Wikipedia:Peer review/Mount St. Peter Church/archive1

Mount St. Peter Church

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I've listed this article for peer review because…I would like to get some feedback on it since this is my first wikipedia article!

Thanks, Rudy4rachel (talk) 05:37, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations on your first article and welcome to the project. Since this is your first article I'll sprinkle suggestions on improvements with thoughts on MOS compliance. I'm not going to harp too heavily on prose and grammar as this is something that comes with time and you may be far more expert on writing than I.

Lead

A lead is the introductory paragraphs before the body of the article. The lead is to be a summary of all the points in the article. A well-written lead should convey a skeletal outline of the article and the body will fill in the details. See WP:LEAD for more details.
In my opinion the lead is not sufficient for the article. It should cover every point in the article in a summary fashion. For an article of this length (we'll talk about length a little later), the lead should be about 3 to 4 paragraphs. I would remove the mission statement and add details that are in the article but not in the lead.

Relocation of the parish

Watch over-linking. See WP:LINK for some thoughts on this. I see a link to God, a good guide to follow is that words that are in common useage shouldn't be linked. I'll delink God and I suggest taking a critical look at the linking in the article. I would leave a word like altar as people who aren't native English speakers may not be familiar with the term.
The paragraph about why the people started returning to the parish seems to be speculation. Using terms like "most likely" gives the reader the impression that the author is guessing as to why the event happened. Try to avoid speculation and stick to what the sources are saying.
The title of sections should follow the convention where the first word is capitalized, and any proper nouns should be capitalized but the rest of the words should not be capitalized.

Overflow of parishioners

Why the ???? in this section? If the year isn't specified then don't include it.

Citations

I want to interject some thoughts on citations. See WP:CITE for thoughts on in-line citation formatting. I see that some of your in-line citationes, especially early in the article, generate as notes at the bottom of the page, but a vast majority of them do not. This is due to the fact that you are not using a citation template like {{cite web}}. You have the words "cite web" but you need the {{ }} surrounding citation. Check out articles such as Olympic Games, which is a Featured Article. The format of these references is accurate. The reason you have numbered in-line citations but they aren't showing up at the bottom of the page is because of the lack of the {{ }} brackets.

Taking possession of the new grounds

One area of improvement is tightening up the prose. Remove superfluous and redundant words that aren't necessary to the progress of the sentence. Here is an example:

"After eighteen months of meetings, discussions, and research, there was still not a solid agreed upon vision for the future church."

In this sentence I would remove the words, "solid agreed upon". Given the previous sentence it is obvious that there were disputes, consequently all you need to say is that there was no vision for the church. H1nkles _{citius altius fortius} 06:06, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Raising the roof

Here is another example of using too many words to convey your idea:

"Unfortunately, this was a problem because the church's account did not contain enough money to employ more men."

"...the church's account did not contain enough money..." could be reworded to "...the church did not have enough money..." It may only be one word difference but over the course of an article, especially a long article, a word here and a word there can make a significant difference in the readability of the article.

Summary style

There is an important concept in article writing that I need to bring up it is called summary style and can be better outlined at WP:SS. The idea is that you want to cover the subject in a way that summarizes the key points. Wikipedia is not intended to cover every topic completely. The trick as an editor is to determine what should be in the article, to satisfy comprehensive requirements, and what is too detailed. I'll give you some suggested areas to edit when I have a little more time. Sorry this review is in pieces, I grab a little time when I can. H1nkles _{citius altius fortius} 16:41, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I feel that there are several sections of the article that can be totally removed and others that can be significantly reduced. The sections that can be removed (in my opinion) would be:gathering more funds, raising the roof, WWII affects the congregation, and God watches over His workers. I would dramatically reduce the following sections: Relocation of st. peter's parish, The marble hall, and News of the destruction of the Mellon Mansion. Basically I would make one section entitled something like Building the church, with a couple of sub sections summarizing the high points of the building of the church. There are 3 sections with 6 sub-sections, which is too long. The reality is that just about all of the sections could be trimmed to improve readability. Of course this is just my opinion and you're welcome to disagree, just keep summary style in mind when writing.
One great way for a new editor to get a guide for writing articles is to look at other articles on the same subject for guidance. To that end I refer you to Stanford Memorial Church, which is a Featured Article. This is an example of the best work in Wikipedia. Part of the article is focused on the architecture of the church, which is not an emphasis of this article so I wouldn't focus on that as much, but there is a good section on the history of the church, which would help you. Don't feel like your article has to meet FA standards right away, but it can still be a great guide for you.

