Wikipedia:Peer review/Los Angeles Police Department/archive1

Los Angeles Police Department edit

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A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for February 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review in order to further refine and improve the article

Thanks, Dodgerblue777 (talk) 19:49, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: I'd suggest tackling the structural problems first. Here are a few quick suggestions.

The ideal lead is a summary or abstract of the whole article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of the main ideas of each of the text sections. WP:LEAD has details. It will be easier to re-write the lead, though, after the structural problems are repaired.
The Manual of Style (MoS) encourages straight prose rather than lists. The lists in "Detective Bureau", "Structure of the Special Operations Bureau", "Rampart Scandal and Consent Decree", and others should be rendered as prose.
Embedded links to outside sources are deprecated. Instead, use in-line citations. The table in the "Structure" subsection consists entirely of embedded external links. An alternative would be to write a sentence about each of the 19 bureaus with an inline citation after each. Another possibility, probably better, would be to write a brief summary paragraph and to use one in-line citation that included links to the 19 supporting documents.
The existing article has far too many sections and subsections. Suggestion: Combine related groups of them, for example the Operations-South Bureau group, under one general heading, and render them as straight prose with normal paragraph breaks rather than subheads. Since paragraphs of only one or two sentences are deprecated, this would mean combining some of the resulting short paragraphs into somewhat larger paragraphs.
Text bolding is generally used only for the article title in the first sentence of the lead. It should not be used for "Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners" in the "Organization" section or award names in "Bravery" and "Ribbons" or for "Los Angeles riots of 1992", etc. or in the citations.
Except for the infobox, the image sizes should generally be set to "thumb" rather than a specific pixel width.
I doubt that a fair-use rationale for all three images in the infobox will survive scrutiny. I'd suggest using only the one that you think is most necessary for a reader's understanding of the topic.

I hope these brief suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 03:07, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]