Wikipedia:Peer review/Steve Irwin/archive1

Steve Irwin

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to get a good idea of what needs to be done to it in order to make it a Featured Article.

Thanks, Richwales (talk · contribs) 03:47, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Brief comments from Nikkimaria

• The lead is quite short, given the length of the article - I'd suggest 3 paragraphs
• See list of problematic links here
• Don't use contractions or slashes, etc per WP:MOS
• "In the weeks after his death, Irwin's conservation foundation, Wildlife Warriors, reported that thousands of people from around the world were offering their support via donations to the conservation group." - source? Check for other statements needing sources
• Try to avoid sandwiching text between images
• Reference formatting needs some cleanup for consistency
• Make sure all web citations include retrieval dates, and print sources include page numbers. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:13, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Comments by Bradley0110

Thanks for bringing this article to peer review. I'm glad someone's taking the article on and getting it into the shape it deserves!

• Given the length of this article, about 5000 words, the lead should be expanded to at least three paragraphs (500 words or so). Try to incorporate every section heading as a summary in the lead.
• Early life:
  • "Irwin was born on his mother's birthday" The date should be stated - although it's in the lead and infobox, don't forget that they are treated as completely separate entities to the body of the article.
• Marriage and family
  • This subsection might work better if it was incorporated into the Early life section, which you could rename Early life and family, since it doesn't detail his career at all.
  • This section and others feature a lot of overlinking (e.g. jewellery, hazard). Regular everyday words like that should be delinked so they don't devalue important ones (such as saltwater crocodile).
• Search and rescue in Mexico:
  • Is this section entirely relevant to the article? It seems like overdetailing.
• Environmentalism
  • "Irwin was a passionate conservationist and believed in promoting environmentalism by sharing his excitement about the natural world rather than preaching to people. He was concerned with conservation of endangered animals and land clearing leading to loss of habitat." Where has this come from? I don't see anything like it in the Age article, the next citation after this. "preaching" is a bit informal for an encyclopeadic article.
  • The Attenborough quote is repeated elsewhere in the article.
• Sporting activities:
  • The prose is repetitive ("Having grown up in [location] Irwin was a fan of [sport]") and, like the scuba section, suffers from overdetailing ("He once wore a Wallaby jersey during a demonstration at the zoo. A behind-the-scenes episode of The Crocodile Hunter showed Irwin and the crew finding a petrol station in a remote part of Namibia to watch the Wallabies defeat France in the 1999 Rugby World Cup Final.")
• Controversies:
  • I personally really hate "Controversies" sections (though some people seem to love then) because they tend to take on an inverted pyramid structure; at the top of a section comes a real controversy (e.g. Irwin taking his son into a crocodile enclosure), and then minor things that didn't really cause much controversy get added on after; "In June 2004, allegations were made that he disturbed wildlife (namely whales, seals and penguins) while filming a documentary, Ice Breaker, in Antarctica. The matter was subsequently closed without charges being laid." That's not a controversy, it's an allegation that went nowhere.
• Death:
  • This section forms nearly half the article. It is way way way too long. The problem comes from new information being added the article when it first came out in 2006. That's lead to contradictory information in some parts (did he pull the barb out or not. was the footage destroyed or not). To develop this section, you should look at the information in a historical sense; Irwin died nearly five years ago (wow) so how much of the information in this section is still relevant and how much detail still needs to be retained?
• References:
  • To echo Nikkimaria's points, References need to be consistent. Print sources should be in italics and non-print sources like websites should not be.
• Looking back through the article history, I see you've done a lot of hard work on the structure and layout of the article, and removed and replaced a lot of dead links. A lot of work now needs to be done on the content of the article. I'd say that probably means stripping it right back to remove overdetailing and contradictory information. Bradley0110 (talk) 11:36, 17 July 2011 (UTC)