Wikipedia:Peer review/The Lord of the Rings/archive3

The Lord of the Rings edit

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because this is an extremely notable work of fiction that deserves to be great article. I think the editors working on it so far have got some great content to build on. So with improving the article in mind, let's have your views!

Thank you for your time and opinions. Davémon (talk) 21:09, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Preliminary comments by Finetooth: This happens to be a novel that I love, and the article looks interesting at first glance. Before wading in seriously, I can mention a few things for starters~~, and I'll add more no later than tomorrow (Dec. 26)~~.

All of the "citation needed" tags will need to be addressed.
Although much of the article looks well-sourced at first glance, some whole paragraphs lack sources. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every paragraph as well as every claim that has been challenged or is apt to be challenged, every set of statistics, and every direct quotation.
The images need alt text, meant for readers who can't see the images. Alt text is now an FA requirement and is not the same as captions. WP:ALT has details.
The dabfinder tool at the top of this review page finds two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.
The link checker tool finds a couple of dead urls in citations.
Many of the citations are incomplete. For example, citations to Internet sources typically need author, title, url, publisher, date of publication, and most recent date of access, if all of these are known or can be found.

Further Finetooth comments: Rather than doing a line-by-line review, I've noted several fairly large-scale things that need attention.

If I were trying to improve this article for another shot at FA, I'd expand the "Reception" and "Themes" section by undertaking a more comprehensive survey of the literary criticism of the novel. The sources for most of the claims in these two sections are periodicals, and that's fine as far as it goes, but they seem to deal mainly with the popularity of the book rather than the book's structure, themes, meanings, moral implications, characters, use of history, or relationship to other literature. Reading a survey or two of the criticism might uncover important themes that are not yet mentioned in the article. I'd start with Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaccs (2004) and Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien's Classic, edited by Robert Eaglestone (2006), and see where they led me. A section of the Eaglestone book is titled "Gender, sexuality, and class", for example. The "Themes" section of this Wikipedia article mentions race and class but says nothing about gender or sexuality; perhaps it should.

I'd suggest turning the list of characters into prose per WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists, which says in part, "Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs." An example of how this might be done appears in The General in His Labyrinth, an FA article about a novel. Cousin Bette, another FA, is another example, and you can find others by searching through WP:FA#Literature and theatre.

Many parts of the article are unsourced or incompletely sourced. The entire Music section is unsourced. The "Posthumous publication of drafts" section is unsourced. Individual claims such as "Tolkien's frequent use of alternative spellings for the plurals of elf and dwarf (elves and dwarves, instead of elfs and dwarfs), which had been abandoned in modern English, have caused them to return to common usage" need sources. Another example is the claim that "The enormous popularity of Tolkien's epic saga greatly expanded the demand for fantasy fiction. Largely thanks to The Lord of the Rings, the genre flowered throughout the 1960s." This may be true, but what reliable source says so? The paragraph that begins "The book has been adapted for radio four times" is another example.

"As for the magic Ring around which the story revolves, it seems quite likely it was inspired in large part by "The Testament of Solomon," in which King Solomon controls a cadre of demons and commands them to build the Second Temple.[2]" - This claim in the "Influences" section should not be sourced directly to an external web site. Also, it's doubtful that the source qualifies as reliable as defined by WP:RS. Citation 52 links to a site "maintained and updated by fans of The Lord of the Rings". It's hard to see how it could be considered a reliable source. All the sources should be checked to make sure they meet the RS guidelines.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 06:22, 26 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]