Wikipedia:Peer review/Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States/archive1

Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States

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I've listed this article for peer review because I believe this article to be ready for FA status, and this is timely in light of a substantial demographic shift occurring on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thanks, bd2412 T 16:59, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: Very interesting and timely article, but I do not think it is yet ready for FAC. With WP:WIAFA in mind, here are some suggestions for improvement.

I think it would help to have a sentence or two somewhere early in the article explaining the Supreme Court for non-American readers (this is done nicely for the justices riding circuit).
The previous point is symptomatic of a need to provide context for the reader. For example Justice Cardozo is first mentioned in this sentence but is not wikilinked or identified by full name: For example, in appointing Cardozo, President Hoover was as concerned about the controversy over having three New York Justices on the Court as he was about having two Jewish Justices.[8]
Article needs more references, for example the fourth paragraph of Geographic background and the first paragraphs of both Ethnicity and Roman Catholic Justices all lack references. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
Internet refs like current 72 and 73 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
Books all need publishers, ISBN etc.
In the Catholic justices section, I would use the {{Main}} template instead of hiding the link to the list in the second to last paragraph. See, List of Roman Catholic United States Supreme Court justices.
The end of the Catholic justics section mentions the Catholic majority on the court, then there is the Jewish justices section, then there is a section on "The shift to a Catholic majority". First off, per WP:HEAD this section should not start with the word "the" if at all possible. I also wonder if "Justices" should be capitalized in headers - is it customary to capitalize the word "justice"? More importantly, avoid repeating the same thing twice in two different sections. Most importantly, I also wonder if logically it would make sense to avoid separation of these two sections by the Jewish justices section - could the "Shift to a Catholic majority" section be a subsection of the Catholic justices section for example?
The article seems a bit skewed towards its current makeup. See WP:WEIGHT
Also avoid words like "Currently" instead use wording like "As of July 2009"
The article has some short (one or two sentence) paragraphs that should be combined with others or perhaps expanded in almost all cases.
Per WP:MOS#Images, images should be set to thumb width to allow reader preferences to take over. For portrait format images, "upright" can be used to make the image narrower.
At FAC images will need alternate text per WP:ALT

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 _><>°^° 03:42, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I will work on these issues. I don't think the issue of recentism can be avoided, however, for two reasons. First, the Court has only recently tended to become diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, and even to a degree in terms of religion. Second, there is simply much more information available about the lives of more recent justices. bd2412 T 04:09, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I understand that more data is available for recent Justices, but it seems like the article is focused mostly on the current 9 (plus Souter) - could the finances section be expanded to the past 20 years or so, for example? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:20, 7 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'll work on scaring up some more data next week. bd2412 T 03:29, 7 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]