Wikipedia:Peer review/Constitution of Thailand/archive1

Constitution of Thailand

I've already put the article up for a Request for feedback and have done my best to implement the suggestions.

I'd like to request further comments on this article, as a further step to nominating it for Featured Article status. In particular, I'd like suggestions on:

1. Whether the article is too long. The article body (not including Intro and References) is currently less than 5,700 words long. This is just less than the 6,000 to 10,000 word length which Wikipedia:Article size notes as the limit at which readers may tire of reading a page. But the content of the article is somewhat meaty, and covers 16 constitutions and 70 years of turbulent Thai political history, so I'm concerned that the reader would just get lost.
2. Sufficiency of contextual information about Thai politics. You can't cover changes in the Thai constitutions without also explaining the context of Thai politics and Thai history. So I've tried to include what I consider essential details of how each constitution came to be and how and why each constiution influenced the nature of government. But I'm concerned about going overboard. Is the current balance OK for a reasonable reader who has no strong understanding of constitutional law, government, or Thai history?
3. Any other comments would also be appreciated.

-- Patiwat 10:28, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Your timing, given recent events, is incredible. The article appears to be pretty comprehensive. However, the section on the 1959 Constitution doesn't give any information about the content of that document. That section, as well as the ones describing the 1946 Constitution and the 1977 Charter, have no references, and the ones on the 1968 and 1974 Constitutions have very few. The sections on the 1997 Constitution and the 2006 Interim Charter are much longer than any the sections on any of the other constitutions; cutting them down would preserve a sense of balance. However, the section on the 2006 Interim Charter should include the timetable for the proposed new charter. The vocabulary needs more variety throughout: in particular, "stipulated" and "promulgated" appear too frequently, even two or three times in a single paragraph. The image Image:Evolution of Thai constitutions 1932-2006 not bold.png is fairly illustrative, but it needs to be updated to include the 2006 Interim Charter. The references to Thai history generally seem justified, but often the importance of a statement in one section does not become clear until the next (e.g., the king's death in 1946, the results of the 1969 elections), which is a bit jarring for the reviewer, but perhaps less so for the reader. NatusRoma | Talk 06:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

• The lead of this article may be too long, or may contain too many paragraphs. Please follow guidelines at WP:LEAD; be aware that the lead should adequately summarize the article.
• The lead is for summarizing the rest of the article, and should not introduce new topics not discussed in the rest of the article, as per WP:LEAD. Please ensure that the lead adequately summarizes the article.
• Per WP:CONTEXT and WP:MOSDATE, months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
• Per WP:WIAFA, Images should have concise captions.
• Per WP:MOSNUM, there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 18mm, use 18 mm, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 18 mm.
• Per WP:CONTEXT and WP:BTW, years with full dates should be linked; for example, link January 15, 2006, but do not link January 2006.
• Per WP:MOS#Headings, headings generally do not start with the word "The". For example, ==The Biography== would be changed to ==Biography==.
• Generally, trivia sections are looked down upon; please either remove the trivia section or incorporate any important facts into the rest of the article.
• Please reorder/rename the last few sections to follow guidelines at WP:GTL.
• Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) maybe too long- consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per WP:SS.
• This article may need to undergo summary style, where a series of appropriate subpages are used. For example, if the article is United States, than an appropriate subpage would be History of the United States, such that a summary of the subpage exists on the mother article, while the subpage goes into more detail.
• There are a few occurrences of weasel words in this article- please observe WP:AWT. Certain phrases should specify exactly who supports, considers, believes, etc., such a view. For example,
  • allege
  • might be weasel words, and should be provided with proper citations (if they already do, or are not weasel terms, please strike this comment).
• Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
  • While additive terms like “also”, “in addition”, “additionally”, “moreover”, and “furthermore” may sometimes be useful, overusing them when they aren't necessary can instead detract from the brilliancy of the article. This article has 30 additive terms, a bit too much.
  • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
• As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space inbetween. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]
• Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that the it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 2a.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Ruhrfisch 14:28, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

• P.S. The footnotes can be found here for now. Ruhrfisch 14:59, 13 October 2006 (UTC)