Wikipedia:Peer review/Horrible Histories/archive1

Horrible Histories

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… the Horrible Histories article, and even the entire Horrible Histories category are in dire need of assistance. In a desperate bid to stop the article from being an article consisting on huge lists of books, I created a few sections and added as many sources I could find for each one. I think it is time for a huge clean-up and I think this is the best place to start, to work out exactly what needs to be changed/fixed up. FYI, there are additional sources in the talk page and in the "Books With Information" section at the bottom.

Thanks, Coin945 (talk) 15:37, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Brief comments from Nikkimaria

• Are those tags at the top of the page still valid? If so, addressing them would be a good starting point
• Per WP:LEAD, the lead should summarize the article and should be a maximum of 4 paragraphs
• Don't include external links in article text
• Some of the long bulleted lists could be converted to prose
• Organization needs some work - very short subsections should be avoided where possible, the long ToC makes navigation difficult, etc
• Prose could use some work. Don't use contractions outside quotes, don't use "you" or "your", make sure your tone is neutral and encyclopedic
  • Please can you provide some examples of where the tone has become bias and unencyclopedic so I get some idea of what sorts of sentences need to be changed?--Coin945 (talk) 14:47, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
• See here for a list of problematic links
  • What do I do with the dead links? The information was on those sites once upon a time..--Coin945 (talk) 00:29, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
    • See WP:LINKROT for some options. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:12, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
• Some additional citations are needed.
• For example, where did all the quotes in the second paragraph of Tours come from?

 All the quotes in Tours were from the same source, however I only included it once. I have now included the reference under each sentence from the site

• Make sure all your citations include the needed information. Don't use bare URLs as references. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:48, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
  • In the process of doing that right now.--Coin945 (talk) 00:29, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying what areas should be worked on first. I'll attend to those issues straight away.--Coin945 (talk) 00:24, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Beginning comments from Truthkeeper88

• Agree with everything Nikkimaria has mentioned above, so that's a good starting place
• I see some naked urls (unformatted refs) that should be formatted
• The organization is problematic but this seems to be a huge series. I'm wondering if it's necessary to list all the titles? My thoughts would be to cut down this page by keeping the background section, and all the other prose sections, and consider splitting out the long lists into a separate page such as List of Horrible Histories that can be linked to from this page.

That seems like a good idea. Recently a page was created called List of Horrible Histories books but it was soon deleted as it pretty much copied a chunk out of this article without adding anything new. I think eventually this page will be about the Horrible Histoires franchise and a new page will be about the books... your suggestion makes a lot of sense. I will take that into account.--Coin945 (talk) 12:59, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I think the page as it is now is too long; if a new page is started, which would be a good idea, then everything going to the new page should be deleted from the current page. Truthkeeper88 (talk) 14:09, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm thinking you should take this slowly, start working on the bits Nikkimaria has mentioned, think about how to re-organize, and I'll work my way slowly through the article with more suggestions to come. Truthkeeper88 (talk) 12:10, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks you very much for your kind words of wisdom. Being the only real editor of the page, and being in year 12 is going to make this one a challenge, but this is a series of my childhood and one which I would really love to see grow and flourish. Yeah, I think I'll definitely take it slowly. First step: proper citations.--Coin945 (talk) 17:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Is there anywhere I could turn to to get some help on this article? It just seems soo daunting.--Coin945 (talk) 14:30, 19 July 2011 (UTC)