Wikipedia:Peer review/Lakeside Apartments District, Oakland, California/archive1

Lakeside Apartments District, Oakland, California

• 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 September 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because, at present the City of Oakland's Planning Commission and City Council is revising zoning and height regulations for new land development (i.e. skyscrapers) in the neighborhood. Currently, much public attention is focused on this neighborhood in the Hearing Rooms at City Hall down the street, around in the conference tables of local investment banks, and kitchen tables of local activists. Having spent many hours editing it, I'd hope this article reflects a modicum of accuracy and good encyclopedic writing.

In regards to specific questions, does the article lack detail about history and architecture? Does the article contain any major shortcomings in terms of meeting:

- manual of style guidelines, - words to avoid, - no original research - neutrality

Thanks, Critical Chris (talk) 19:58, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

• There is some good work and article development here. You may want to review WP:LAYOUT for the standard "See also", "External links", etc. section orders. Continue adding references. The "Neighborhood Retail" section doesn't have any footnotes (want to see where this information is coming from). The writing is largely good, except euphemisms and irrelevancies sometimes pops up. For instance,
  • "on the west side of Oakland's urban saltwater Lake Merritt near Downtown Oakland, California" - 'urban saltwater' an unnecessary diversion from the purpose of that sentence. Try "on the west side of Lake Merritt near Downtown Oakland, California"
  • "map prepared in 1850 for the founders of Oakland, Horace W. Carpentier, Edson Adams, and Andrew J. Moon." - another diversion from the purpose of the sentence.
  • "Other residents enjoy the bicycle infrastructure..." - enjoy is probably not the most encyclopedic word here
  • "...a group of speculators purchased..." - speculators?
  • "...which has differential hours of service for customers..." - the operating hours of a fast food joint is not necessary.
  • "...the owners assembled a seasoned, well-connected real estate development team..." - puffy adjectives here. The paragraph goes into a lot of unnecessary background detail about a SF developer.

and so forth. Anyways, I'm generally not a fan of listing proposed developments in city-related articles because (a) they don't exist and (b) so many of them never materialize. If you're interested in seeing the article traffic try this [1]. --maclean 04:55, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

• Comments
  • Images: You're using several images with the {{Non-free historic image}} however the important part of that is that the image has to be unique and illustrative of some significant event; the street car (Image:Key175 A.jpg), and sailboats (Image:Z0001300.jpg) don't really add much aside from decoration and I've removed them. If the image is published prior to 1923 then {{PD-US}} or even {{PD-old}} may apply. Many images use non-descriptive names such as the previous sailboat name, please use either {{Rename media}} on the original photo, or upload a more descriptive title to rename them. Either way all of the images which aren't using fair use justifications should be moved to commons. You should also either upload the USGS version or at least provide a link to where you found the USGS image to verify the source. Also the article mentions "E.M. Sessions' 1869 map" is there a copy for readers to see? Something like that would be a helpful visual.
  • See also/adjacent neighborhoods: You don't need to put the names of other Oakland neighborhoods, they are all in the navbox. See also sections generally go above the references, and any links in there should be integrated into the text where possible.

Done, no more list of neighborhoods. Still working on the other tasks.Critical Chris (talk) 03:20, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

• • References: A lot of the references are missing the access date parameter. Please fill that in with something like 2008-09-19 so that in the long term people could use the internet archive to link to pages if the original page goes dead.
  • Comprehensiveness/summary: Much of this article needs to be included in the main Oakland article, or broken out into its own sub-article (Wikipedia:Summary style). The parks section should integrate the two subsections into a few paragraphs without headers. There is also a lot of focus on proposed and new development, which may need to be pruned or split off into a subarticle.
  • Prose/general: "By 1920s" the article states the decades like that, it should be "By the 1920s", also this is repeated almost every line, and should be mixed up because it gets repetitive. It's (it is or it has) vs its(possessive pronoun) (See ITS). Also watch out for capitalization issues on the names. Also when you refer to things like bus lines make sure to write it for someone who doesn't know which line number you are referring to. Or Class one, two and three bike lanes (I didn't know they had classes, so a link there would help. Make sure to clarify when you refer to NIMBYs/YIMBYs whether they are organizations or individuals. Referring to the real estate division head as refusing to take responsibility is pretty POV/weaselly. The focus on the recent development also tends to be a bit sensationalistic in tone. You quote a lot on 14th and Madison as "vacant" and "underutilized", who are you quoting? Also referring to car-free in scare quotes, how come? The neighborhood organizations need a cite for their goals and objectives. Please add in a cite for the Chauncey Bailey murder just for future reference for others.

That's what I have for a first pass through and I'm sure this probably brought up more questions, but I hope it helps. -Optigan13 (talk) 23:23, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all the feedback. I'll be editing these changes into the article over the next several days.Critical Chris (talk) 08:02, 22 September 2008 (UTC)