Wikipedia:Peer review/Danny Williams (politician)/archive1

Danny Williams (politician)

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I wanted to see where the page is going wrong and why it's only a B.

Thanks, Newfoundlander&Labradorian (talk) 03:53, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a good start. Parts are quite well-written, but others are less so. The coverage is broad; the image licenses look fine, but two of the images (the charts) need explanatory keys. Here are suggestions for further improvement:

Lead

• "a by-election for the riding" - Link riding to Electoral district (Canada)?

• "as ordering all Canadian flags to be removed from provincial government buildings over offshore oil revenues" - Puzzling if taken literally. Maybe deleting "over offshore oil revenues" would help. Otherwise it seems to suggest that some government buildings were suspended in the air offshore.

• The "Canadian flags" sentence is also awkward because it starts with "event such as" and ends with the redundant "among other events".

Early life and education

• Could the names of his parents and siblings, if any, be added? Could anything else about his early interests (music, sports, hobbies) be added?

Leader of the Opposition

• "Support for the Tories saw a big bounce... " - Are the Progressive Conservatives the same as the Tories? If so, should the article make this more clear for non-Canadian readers?

• "Four by-elections were held during the two years he was the Official Opposition Leader with each seat being won by a Progressive Conservative candidate, as well in September 2001, Liberal MHA, Ross Wiseman crossed the floor of the house to join the Progressive Conservative caucus." - Doesn't make sense as written.

2003 election

• The maps here and in the "2007 election" section will make no sense to most readers unless the color-coding is explained. A further difficulty is that the colors do not seem to match the colors in the tables. Even if you create keys for the two maps, the colors in the maps will not match the colors in the tables. I would consider reworking one set of colors to match the other set and then providing a key that explains them all. Examples of keys can be found in many of the featured lists at WP:FL.

• "Since 2001 when Williams took over the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives the party's popularity rose, polls leading up to and during the election showed that his party had a substantial lead over the Liberals and New Democrats." - This is an example of what is called a "comma-spliced sentence". I fixed one of these earlier in the article, and I see other problems with grammar and syntax. I'll stop at this point with a line-by-line commentary about things like that, except to say that enlisting the aid of a copyeditor would be a good idea. You can probably find one via WP:GOCE/REQ.

• The last two sections may include unnecessary detail. For example, the "Controversies" section includes the equalization controversy, but it was already covered in the "First term" section. Also, couldn't the many poll numbers in the "Public opinion" section be summarized more succintly?

References

• The publisher for citations 1–5 and others with cbc.ca (the web site) as publisher should be changed to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

• Citation 42 needs a date of publication. Citation 43 is incomplete, as is citation 48 and many others in various ways. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and date of most recent access if all of those are know or can be found.

• The date formatting in the citations should be consistent throughout. For example, citations 11 and 12 use formats that are not identical. Pick one and stick with it throughout the reference section.

Other

• The link-checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds one dead link in the citations.

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) 20:05, 4 January 2011 (UTC)