Wikipedia:Peer review/Red Horn (legend)/archive1

Red Horn (legend)[edit]

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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 October 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I thought this page could use an objective pair of eyes. The ref list has become a series of footnotes that has out grown the actual text of the article.

Thanks, Heironymous Rowe (talk) 06:05, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there,

the first thing that I noticed is that the article's lead lacks a clear definition of its subject: the name "Red Horn (legend)" makes me think it's about a legend, but the first two sentences of the lead refer to "his" adventures, meaning the lead defines a character. The lead should not contain any information not found in the article's text: it should be a mere summary (see Wikipedia:Lead section). At the moment, it contains some sentences that cannot be found in the text, and does not serve as a good summary. For someone who is unaware of Native American folklore, it does not provide a clear introduction to the subject. It's like a rough jump straight to the facts.

The article seems to be a retelling of the legend itself rather than an encyclopedic treatment of it: of the entire text, only about 1/3 is not the story itself. I believe the article can be better divided into sections too: the current names are a bit unclear to an unaware reader. The "Wikipedia links" section should be renamed to "See also" too.

As for the wall of references, that's easy to solve: list your sources under "Bibliography" or "References" and use shortened names for the footnotes themselves (e.g. "Radin (1948), pp. 115–136." instead of "Paul Radin, Winnebago Hero Cycles: A Study in Aboriginal Literature (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1948) 115-136."). The full bibliographic data will be readily available for the reader while at the same time it won't appear in every footnote: that's not necessary and clunks up the section (which might be renamed to "Footnotes").

As a whole, you've done a good job with the referencing, but the article has some minor formatting issues and probably some minor grammar problems too (I noticed an "it's" instead of an "its", before ref 16). More serious problems are the unclear definition of the article's scope and subject, the non-summarizing lead section, which makes the article hard to understand for the average reader (me :P) and the unfavourable ratio of retelling to encyclopedic treatment.

The article has WP:GA potential, but it's got some pretty big issues to be dealt with. All the best and good luck! Todor →Bozhinov 16:33, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]