Talk:Harvard University/GA2

Comment

I believe this nomination is premature and should be speedily closed without prejudice to the nominator's intentions or potential reviewers' willingness to comment. Madcoverboy (talk) 20:24, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Review

I agree the article has been listed prematurely, but this is not to the detriment of the merit of a full review, which I shall post below. It could easily serve as the basis for the improvements to the article ahead of a subsequent nomination. I will be commenting in full shortly. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 16:24, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Against the Good Article criteria:

1a) Prose on the whole appears to be OK.
1b) Lead is OK. References shouldn't be necessary unless the facts are controversial. (I do not think any of those points are controversial.) They should instead be referenced in the main text, since the lead is intended as a summary and there should not be any new material. Length is fine, and while more than 4 paragraphs are discouraged, in this instance I think it is all but unavoidable. The history part of the lead will need to be expanded slightly given the recommendations below.
2a) It has an appropriate section for references.
2b) About 25% of the article goes unreferenced, which is unacceptable for Good Article status:

Colonial section: "The leading Boston divine Increase Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, which marked a turning of the College toward intellectual independence from Puritanism."
Women section: "Drew Gilpin Faust, the Dean at Radcliffe, became the first woman president of Harvard in 2007."
The opening paragraphs of "Administration and organization"
The "Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard" paragraph
Large parts of the "Campus" section
Most of the "Student activities" section
Some of the "Athletics" section (about half)
The Alumni. Really, each alumnus or alumna needs to referenced, this is quite a lot but it should not be difficult given the fame of all the people of the list. This would perhaps be optional depending on your chosen interpretation of the criteria. "Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, 19 Nobel Prize winners and 15 winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty." must be referenced, however.
In fiction and popular culture. Hack this section down completely. I suggest ridding it at least of the list given under "onscreen" and some of the other lists, keeping only general description like the paragraph under "onscreen".
There is at least one "dead link" that needs fixing or another source finding.

3a)Ideally, the history section would include the "Civil War, World Wars & Great Depression, racial integration & coeducation, 1960s-70s student activism on campus, etc." mentioned at the first review; "Faculty and staff" section expanded as prompted; there are more points in the first review. However, the criteria are actually quite lax in this respect – "articles that do not cover every major fact or detail [are OK]".
3b) Very little by way of extraneous detail, although some sections are slightly out of balance (recentism for example) but if expansion occurs then that may not be a significant problem.
4) No noticeable neutrality problems.
5) Stability. If there were anything more than a snowball's chance that this passes, I would wait out the hold period to check since there are some problematic edits within the last few weeks which would need to be assessed.
6a) A nice amount of images, all seem relevant;
6b) I haven't rigourously checked, I picked out a couple that seemed OK. I notice fair use issues have been mentioned in edit summaries and this needs investigating further if the article is going to pass due diligence.

This is my assessment. Therefore I'm failing the article, but I hope the above points can help improve the article. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 16:49, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]