Wikipedia:Peer review/Anna Anderson/archive1

Anna Anderson

• 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 August 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because the article is a mess, has been poorly written (with far too many lengthy direct quotes) and suffers from a lack of balance. I am attempting to edit it to improve it, but it badly needs fresh eyes and outside opinions on how best to improve it so it can reach Good Article status.

Thanks, Bookworm857158367 (talk) 02:00, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: I see you've been having a rough time with edit wars. You have my sympathy. Alas, you have already guessed at least part of what I have to say. Yes, the article needs a re-write, and, yes, it has way too many long quotes. I read quite a lot of the talk page before reading the article, and I see that instability has prevented progress for many months. This is too bad, because it's virtually impossible to write the final lead and to polish the prose while great chunks of material are being added and subtracted. I can't tell for sure that the article is stable yet, but I'll assume so. Here are some suggestions for starters:

• Quotes shorter than four lines normally appear in the text set off in quotation marks but not block quotes. For example, "Grand Duchess Ernst Ludwig stated about Anderson that she was "an impostor, a lunatic, a shameless creature" is how the first quote should appear in "Ernst Ludwig and Franziska Schanzkowska" and not as a block quote. See MOS:QUOTE. Instead of the {{cquote}} template, which inserts decorative quotation marks, use an alternative. I generally prefer a pair of HTML blockquotes, but they have limitations. Again, see MOS:QUOTE for details.

• Moving the short quotations into the main text would reduce the space occupied by the article, but I recommend that you paraphrase or compress as many of the others as you can. For example, I would seriously consider replacing the long quotation from the British Consul-General with something like "and the British Consul-General in Ekaterinburg, Thomas Hildebrand Preston, at the time of the murders cast doubt on the truth of Svoboda's testimony, saying, 'as British Consul, I was extremely well informed of what was going on and should almost certainly have heard of Svboda's alleged activities had they been true.' "

• The lead of an article should be a fair summary of its most important points. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of the content of each section of the main text and not to include things in the lead that are not mentioned in the main text. The existing lead violates both guidelines. Much of the first paragraph of the lead gives background about the Romanovs that I think might work better in a short section called "Background" that explains who the Romanovs were and what happened to them. I'd mention that content in the lead but devote only a sentence to it; the article is about Anderson, not the Romanovs. I'd keep her front and center all the way through. The new lead should include mention of the important biographical events covered in the other sections; essentially it should be a capsule biography.

• The citations should include the author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL if a web source, and access date. Sometimes not all of this can be found, but it's good to include as much of it as possible. I see that some of the citations use cite web or others in this family of templates, and that's fine.

• I'd unlink some of the names that are red-linked, especially ones that are red-linked multiple times.

• Plain year dates should be unlinked.

• After you work to compress the quotes and re-write the lead, I'd certainly ask someone to copyedit the whole article.

I hope you find these few suggestions helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, perhaps one from the backlog, which is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 23:03, 16 August 2008 (UTC)