Wikipedia:Peer review/List of presidents of the United States/archive1

List of presidents of the United States

I'm not a major contributor to this article, but I noticed it on the top 25 annual list for 2021 by pageviews, and upon giving it a read, it seems it pretty good shape, making it a potential candidate for featured list status. I'd like to see what others think would need to be improved to push it the rest of the way. (Note: The page was previously a featured list from 2005 to 2008, not that that means a ton given the standards of the time.)

Personally, the lead looks a little overlong; lines like The presidency of William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days after taking office in 1841, was the shortest in American history. could probably be trimmed. It'd also be good to add how many presidents there have been from each party. That's really about it, though. What do others see? Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:19, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Comments from Goldsztajn

Agreed that the lede is overly long. Some suggestions for reduction:

• First paragraph, replace "by the American people through" with "via". Two problems: flowery language and technically not accurate, ie US citizens elect state representatives who elect the President in the Electoral College.
• Second paragraph: the placement of Grover Cleveland here seems unduly prominent, especially since he appears there only to explain the interesting but not especially noteworthy numerical anomaly between presidencies and presidents.
• In the fifth paragraph I would suggest removing the text of the paragraph from "and set the precedent that a vice president who does so becomes the fully functioning president with his presidency..." onwards, since this material primarily concerns the vice-presidency and would be more appropriate in a list of VPs.
• Sixth paragraph, drop altogether and replace with a sentence that indicates that Washington was the only president unaffiliated to a political party. I disagree on adding number of presidents from each party (I'm not clear that indicating there have been four Whig presidents and one Federalist is significant), although I could see adding text on which party has produced the largest number of presidents.
• Missing factoids to possibly note: no woman has yet served as president, Barak Obama was the first African-American president, five presidents have lost the national popular vote, but won the electoral college.

Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 09:53, 19 February 2021 (UTC)