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Aalen

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Hi, this is a translation of the de.wp Good Article[1] de:Aalen, and the German version has undergone de.wp peer review[2]. I’m curious to know wether eyes of English-speaking people see different weak or good points in this article, and if it qualifies for GA here too. As yet, the article’s structure is close to the original, but it doesn’t necessarily have to stay that way. I’m not a native speaker so I definitely brought in many language flaws, but as I can see the article has been visited and improved by obvious native speakers since I’ve done my main translation work.

Thanks, dealerofsalvation 16:50, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: Thanks for your work on this article. Sounds like a lovely town, but I do not think the article is anywhere near ready for GAN yet. Here are some suggestions for improvement.

A model article is useful for ideas and examples to follow/ There are many FAs on cities that seem as if they would be useful models. See Category:FA-Class WikiProject Cities articles
The biggest problem I see with the article is that it needs more references, for example the whole Designation as Imperial Town section has zero references and there are many other paragraphs and sentences that need refs but lack them.
Or only two of the many Persons connected to Aalen have refs - all should
My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
The references that are there need to be formatted consistently so as to provide all needed information. For example, Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
I also note that the article's references seem to depend pretty heavily on aalen.de (at least 22 of the 70 references cited). As much as possible, it should use refs from reliable, independent third-party sources.
Some refs that are from aalen.de are not identified as such (i.e. current ref 37 is "Stadt gedenkt der Opfer der Luftangriffe" (in German). Stadt Aalen. Retrieved 29 March 2011.
The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article - I think the current lead is too short and it could be expanded to up to 4 paragraphs per WP:LEAD.
When expanding, nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself
My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way
The article may need fewer sections / header too. Avoid short (one or two sentence) paragraphs and sections as these interrupt the narrative flow. So do we really need a one sentence section on Other christian communities? Or does Godparenthood (which no one reading this in English will understand as a section header) really need its own section?
Section headers do not follow WP:HEAD in places - avoid repeating the name of the article in headers. So "Persons connected to Aalen" could just be something like "Notable residents"
Be consistent on little things - is Große Kreisstadt italicized or not?
Also be careful about translating German words and phrases - most are translated, but a few are not.
The English is understandable, but needs a copy edit to sound more like something written by a native speaker.
Nice photos
Several dead external links here
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 all peer reviews, in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:30, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]