Wikipedia:Peer review/Madonna/archive2

Madonna (entertainer)

Previous peer review

• 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 July 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I believe this article has changed and improved a lot from the time when it was de-listed from FA status. I believe the article can gain back the bronze star again. However I though of taking the suggestions of my fellow reviewers and fellow editors to see if any further improvement can be done on the article.

Thanks, --Legolas ^(talk2me) 04:25, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments This certainly seems comprehensive, and it's generally well-written. I found and fixed a few typos, misspellings, and other tiny errors, but I doubt that I caught them all. I also doubt that there are many more because the article is polished. I note some Manual of Style issues that should be addressed. Mostly they are little things like missing hard spaces here and there that won't take a lot of time to fix. Writing alt text is a somewhat bigger challenge; I wrote my first one yesterday, and the process of imagining how to describe a formal portrait to a blind person was interesting, though not necessarily easy. Here are my thoughts and suggestions:

Lead

• "Born in Bay City, Michigan and raised" - When you have a city–state combo like this, the state should have a comma after it too; i.e., "Bay City, Michigan, and raised". You should add a comma to all similar cases throughout the article. The same is true of triple dates ending with the year; e.g. "August 16, 1958, to... ", which appears early in the next section.
• "Madonna signed an unprecedented $120 million dollar contract" - WP:NBSP says in part, "Wikipedia recommends the use of a non-breaking space (also known as a hard space) when necessary to prevent the end-of-line displacement of elements that would be awkward at the beginning of a new line... ". It specifically mentions combinations like "$120 million" as well as several other kinds of combinations. You should check the whole article for these and add nbsp codes where needed. Reviewers at FAC will be sure to look for them. In addition, it's not necessary to say "dollar"; the $ symbol is standard; i.e. "$120 million contract".

1958-1981: Early life and beginnings

• "who was a first-generation Italian American Chrysler/General Motors design engineer... " - It's good practice when you have a series of wikilinks that bump into one another like these three to recast the sentence to make them visually distinct from one another. Suggestion: "who was a first-generation Italian American who worked as a design engineer for Chrysler and General Motors. It would be good to search the whole article for these link bumps and separate them.
• "convinced her father to allow her to partake the classes" - "take" rather than "partake"?

1982–1985: Madonna, Like a Virgin and marriage to Sean Penn

• "visiting Los Angeles over December 82-January 83" - Date ranges take an en-dash rather than a hyphen.
• "critic Vincent Canby named the film as one of the 10 best films of 1985... " - Here you have used digits for 10, but at least some other numbers bigger than 10 in the article are written as words. Typically, numbers from one to nine are expressed as words, and bigger numbers are expressed as digits. You should aim for consistency.
• "Since the commercial and music video were nearly identical, Pepsi was unable to convince the public that their commercial had was not inappropriate." - Delete "had"? Or change to "was not appropriate"?
• "At the end of the year, Madonna deceided to leave the controversial... " - "decided"
• "The release of Truth or Dare, Sex book, Erotica, Body of Evidence and the appearance on Letterman - all of them made critics question Madonna as asexual renegade" - Rather than a hyphen, perhaps "... and the appearance on Letterman all made critics question... "?

Musical style and influences

• "her dancers wore t-shirts" - T-shirts

Music videos

• It might help to break this giant paragraph into two or three paragraphs.

References

• WP:MOSNUM#Format consistency says in part, "Dates in article references should all have the same format." For this reason, you should choose either yyyy-mm-dd or m-d-y and use it throughout the reference section.

Captions

• Captions that are only sentence fragments do not get terminal periods.

Alt text

• WP:ALT says in part, "Every visible image should have alt text... " for readers who cannot see the images. FAC reviewers are now requiring alt text. WP:ALT explains how to write alt text and where to put it.

General

• The link checker tool that lives here finds at least two dead urls in the citations.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 02:14, 5 August 2009 (UTC)