Wikipedia:Peer review/New York City/archive4
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I've listed this article for peer review because New York City is an important city and because the article could use some fresh eyes to look it over.
Thanks, Attic Salt (talk) 20:48, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
I've read through a good amount of the article, and I have a few ideas on how to improve it. There has doubtless been some discussion on some of these issues, but I haven't had the chance to look through the talk page and its archives. I've already seen one contentious conversation about the word "megacity" that I will reference below.
- The second paragraph of the British Colony subsection reads telegraphically, listing several facts briefly. A better alternative would be to fully develop these topics within this subsection, or better yet, to leave these facts out totally and make sure that they are well developed in their main article.
- The final paragraph of Nineteenth Century seems to be talking about the draft riots. If so, it probably should not have its own paragraph.
- The Modern history subsection talks briefly about the drop in crime, but ought to also briefly introduce the nuance that is present in the later Police and law enforcement subsection. As it stands now, this subsection contradicts the Police and law enforcement subsection with regard to crime.
- This subsection also seems like an inappropriate place to fully consider the debate on whether transgender people contributed to the Stonewall riots, since it's such a granular issue relative to this article's topic and the History section. Similar to my issue with the British Colony subsection above, I think this issue should either be addressed briefly and more elegantly, or simply skipped, with care taken to address this issue on a main article and in the Sexual orientation and gender identity subsection.
- Population density: so, is New York the densest city in the US, or is it not? The issue lies with the fact that there is a municipality in New Jersey that is denser than New York City. Because this municipality exists, any "densest city in the US" sentence should be used only with a qualifier. Such sentences appear at least twice in the article.
- Public health: I don't think the sentence about the cigarette ban in pharmacies belongs in that paragraph. To the extent that other public health initiatives belong in this subsection, it should be placed with them and not in the paragraph about hospitals (indeed, the whole subsection is about hospitals).
- Firefighting: Mention of the subway should connect more explicitly to some potential fire hazard. Just mentioning "electrified track" is not enough.
- Pace: This two-sentence subsection should be dropped as long as the material exists in some other article about New York City. It's also silly that half of this subsection (so, one sentence) is a characterization by 19th century poet Walt Whitman.
- Environment: I have a feeling that the info on Citibike is out of date.
Generally, as earlier peer reviews have found, there is a lot of "capital of," "center of," "most," and "diverse," in this article. Many of these superlatives are warranted, but many are unwarranted. The opening line of the Culture and contemporary life subsection qualifies a superlative by attributing it to Baruch College:
New York City has been described as the cultural capital of the world by New York's Baruch College.
That this is a New York City university's opinion of the cultural prominence of New York City makes it a rhetorically weak opening sentence. More care should be taken to come to a consensus that New York City is singularly significant or superlative before saying generally that it is the "capital of" anything. An assertion that "so-and-so has said that New York is the capital of..." should be more effective than the example above.
Finally, there seems to have been a debate on the use of the word "megacity." I think that the word is too arbitrarily defined and should not be given much weight in the article. Moreover, what definition does exist of "megacity" tends to include the whole metropolitan area. In this case, it seems inappropriate to label New York City itself as a megacity.
I'll publish this on the article's talk page. This is my first peer review. Feedback is appreciated!
I am only planning on tackling a few of these issues, so feel free to work on any of them if you are so moved.