A fact from Mary Birdsall appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 23 March 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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As a project for my Wiki Scholars program, I have done extensive research on Mary Birdsall and made essentially an entirely revised article that is fully cited and (hopefully) completely accurate.--Biotech46 (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Biotech46: nice to see the amount of work you've put in! Things that you did really well:
I feel that this was definitely written with a neutral point of view. Maintaining neutral tone and word choice can be difficult, especially when writing about people or topics about which we feel strongly!
Excellent use of citations. This all looks really well supported.
I have a few small suggestions for improvement--
Per the Wikipedia Manual of Style, the subjects of biographies should be referred to by their surnames after the first usage of their first and last name together. You wouldn't write the George Washington article calling him just "George", for example. Refer to Mary Birdsall as "Birdsall" or "Mary Birdsall" in instances of confusion with her husband or children, for example.
Similar to the surname policy above, you can ditch honorific titles such as "Mrs." as you have for "Mrs. Bloomer" and "Ms. Way"
Similar once more, the title "Dr." is infrequently used on Wikipedia unless it is part of a stage name or other pseudonym. I see this at least once with "Dr. Mary F. Thomas" (policy link here)
There are some minor formatting issues. Per the Manual of Style again, section titles should be in sentence case, not title case. Therefore, only the first word of a section title (and any proper nouns) are capitalized. So instead of "Journalism Career" as one section, it would be "Journalism career"
Make sure you italicize newspaper titles, even when they appear in section or subsection titles. So this refers to your subsection Indiana Farmer and The Lily.
Book titles are also italicized. In the Mary Birdsall house section, you should italicize the Beecher book title American Woman's Home
In your section on The Lily, you don't need the hyphen in "newly-formed" (policy link here)
Counterintuitive to how most Americans write, Wikipedia articles are written with the punctuation on the outside of the quotation mark, known as logical quotation. This is a hard one for me to remember, as it is not how I was educated to write! So instead of Her speech was described as "a clear and logical plea in behalf of the right of suffrage in woman." you would have Her speech was described as "a clear and logical plea in behalf of the right of suffrage in woman". I see a few other instances of this that could be adjusted
"House" and "Senate" are proper nouns--make sure they are capitalized consistently
In the legacy section, it appears that you are rehashing content that appears in other sections of the body. The only place where content should be duplicated is if it appears both in the lead and the body. Otherwise, it appears three times in the article that her home was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Let me know if you have questions about any of this feedback! Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:21, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for all the helpful feedback!--Biotech46 (talk) 17:58, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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