Wikipedia:Peer review/United States v. Wong Kim Ark/archive2

United States v. Wong Kim Ark edit

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I am trying to get this article up to FA quality. It went through a first peer review last month, and I think I've addressed the issues brought up at that time, and I would like to have it checked again now to see if it's ready, or if other changes need to be made.

Thanks, Richwales (talk · contribs) 04:35, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this interesting and timely article. I have a few suggestions for further improvement.

Lead

"The citizenship status of Wong (a man born in the United States to Chinese parents around 1870) was challenged[1] because of a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens,[2] but the Supreme Court ruled that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress." - This sentence is perhaps slightly too complicated for comfort. I might break it up something like this: "The citizenship status of Wong, a man born in the United States to Chinese parents around 1870, was challenged[1] based on a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.[2] Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong, deciding that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress."

"but no such proposal so far has ever succeeded" - Tighten by deleting "so far" and "ever"?

Background

I think it would be helpful to include a bit more about the original reasoning behind the Chinese Exclusion Act as well as the original reasoning behind the citizenship clause. Readers can find out about these things by clicking through to other articles, but it would be much handier for them to be able to get a sense of these things without having to leave the page. Foreigners in particular will not know who the citizenship clause was meant to protect or from what. They also might have no idea why Congress would want to exclude the Chinese. These things are all partly explained in the "Dissent" subsection, but that might be a bit too late.

Opinion of the Court

"The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause... " - Here it is 14th, but earlier it is Fourteenth. I'm not sure which is correct. The Associated Press uses 14th, and generally Wikipedia uses digits, unless they start a sentence, for numbers bigger than nine. However, this might be an exception. In any case, I'd make them consistent within the article.

"The majority held that the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase in the 14th Amendment specifically incorporated these exceptions (plus a fourth – namely, that Indian tribes "not taxed" were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction[26][27])—and that since none of these exceptions applied to Wong's situation, Wong was a U.S. citizen, regardless of the fact that his parents were not U.S. citizens (and were, in fact, ineligible ever to become U.S. citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act)." - Too complex. I'd rewrite this as two or three separate sentences.

Dissent

"the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not". - Generally, nothing should be linked from within a direct quotation since the links were not part of the original. WP:MOS#Linking has details.

Criticisms... "

"introduced as H.R. 1868" - I'd spell out and abbreviate H.R. on first use: House Resolution (H.R.) 1868. Otherwise, foreigners will have no idea what it stands for. Ditto for S.J.Res. 6.

References

ISBNs should include the hyphens. I see only a couple without hyphens in the reference section. A handy conversion tool lives here.

Citation 3 and the others with the "text" link should include access dates.

References to books should include the place of publication. See citation 16, for example.

Other

It would be interesting to know if any ethnic groups other than American Indians and Chinese have ever been legally excluded from U.S. citizenship even though born in the United States after passage of the 14th Amendment. For example, U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were locked up during World War II temporarily lost at least some of their Constitutional rights; were they still considered citizens?

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) 18:20, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]