Wikipedia:Peer review/Netball in the Cook Islands/archive1

Netball in the Cook Islands

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to improve it for possible consideration in the future.

Thanks, LauraHale (talk) 02:32, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Brianboulton comments: As this article already has GA stsus, I assume that you are looking at the possibility of future featured article status, and have reviewed it in that context. I would certainly welcome seeing an article on this topic at FA; I don't think we have any featured netball articles, and precious few dealing with women's sports.

Lead

The lead should be a broad summary of the main text of the article. It should touch on all the main areas covered in the article, without giving too much by way of detail. At present it is rather a collection of individual facts than a general summary, and needs some redrafting.
- Tried to fix this. Not sure the wording is any better. Summary style is not always my fortee. :( --LauraHale (talk) 08:46, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Citing information in the lead is unnecessary when the same information occurs in the main text - where it should of course be cited. Thde lead is a kind of shop window for the article, and when it is cluttered up with citations it has an apparance that might be off-putting to the general reader. There is also a tndency here to over-citation; in a single sentence we have successive cites to [6], [8], [6], [6], [], [9].
- Cleared the citations out of the lead. Made sure that they were all in the body so that cites weren't left stranded. Some of the in sentence stuff needs to be looked at later but often it is cited like that because of multiple sources so I wanted to make sure just because say [2] supports the second half of the sentence but not the first, that [1] which supports both is still indicated that it supports all facts in the sentence. --LauraHale (talk) 18:54, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article structure

The article needs a better prose structure. It would be helpful to readers such as myself if the article began with some basic information on the Cook Islands. How many populated islands? What area is covered? What is the total population, etc.? This kind of background would provide a context to such information as there being 1,000+ registered players.
- Restructured the article to hopefully provide more clarity. Started to add background statistics. --LauraHale (talk) 06:39, 7 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The lengthy section entitled "Local" is at present a bit of a hotchpotch of information, given rather randomly. At the moment there isn't a natural flow; for example, it seems to me that the first and the sixth paragraphs are related, and should be brought together. The overall heading of the section could be changed from "Local" to "History and development", and might be better organised into subsections dealing with, for example, (a) Sport in the Cook Islands, (b) Development of netball, (c) Internal competitions, (d) Social and cultural impact. These headings are just suggestions; you may have better ideas. I would change "International" to "International competition"

Competitive history

What are the first two lines of the main table trying to convey? They don't specify an event or a score, yet these are supposed to be "sample" results. On that point, offering a table of "sample" results is tricky; who chose these particular events as samples?It would be better to restrict the table to specific events such as the World Youth Netball Championships and the Commonwealth Games. Would the tables be better placed after the main text? There's a danger the last section may be overlooked.

Originally, I was thinking of trying to get a list of as many of the nation's international competitions as I could find. I removed all the rows where there was no score. (I also added a reference column and a few more events that the country has competed in.) The sample isn't so much a sample as it is the competitive history that I found when writing the article. Ultimately, as one of the primary contributors to this article, it would be great to have a complete list of the nation's international performances and possibly have it on its own page. I moved people up to after local. --LauraHale (talk) 03:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"People" section

Having just said that, I in fact wonder if it is worth a separate section to record the activities of these people. Perhaps this information should be incorporated into the earlier sections (where the feats of Noovao and Matenga are already mentioned).

Prose generally

The prose is generally readable, though its organisation is sometimes puzzling. For example, in the second paragraph of the "Local" section there is a sudden change of topic, from the future status of netball as an Olympic sport to the nitty-gritty administration of netball facilities in the islands. There are other instances of this sort of thing in the text; perhaps when the article is given a more detailed structure, this problem will be eliminated. Generally, however, all articles benefit from a copyedit by an uninvolved editor before submission to the FAC process.

Referencing and citation

There is a tendency to over-referencing. In general the same citation should not appear successively in the same paragraph; all the material is covered by the final cite. In the first paragraph of "Local" you have several successive cites to [18], and this happens elsewhere in the article, too. It is also unnecessary to use a string of references for relatively straightforward statement; "During this sporting event, the boys cross dress and wear the uniforms that are traditionally worn by women" has got four citations and a footnote.
Looking at some of the citation formats, I'm a bit puzzled by some. For instance "Kautai et al. Tanga" (why not just Kautai et al?") The short citation style is not really appropriate to website sources ("Turk"). "Notes" should not consist of uncited statements.

Images

I wonder if enough has been done to seek out images for this article. More images would certainly brighten the text, even if they were only generic shots of island life or sports facilities. Images are not a requirement for featured articles, but it is generally expected that some effort is made to secure appropriate images - though sometimes a little imagination is required.

Not many images available related to sport that I could find on Flickr or on Commons. I found two that kind of possibly convey a sense sport in the Cook Islands and included them in the article. --LauraHale (talk) 03:24, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that these comments are helpful. Please contact my talkpage if you have queries arising from this review. I'd be happy to look at it again when you have responded to these points. Brianboulton (talk) 16:19, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Geometry guy

I have familiarized myself with the article, and intend to add review comments below. Before I do that, I would like to express my appreciation for all the work that has gone into this article so far: Wikipedia needs articles like this, and editors who want to make such articles shine.

According to my preliminary review, my comments are likely to relate to a common theme: this is an encyclopedia, and we should write articles from an encyclopedic viewpoint. That is easy to say, but hard to achieve, and so I would like to be as supportive as possible in my comments. The principles informing my comments are as follows: we should draw attention to significant opinion, without necessarily supporting it; we should write for the uniformed reader, without dumbing down; and we should avoid including editorial viewpoints, even though it is all too easy to do so without being aware of it. Geometry guy 23:23, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I normally review the body of an article before the lead, but just to get the ball rolling, I have comments on the first sentence:

The Cook Islands are an important netball playing country in Oceania, with more than 1,000 registered players.

This suggests that the article title is "The Cook Islands in Netball"; it is backwards for the current content and title. I recommend alternatives such as...

Netball is a popular sport in the Cook Islands, with more than 1,000 registered players.
In the Cook Islands, Netball is a popular sport, with more than 1,000 registered players.

(FAC reviewers may have better ideas.) Note that "popular" is easier to source and cite than "important", especially as the sentence already quantifies the popularity. This is an example of the "show don't tell" principle of encyclopedic writing. Geometry guy 23:30, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]