Wikipedia:Peer review/Andrea Guarneri/archive1

Andrea Guarneri

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for January 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… This is my first proper article, and I just want to make sure I am doing everything right. I would like to write more biographies of violin makers in the future. I realize that some pictures would be nice, and I'm working on that.

Thanks, Chickpeana (talk) 17:33, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: A set of biographies of violin makers sounds like an interesting subject to pursue. I have several suggestions for improvement.

• Finding models to imitate is something that often works for me. You're already aware that the article lacks images, but the first thing I noticed was the lack of an infobox in the upper right. Biographies in Wikipedia usually have them. You can see an example in Lisa del Giocondo, a short featured biography about an Italian from roughly the same time as Andrea Guarneri. The Lisa del Giocondo article uses Infobox Person, which is one of many possibilities. You can also look at biographies at WP:GA and WP:FA to see what other editors have done.

• WP:BIOG, the Wikipedia biographies project, has a lot of ideas about how to create good articles about people.

• The existing article has only one in-line citation. A good rule of thumb is to cite every paragraph, every set of statistics, every direct quote, and every claim that might reasonably be questioned. Paragraphs that can be attributed to a single source may need only one citation at the end of the paragraph, but some paragraphs may need more than one. The cite family of templates is handy for doing the in-line citations, and the one citation in the article does indeed use "cite book". However, that citation lacks the name of the publisher, the place of publication, and the isbn number. All of those should be added. General information about citations can be found at WP:CITE, and information about the cite family can be found at WP:CIT. Beyond that, the book-length sources should probably be listed in a Bibliography section, which makes it easy to create in-line references to specific pages in often-cited texts. The Lisa del Giocondo article uses a bibliography and simple in-line citations listing a short title and the exact page numbers between a set of "ref" tags, like this: <ref>Pallanti 2006, pp. 17, 23, 24</ref>.

• The lead of a Wikipedia article should be a summary or abstract of the main text sections. The existing one-sentence lead needs expansion.

• The existing article appears to rely on too few sources. A couple of other possible sources in English are mentioned in Guarneri. It would be a good idea to read everything you can find about the subject.

I hope you find these brief suggestions helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Good luck with the article and the larger project. Finetooth (talk) 20:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)