Wikipedia:Peer review/Katharine Hepburn/archive2

Katharine Hepburn

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.

I'd like to nominate the article for GA but I'm not an experienced wikipedian so need some guidance on where it may be falling short of the criteria. Thanks --Lobo512 (talk) 18:53, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a really good article about one of my favorite actors. I don't imagine it would have much trouble at GAN. If you decide to take it to FAC at some point, you might consider using the "Further reading" material as sources rather than simply listing them at the bottom. Listing them almost always raises the question, "If they are important, why haven't you cited them"? That may lead to a second question, "Is the article truly comprehensive if major sources have been ignored?" However, those questions will probably not arise at GAN, where "broad in coverage" is a requirement somewhat easier to meet than "comprehensive". Here are a few suggestions:

Lead

• "After being viewed in the early years of her career as arrogant and unrelatable... " - Maybe "distant" or "aloof" rather than "unrelatable", which may not be a real word.

• "After being viewed in the early years of her career as arrogant and unrelatable, the public came to admire her fearlessness and she became a popular figure." - The opening clause seems to modify "public". Maybe "After being viewed in the early years of her career as arrogant and unrelatable, she became a popular figure admired for her fearlessness"? Or something like that.

• I'd recommend spelling out as well as abbreviating RKO and BAFTA on first use; e.g. Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures.

Early life and background

• "and Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn (1879–1962), a successful urologist and surgeon from Virginia" - The Manual of Style suggests using descriptors rather than academic titles. In this case, you already have the modifiers, "urologist" and "surgeon", and "Dr." is redundant. I would delete it, and I'd delete it from the infobox as well.

• "she often credited them with giving her the belief and conditions with which she was able to make herself a success" - "Conditions" doesn't seem to fit well with "with which she was able to make". Maybe "she often credited them for creating conditions that helped her succeed"?

• "Her parents were socially criticized for their progressive views... " - Tighten by deleting "socially"?

• "She was a fan of movies from a young age, and would go to see one every Saturday night." - Straight past tense might be better here and in the next sentence; i.e., "went to see".

Instant success in Hollywood

• "She is a distinct, definite, positive personality – the first since Garbo." - Nothing inside a direct quotation should be linked since the link does not appear in the original. Ditto for the link in the Dorothy Parker quote not far below this one and for any other links inside quotations.

• "ranked it amongst the worst films she ever made" - "Among" is preferred to the archaic "amongst".

• "and Hepburn was slated by the critics" - Is "slated" the right word? I've never seen it used this way.

Career struggles

• "Back on top, Berman allowed Hepburn to pick her next feature." - This suggests that Berman was back on top, but I think you mean Hepburn. Not sure.

• "who's hair was cut like a boy" - Whose, not who's. Boy's rather than boy?

Revival

• "These factors combined to 'recreate Katharine Hepburn' in the eyes of her audience. - Use double quotation marks rather than single except when single quotes are needed for nested quotes inside of other quotes. Ditto for other instances of single quotes later in the article. I fixed a few above this point.

Performances

• "As Schickel explains, right, these self-assured characters tended to be humbled in some form and revealed to have a hidden softness or vulnerability." - This sentence, with "right" in the middle, threw me for a loop at first. It's generally not a good idea to direct the reader to some other part of an article. I'd recast somehow to avoid this.

On film

• This subsection lacks inline citations to reliable sources.

Other

• Captions consisting solely of a sentence fragment don't take terminal periods.

• If you want to add the hyphens to the ISBNs, there's a handy converter here. I'm not sure it's necessary to add the hyphens since you've formatted the ISBNs consistently. Just a thought.

• Book citations should include the place of publication as well as the publisher. If you don't have all the bibliographic information in your notes, you can usually find it via WorldCat.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:29, 8 October 2011 (UTC)