Wikipedia:Peer review/Over-the-Rhine/archive1

Over-the-Rhine

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I think it's a well written article and should be recognized.

Thanks, J.H (talk) 00:44, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting article about an interesting place, and a lot of work has gone into it. However, its Manual of Style problems alone would keep it from making GA at the moment, and it would need much more work to have any chance at FA. That is not meant to be discouraging; it would be great to see this worked up to FA. What follows is not a complete line-by-line review, but it's not a fly-by either.

Lead

• "Built in the nineteenth century during a period of extensive German immigration... ". - For consistency, this should be 19th, as you have it in the first paragraph. Ditto for 20th century later in the sentence and similar instances elsewhere in the article. Be sure to add a no-break code between 19th and century (unless you are using it as a hyphenated adjective) to keep them from separating on line-break. WP:NBSP explains the code and when to use it.

Etymology

• "In German, the district was called "über'm Rhein." - This certainly might be correct, but it looks a little strange to me. I would have thought "über dem Rhein", but this is based on my quite feeble grasp of German. Is 'm a contraction? What is your source? It might be good to add a citation to the source.

German neighborhood

• Citation 26 links to the home page of the Findlay Market web site, but it should link directly to the market history page at [1].

• When I look closely at the market history page, I notice that most of one sentence in the article very closely mirrors one sentence in the source: "...attracted a concentration of bootleggers, entrepreneurs, saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, brothels, and other institutions not tolerated in the city of Cincinnati." It's best to avoid direct copy-and-paste, even of single sentences or strings of attractive nouns. I realize that multiple editors contribute to most articles, so this comment points the finger at no one in particular. Still, it's best to track down anything that looks cutty-pasty and re-write it as a not-too-close paraphrase.

• "In 1850 approximately 62.57893 percent..." - I would round this to "about 63 " percent.

• Much of the second paragraph of this subsection too closely resembles the third paragraph of citation 28. It's not a direct copy-paste, but the sentence structure, the sentence sequence, and much of the word choice is strikingly similar from one to the other. One of the ways I avoid plagiarism or paraphrasing too closely is to find multiple sources, if possible, for as much of an article as possible. I read the source material(s) and then try to write what I've learned in my own words. I check my claims against the sources and then, usually rewriting as I go, add the inline citations. I often do a lot of this sort of thing in my sandbox; this allows me to tinker with large blocks of prose before adding them to the main-space version of an article. Plagiarism and too-close paraphrasing are often unintentional, I believe, and deciding how to paraphrase can be tricky. An article, WP:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches, has helpful details.

• "By contrast, in 2000 Cincinnati's population density was 3,879.8 people per square mile." - I would round this one to "about 3,900 people per square mile" or maybe "about 4,000 people per square mile" to make it more meaningful and easier to compare to the 32,000 given earlier in the sentence.

Economic decline

• "who distrusted whether the ethnic Germans were loyal to the United States" - Maybe "doubted whether" rather than "distrusted whether"?

• "With the heart of its economic engine gone Over-the-Rhine began a slip into decades of economic decline, which prevented new development and ironically helped preserve much of the neighborhood's historic architecture." - Needs a source. Also, "ironically" is an editorial comment and should probably be deleted. Maybe " ...new development but helped preserve... "?

• "In 1920 the city drained the canal and began construction of the Cincinnati Subway... " - This and the rest of the paragraph beyond this sentence need a source.

African-American neighborhood

• The second paragraph needs inline citation(s) to a source or sources.

2001 race riots and aftermath

• The Manual of Style suggests using "percent" instead of % in simple case. I changed a few of these in the early parts of the article, but I'll leave the rest to you.

• Should "Section 8 voucher holders" be briefly explained?

Architecture

• "but there are other odd balls as well" - Replace slang, "odd balls"?

• "at Twelfth and Walnut streets is ironically one" - Delete "ironically"?

• Is such a large gallery of images needed to make the subject clear to the reader?

• Captions consisting solely of a sentence fragment don't take a terminal period. I fixed quite a few of these in the early sections. I leave the rest to you.

Deterioration, preservation, and demolition

• Would just one image, the fire-damaged house, convey the main idea just as well as a gallery of six images?

Landmarks

• WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists suggests converting lists to ordinary prose paragraphs whenever feasible. I think that could be done here by grouping the music halls in one paragraph, the art venues in another, and so on. Or possibly, the parts of this list that simply repeat what has already been said in earlier sections could be deleted and the other parts merged with earlier sections.

• The direct external link to the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati should be removed. You might replace it with an inline citation or add it to "External links".

References

• In some citations you abbreviate "page" as "pg." and in others as "p.". You need to pick one and stick with it throughout. A reliable standard is "p." for single pages and "pp." for multiple pages.

• The date formatting in the citations should be consistent throughout; i.e., don't use 2009-06-18 in one place and 27 May 2007 in another and November 7, 2008 in another. Since this is a U.S.-centric article, you can rule out the form "27 May 2007". Either of the other two is OK in the reference section, but you need to choose one and stick with it. On the other hand, in the main text only the format exemplified by November 7, 2008 is considered correct in a U.S.-centric article.

• Some of the citations may not link to reliable sources as defined by WP:RS. Number 196 links to a personal blog, for example.

• Some of the citations are incomplete. Number 133, for example, lacks a publication date and and a date of most recent access.

• Wikipedia house style takes precedence over other styles sometimes. In citation 48, for example, the all-caps words should be changed to title case even if the source uses all caps; e.g., Harrington, John Walker (July 14, 1918). "German Becoming Dead Tongue Here".

Other

• The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find six dead links in the citations and two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.

• I would suggest turning all of the lists near the bottom of the article into straight prose, eliminating anything that simply repeats what has been said in earlier sections, merging the church section with the landmark section, and deleting the "In media" section on grounds that it is a trivia section and merging anything truly important in it with other sections.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 02:39, 13 December 2010 (UTC)