.
• The "Early life" section begins in a confusing way - start by referring to Joseph and Frances as Paine's parents. Notice also that the first mention of "Thomas Paine" is actually "he" - how is the reader supposed to know that the "he" in the sentence refers to Thomas Paine? Grammatically, it refers back to Joseph.
• The article says that Paine failed at corset-making - I thought he just hated it and refused to work. This is why we need sources! By the way, the article states just one sentence later that he set up a corset shop, so clearly he didn't fail, even according to your own account.
• Link or explain "supernumerary officer".
• "The "Early life" section jumps around quite a bit - try to make it flow more. Also, Paine's interest in science seems to be just tacked on, but when I read about him, biographers make a big deal about that. More should probably be said about that.
• The "American Revolution" section should begin with why Paine published Common Sense; it is odd to suddenly read that it is popular. The last thing the reader knows Paine is nearly dead in America - why is this pamphlet now popular? The reader has no idea why he wrote it or why he got invovlved in American political issues so quickly.
• Paine's strength lay in his ability to present complex ideas in clear and concise form - this is debatable - this is why sources are so necessary; other sources I have read would claim that Paine wasn't presenting sophisticated ideas, he was distilling the "philosophical ideas" the article mentions later down into their most basic elements and presenting them with rhetorical vigor - he was a great propagandist, in other words.
• Again, the "French Revolution" section begins without any context - why is Paine writing the Rights of Man? You have to set the scene for the reader by beginning with Burke's Reflections and the ensuing "Revolution Controversy." See my attempts to do this in Mary Wollstonecraft (the section on the Vindication of the Rights of Men) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (the "Historical context" section).
• It was an abstract political tract published in support of the French Revolution - the Rights of Man is partly this, but much more - you might begin by reading the "Introduction" to Marilyn Butler's Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002).
• You have to explain why the Age of Reason was such a reviled book.
• The "Views" section is very disjointed - I would suggest a radical revision of this section or integration of this information into the biography section of the article.
• The last paragraph in the "Legacy" section seems like an advertisement.
• This article needs a careful copyedit. There are lots of awkward sentences, grammatically incorrect sentences, puncutation mistakes, spelling mistakes, etc. You might want to list it at the League of Copyeditors after you have finished revising it.
• There should be a list of works that Paine wrote. See Mary Wollstonecraft for an example. It is up to the editors whether or not they want to include the publication information for the first editions (see Talk:Thomas Paine).

There is a lot of work to be done on this page, but I feel that with some dedicated editors it could become GA in a few weeks and maybe even an FA in a couple of months. Awadewit 18:12, 10 April 2007 (UTC)