Talk:Galveston, Texas/GA1
GA Review[edit]
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The article needs a lot of work and at present, is an indiscriminate collection of random facts, and not an encyclopedia article. With all due respect, it looks like a C-class article at best. I'd recommend looking at the guideline for US city articles for information on how to organize an article on a US city.
- The 'galveston today' section should be included in the 'history' section. Additionally, the article title itself should actually not be used in section or subsection headers, per WP:MSH. The history section also seems to focus a bit too much on the hurricanes of 1900 and 2008, which slants the article's direction more towards the disasters than anything else.
- The 'architecture' section is just a list of buildings, and the list starts with a bulleted list and then goes to a numbered list, which isn't good style. A good 'geography' section should include a subsection on 'cityscape', which should discuss the downtown area and other neighborhoods, and could include various aspects of the architecture. A list of buildings itself isn't really discussing the "architecture" in a city.
- Information in the 'The Port of Galveston' should probably be incorporated into an 'economy' section, since it's central to the economics of the city. Such a section should also include other aspects of the businesses in the city as well.
- 'Geography and climate' has a few short sentences with some uncited weather averages and records, and a big table. I wouldn't call that complete.
- The 'Transportation' section is really just a listing of the various transportation options in the city, in the guise of subsections (and very short text in each subsection, largely uncited, at that). I'd recommend dropping the subsections entirely and weaving all of the information on the transportation options into a single, coherent discussion in this section.
- 'Galveston in pop culture' is a good start; change title of section to simply 'In popular culture', per WP:MSH. You could also call this section 'Media and popular culture', and incorporate information on local media (newspapers, radio, television) into the section. The Flagstaff, Arizona article handles media and popular culture reasonably well.
- 'Education' -- similar to 'transportation', I'd recommend dropping the subsections and weaving this information into a single, coherent discussion on the educational opportunities in Galveston. Don't just state the schools in the city (which is really just a list in prose form). Talk about how the schools are administered, how many students/teachers there are in the city. Mention some of the more noteworthy schools (governor's schools, charter schools, etc). I think more can be said about the library system than simply, "The city is served by the Rosenberg Library."
- 'Postal service' AND 'Community information' -- not really notable for an encyclopedia article. Wikipedia is not a directory. Postal zip codes, as long as there aren't too many, can be put into the infobox if desired.
- The inline citation in the 'sister cities' section should be at the end of the first sentence, immediately following the colon (:), not before the sentence.
- There's quite a few external links. Some of these could be pruned. I would think many of these could also be used to provide further information to improve the article itself, and thereby becoming inline citations instead. It might also help to review WP:EL for tips on what external links are appropriate for inclusion and which ones could be dropped.
- Inline citations used in the article are overall insufficient to meet the GA criteria requirement.
- WP:LEAD could provide additional information on writing a good, concise, and eye-catching lead section for the article.
Hope this helps. Unfortunately, this article is quite a way away from meeting the six GA criteria, so I can't list it at this time. It can be renominated once these issues are cleared up. Dr. Cash (talk) 04:02, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for your review, Dr. Cash. I began improving some aspects. The schools section now discusses when schools opened and closed; Galveston is seeing a trend of public schools dropping like flies. The Catholic schools also decreased as time passed. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2008 (UTC)