Wikipedia:Peer review/List of colleges and universities in Alabama/archive1

List of colleges and universities in Alabama

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I plan on submitting it for FLC. I've patterned it after similar FLs List of colleges and universities in New Hampshire and List of colleges and universities in Vermont. I would appreciate any feedback and comments.

Thanks, —Spyder_Monkey (Talk) 23:10, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this list. Here are a few suggestions:

• Older FLs like the two you mention above, although excellent, sometimes did not include tags that make the tables accessible to non-sighted readers. A general explanation appears at WP:ACCESS#Tables. However, it may be easier to imitate the patterns in recent FLs than to try to figure out how the tag explanations apply in this particular case. Those recent FLs can be located via WP:TFL. The first one in the list at Today's Featured List (TFL) at the moment is Dickin Medal. If you look at Dickin Medal in edit mode, you will see how and where to add tags like ! scope="col" | and ! scope="row" |. You may need to add these row and column tags to meet the current accessibility requirements for FL.

• The lead has an awful lot of blue in it, and in some cases the links are run together so that they look like one link when they are actually multiple links. It's better to recast to avoid link bumping, and you might also eliminate links of least importance. I would consider unlinking "public" in the sequence "public University of North Alabama", for example. Most readers already understand the difference between public and private schools. In the sequence, "smallest institution is Selma University, a Baptist seminary in Selma," I'd probably delete "in Selma" since Selma is contained in the university name, and I might re-write to say "smallest institution is Selma University, a seminary run by the Baptist Church" or something else that would separate the remaining bumped links. I think I'd unlink "medical school" and "law school" on grounds that the links are unnecessary and therefore distracting.

• Even though links in the table lead to explanations of the meanings of "Type" categories, it would probably be helpful to foreign readers to include a brief definition of each type in the lead. Terms like "Associate's college" and "Master's university" may be less familiar than terms like "law school".

• The Manual of Style recommends "and" instead of "&". Several ampersands appear in the big table.

• Citation 7 returns a "Bad Request" error and will need to be fixed somehow.

• Most of the "Notes" end in terminal periods, but some don't. Note H is a complete sentence, so the existing pattern is not determined by "complete sentence" vs. "sentence fragment". This is a truly minor observation, but I think I'd go with "full sentence gets a period" and "fragments do not".

• I'd probably end each item in the "Out-of-state institutions" list with a period rather than a comma.

• The "Out-of-state institutions" list needs a source.

• Citation templates must all be from the same family. Citation 5 is from the "citation" family and is therefore out of sync with the first four citations. There may be other nonconforming refs. I didn't check them all closely. I spotted citation 5 because of the telltale punctuation and little "r" on "retrieved". Writing this, I see that citation 6 and 7 are like citation 5 but different from the majority of other refs in the article. You are free to choose either style (or other styles), but you need to choose just one style, not multiple styles.

• Citations 6 and 7 lack access dates. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, URL, date of publication, and accessdate if all of those are available. Access dates are always available. You should check all of the citations to make sure they are as complete as possible. At a quick glance, it looks like most are OK.

• 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) 20:58, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your comments. —Spyder_Monkey (Talk) 22:23, 5 August 2011 (UTC)