Wikipedia:Peer review/List of most wealthy historical figures/archive1

List of most wealthy historical figures

• 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 August 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it needs your support and improvement in the following areas:

• • Inadequate lead.
  • Poorly formatted table.
  • Very few sources, which include several wikipedia pages, which is a huge no-no.
  • If the main source is this list, then the rest of the table is original research because that list only includes Americans.
  • Standardization: Why are some 'company' and some 'main source', and sometimes 'company' is used when no company is actually there? (A monarchy, for example)
  • Poorly formatted; not really tabular at all. Many of these can be made into columns. In the process, you would change the image format from thumbnails to portraits.
  • The Fuggers. Source for this is the talk page. Absolutely unacceptable. Likewise, two other refs are links to Wikipedia; again, unacceptable.
  • Finally, the complaint on the talk page, while poorly made, is valid - "wealthiest" is the proper form, not "most wealthy".

Quote from Raul654 (talk):

“ I noticed this because it was first nominated on the FAC. I was pretty surprised that Croesus (who could very well be the richest man who ever lived and whose name is literally synonymous with wealth) wasn't on the list. Admittedly, the list does say that "their wealth is hard to estimate and the ancient historical figures [sic] are scarce in numbers on the lists." - however, this seems to be a cop-out. Essentially, it says that because you can't establish an exact valuation or CPI for those times, you can ignore them. I think that's poor methodology. ”

Thanks, Bugnot (talk) 15:00, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Very briefly, here are some suggestions for improvement. If you want more comments, please ask here. Ruhrfisch comments

• I am tempted to just say WP:SOFIXIT, as you and Raul have clearly identified many of the problems with this list. Peer review is more a place to point out problems than to find people to fix them (that is the nominator's job, though they can recruit others to help of course).
• I also note that Wealthy historical figures 2008 is better in all respects - merge this.
• Article has a major cleanup tag and is up for deletion - archiving the peer review per PR rules.

Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:59, 19 August 2008 (UTC)