Wikipedia:Peer review/June Anderson/archive1
- 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 June 2008.
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to eventually have this article listed as a good article. Comments related towards getting this article to that place would be appriciated.
Thanks, Nrswanson (talk) 13:40, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
Brianboulton comments: The following, in my view, are the main issues:-
- Lack of images: I know the problem with living artistes, but other opera singer articles have found a way round – for example, see Kathleen Battle, Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo. A fair use rationale could be tried on one of the June Anderson portraits on Google Images, or do what the Domingo articles editors apparently did, and get permission from the image’s owner. What I would recommend, first off, is contact User:Elcobbola, who has great expertise in the use of images. I nearly always seek his advice, and always accept it.
- Lead: The lead needs to be rewritten and extended to form a concise overview of the entire article, as required by WP:Lead. At the moment, it's a bit of a motley collection of facts, in no particular order (e.g. why mention the 2008 award before the 2007 award?)
- Article structure: The article isn't really structured at present, being a sequence of main sections undifferentiated in levels. My suggestion as to a possibly better structure is:-
- 1. Early life: this section should include most of what is at present in the "Education and vocal training" section, but considerably expanded to include information essential in a biographical article such as parents’ names, details of any siblings, date of entry to Yale, date of graduation, and dates of study with Leonard.
- 2. Opera debut: The reader will want to know how she moved from being a near penniless, unsuccessful auditioner to being the Queen of the Night at the NYCO. How did she land the part? There is an interesting story to be told, and it should be told here. The rest of this section can cover her years at NYCO as she gradually established herself.
- 3. Operatic Career: We need to get some sense of the progress of her career during the last 30 years, and we don’t really get this from content which, at present, rather over-concentrates on listing roles performed and venues. For example, it would be interesting to know why she moved into the bel canto roles in the early 1980s? Who, or what, were the greatest influences on her career, that led her to make the decisions that she did? These are issues worthy of discussion. I am not sure, either, that subdividing her career into decade sections (1980s, 1990s, 2000s) is the best idea - it's a bit flat and formulaic. Would it be possible to divide the Operatic career section perhaps along lines such as:-
- 3.1 Bel canto roles
- 3.2 Broadening the repertoire
- 3.3 Later career
- 3.4 Future plans (I’m sure that better headings than these rough suggestions could be developed, with a bit of thought)
- 3. Operatic Career: We need to get some sense of the progress of her career during the last 30 years, and we don’t really get this from content which, at present, rather over-concentrates on listing roles performed and venues. For example, it would be interesting to know why she moved into the bel canto roles in the early 1980s? Who, or what, were the greatest influences on her career, that led her to make the decisions that she did? These are issues worthy of discussion. I am not sure, either, that subdividing her career into decade sections (1980s, 1990s, 2000s) is the best idea - it's a bit flat and formulaic. Would it be possible to divide the Operatic career section perhaps along lines such as:-
- 4. Private life. Did she marry? If so, who to? Did she have children (how many?) – these are details essential to any biog. article. A short section, probably at the end since she is still living, should provide this information
- 5. Notable recordings formats: A standard, regular format for should be used for each entry. At present, years are sometimes bracketed, sometimes not; LONDON (the record label) is sometimes capitalized, sometimes not; "conducted by" is sometimes shortened to "cond." Etc., etc. As a result, the section looks untidy; it would look much better for being regular. I also wonder quite so many examples are necessary.
- Referencing: the article is unevenly cited, with sometimes lengthy passages without citations. I noticed this particularly between refs [14] and [15], and between [20] and [21]. I also noticed that the formats of the references are almost all incorrect. On-line sources (the majority) should be in {{cite web}} format. Book references must be to pages or short page ranges, not to whole books, with the title, author, publisher, year of publication, location of publication, and ISBN number all given. For magazine or newspaper articles the article name, author and exact date of issue must be given. See Wikipedia:citing sources for further guidance.
- WP:MOS violations. I haven’t done a full check, but dates are generally unlinked; small ordinals like 5th should be written as fifth; there should be no spaces before references ([11] is one I saw). You don’t seem to have employed non-breaking spaces.
- Prose: I haven’t done a detailed prose check. On my read-through it seemed OK.
To summarise, a fair amount of work, in my view, is needed before the article looks ready for GAN or FAC, but it’s a decent start. I hope this helps.