Opening of Mt. St. Peter church

I want to bring up another key aspect of writing articles on Wikipedia, that is neutrality. See WP:NPOV for a greater explanation of this. You want to discuss your subject in a neutral point of view without displaying any bias either for or against the subject. This paragraph is a concern to me regarding bias:

"Mount Saint Peter Church was magnificent and rose up on the hill, but to many, it seemed as if it could not really belong to the congregation. It was much richer than Saint Peter Church and if it had not been labored upon by so many members of the congregation, none would have felt worthy to call it their parish. But since so much work, love, and faith had been spent on this beautiful place of worship, parishioners became proud to have the honor of attending Mass there every Sunday."

Words and phrases like "magnificent", and "...so much work, love, and faith..." displays a bias in favor of the church and the builders of the church. Also it is unnecessary to state that they were proud to have the honor of attending mass there every Sunday. It's just a detail that is superfluous and a bit speculative unless you're quoting a member who was there at the opening.

Here's another sentence that raises concern for me:

"The beauty of the Melllon Mansion was restored by the congregation and turned into something even more magnificent than a home to entertain the rich; it became a House of God."

This is a value statement, and an opinion, which editors are not to display when writing.

"Many of today's parishioners are descendants of those volunteers and are proud to tell the story of their forefathers who gave them this gorgeous church in which to practice their faith. Their only hope is that future generations will continue to appreciate and cherish this amazing parish."

Unless this is a direct quote from a parishioner it doesn't belong in the article as it is biased and speculative.

References

It appears you are using the Notes section for websites and for specific pages of books. This is similar to the format used in the Stanford Memorial Church article. Check out the References section of this article. Please employ the {{cite book}} template and use either bullets or numbers for each reference.
As a general rule it is always better to use as many different sources for your citations as possible. This article relies heavily on the Centennial Committee for the information. This isn't necessarily bad given the very specific subject matter, but for future articles consider using a plethora of source material. More to come on credibility of sources. H1nkles _{citius altius fortius} 04:08, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding credibility of sources the most credible sources are peer reviewed professional journals, following this would be books, reputable newspapers, magazines, journals, websites etc. Sources that are deemed not credible would be blogs, rumor websites, facebook/myspace pages. What is really anathema in Wikipedia is original research. See WP:OR for more on that. That page explains it a whole lot better than I could. See WP:SOURCES and WP:VERIFY for a good rundown on references. See WP:CITE for information on formatting references. This site relies heavily on a report published by the church for what I assume is the centennial celebration of the church. While I wouldn't call it unreliable, it is a self-published source, which isn't as reliable as a third party published source (someone writing a history of the church that could be independently verified). That said, I feel that the source is fine but it would make the article stronger if you could find other sources to help augment your information. What you want to steer clear of are diaries and primary sources.

Images

Whenever possible it's great to have images. These images need to meet the qualifications set forth in WP:IMAGE. Images you take yourself and license under a "creative commons" license are perfectly fine. See WP:FU for information on using Fair Use or Copyrighted images.
Images draw the reader into the article and help explain the information far better than words can. Images will be especially useful in the building section and the sections about all the additions made the church. If you wish your article to reach GA quality then you'll probably need to include at least one image.

Overall

The article is very complete. What I would recommend is to look critically at your writing. I felt as though you were telling a story through the article. This would be very compelling except that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and a narrative form of writing doesn't work well with this project. As it stands the article would be great as a pamphlet for parishioners of the church or in a long article for a newspaper, but as an encyclopedia article it doesn't fit. Not that it can't be fixed, it certainly can and you've done a lot of work on it.
I would recommend cutting out the nice to know information and leaving in the need to know information. Read the excerpts from the Manual of Style that I referred to. Once you feel as though the article conforms to these guidelines then relist here at WP:PR and have another editor review it.

That's it for my review, I hope you found it helpful. If you have questions, comments or concerns please leave them here and give me a poke on my talk page. I'll be happy to respond. H1nkles _{citius altius fortius} 23:34, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One thing I forgot to mention is the "Orphan" tag at the top of the page. This is put on pages that are not connected to any other pages within Wikipedia. If there are other pages (like if there is a list of Catholic churches in PA) that should link to this page then add a link and delete the orphan tag. You can delete it as soon as you can link this article to another article via a wikilink. Sorry I forgot to mention that. H1nkles _{citius altius fortius} 23:39, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]