Wikipedia:Peer review/Central Intelligence Agency/archive1

Central Intelligence Agency

• 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 May 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it has undergone some tremendous work since about last December, thanks primarily to HC Berkowitz, whose commitment to it has been nothing short of incredible, and I'd like to see if people think it is ready for FA nomination, or how it could be improved. As I hope you will all see, this article has already been greatly reduced in size and a huge amount of information has been created in supporting and related articles. I realize it is still a large page, but it is a large topic, and given size and scope of the topic, I think this article, as it stands, as very nearly as small as we could get it.

Having said that, I think we all look forward to any constructive criticisms or opinions you may have.

Thanks, Morethan3words (talk) 10:06, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Ealdgyth

You said you wanted to know about FAC, so I looked at the sources for the article.

• Give ISBNs where possible.
• When citing a book, give a page number
• A large number of your web site citations lack publisher information. Author isn't enough, publisher is also needed.
• Some website citations lack last access dates.

These are pretty basic needs for GA or FAC. Drop me a note when the above issues are taken care of and I'll be happy to double check the reliablity of the sources in terms of WP:RS and WP:V. 16:16, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch

Interesting article, but needs a lot of work before FA in my opinion. I agree with Ealdgyth's reference comments. Here are some suggestions for improvement:

• Article is way too long - take more out and make separate articles per WP:Summary style. For example, Could the whole "Internal/presidential studies, external investigations and document releases" section be a sub-article?
• At the same time, summary style says there should be a summary of the article removed left behind. "Linkages with former Nazi and Japanese War Criminals" with just a See U.S. Intelligence involvement with German and Japanese War Criminals after World War II. or several other examples - this would be a big problem at FAC
• There are many short (one or two sentence) paragraphs that break up the flow and need to be combined or expanded. Also several very short sections.
• The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself - my rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. I think that the article may need fewer sections / headers too. Please see WP:LEAD
• Article needs more references, for example the last paragraph of Organization and the first two paragraphs of Executive offices are unreferenced, as are four of six paragraphs in National Clandestine Service, including a direct quote. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref. See WP:CITE and WP:V
• Several bullet point lists should be converted into prose
• I think I might put History first, before Organization. Telll how they got there
• Per WP:HEAD the name of the article should not be repeated in headers - so change "Early CIA, 1947-1952", "Abuses of CIA authority, 1970s-1990s" and "2004, DCI takes over CIA top-level functions".
• Article either has no images or too many in a given section.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:37, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

PS I ran this tool on the article here. It says it has Readable prose: 75.5 KB which is a bit much Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 22:01, 20 May 2008 (UTC)