Wikipedia:Peer review/War in Darfur/archive1

War in Darfur edit

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I have requested this article to be peer reviewed because I believe this article can be improved to an almost featured status. The article's few FAC responses cited instability for opposing it's candidacy, something that could be contested if this article is improved. I am looking for general feedback, but mostly feedback on where this article need more/less detail, and how the sections could be restructured so this can become a more balanced article.

Cheers. -- Reaper X 19:37, 16 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Needs serious ref work Comments from Ealdgyth (talk · contribs)

  • You said you wanted to know what to work on before taking to FAC, and my first suggestion would be to get your references into order. A number of your website references lack publisher and/or last access dates, which are the bare minimum needed for WP:V. Books need publisher, author, and page number on top of title. When you've got those mostly straightened out, drop me a note on my talk page and I'll be glad to come back and look at the actual sources themselves, and see how they look in terms of reliability, like I would at FAC. 13:27, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Very briefly, here are some suggestions for improvement (I agree with Ealdgyth's comments on the references - more are needed in many places in the article too, such as the first paragraph of the Timeline section). If you want more comments, please ask here.

  • The lead needs work - see WP:LEAD. It should only be four paragraphs (not five) and the idea of the lead is that it is a summary of the whole article, so things like (see List of declarations of genocide in Darfur) should not be in there either.
  • Article needs a serious copyedit - two examples The Sudanese government has suppressed information by jailing and killing witnesses since 2004 and tampered with evidence such as mass graves to eliminate their forensic values[.][10][11][12] ("value" not "values" and missing period) or the awkwardness of In the lack of foreign political will to address the political and economic structures that underlie the conflict, the international community has defined the Darfur conflict in humanitarian assistance terms and debated the "genocide" label.[51]
  • There are numerous places where things are just done incorrectly. For example, the "See also" section is for articles within Wikipedia, not external links to things on the web (that is what an "External links" section is for). Or the "International response" section starts with Main article: International response to the Darfur conflict, so it makes nol sense to have this same header in the "Criticism of international response" subsection too. Or it is fine to have a list of abbreviations at the top of the article, but the article should still gived the full name and abbreviation after in parentheses on first use (as is done nicely in some cases, such as On October 16, 2006, Minority Rights Group (MRG) )
  • Article could be better organized - for example the Background section does not start with history or the location of Darfur, but with the UN Secretary General. When history is mentioned in the third paragraph, there are few dates given to provide context for the reader - see WP:PCR

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). Yours, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 20:34, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]