Wikipedia:Peer review/Rudolf Wolters/archive1

Rudolf Wolters

• 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 January 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want to nominate it for FA and want it to be looked at before I do…

Thanks, Wehwalt (talk) 14:01, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting article focused mainly on the relationship between two men. Its title suggests a biography, but it's heavy on the Wolters-Speers relationship and light on other kinds of information. That's not necessarily bad, but I'd consider adding some new data to add a little balance. For example, Wolters' wife, Erika and his son, Fritz, are mentioned, but I was surprised to read no more about them. Did he have other children? What sort of domestic life did the family have? Did Wolters have siblings? I have two other areas of concern: the images and some of the prose. Here are some comments and suggestions:

• To reach FA, you'll need more images. You only have two, and one is questionable. (See below.) Try to find a usable photo of Wolters if you can, and add it to the infobox. The Bundesarchiv might have other work you could use. Some of the pages that you've linked to have nice images of the universities. You'd need to check the licensing information, but one of these might work nicely in the "Early life" section. If you search, I think you can find more images for the other sections.

• Image:Bundesarchiv Bild 146III-373, Modell der Neugestaltung Berlins ("Germania").jpg looks good to me, but Image:Coesfeld Fußgängerzone.jpg lacks the minimum required licensing information. The source is listed at the Commons as "Own picture" but doesn't say who "own" is. The user named in the User column is Stahlkocher, but there's no link to a user page. A note on the licensing page says, "This picture may have usage restrictions" without specifying what that means. To be acceptable, the description should include the author's name and method of contact. The sentence about usage restrictions needs to be more explicit. If it means GFDL, that's OK, but if it means something else, it might not be OK.

Lead

• "Wolters, who was born to a Catholic middle-class family in the northern German town of Coesfeld, obtained his degree and doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin, during which time he became a close friend of Speer." The phrase "during which time" is awkward because no specific time is mentioned earlier in the sentence. In addition "degree and doctorate" is odd. Does this mean undergraduate degree and doctorate? How about "Wolters was born to a Catholic middle-class family in the northern German town of Coesfeld and obtained his doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin. At the university, he became a close friend of Speer."?
• "In addition to receiving and organizing Speer's clandestine notes from Spandau, which later served as the basis of Speer's bestselling books of memoirs, Wolters quietly raised money for Speer, which was used to support Speer's family and for other purposes, according to directions which Wolters received from Speer." This sentence is too long and complicated. I suggest breaking it in two after "money for Speer" and starting the next sentence with "This was used to support... ".
• "until the two men became embittered to the point that" How about "until the two men became so embittered that"?
• "Wolters was involved in the reconstruction of West Germany following World War II, reconstructing his hometown of Coesfeld" Re-cast to avoid repeating "reconstruct".
• "Wolters also wrote several architectural-based books... " How about "Wolters also wrote several books about architecture"?

Early life

• In his privately published memoirs, Segments of a Life, Wolters described his father as "a serious, conscientious and diligent man, always concerned about the future" while he saw his mother as "a highly practical woman, full of zest for life, who in hard times thought nothing of serving a delicious roast without letting on it was horsemeat". This is understandable but has too many clauses for comfort. I'd suggest breaking it in half before "while" and starting the next sentence with "He saw his mother... ".

• Nazi era
• "Head of Department in the Planning Bureau" All lower-case unless Planning Bureau is its formal name.
• Kindergarten. Lower-case in English.
• "since Speer found that Party" Lower-case "party".
• "Much of Wolters' work at GBI was connected with Hitler's plan to reconstruct Berlin on a massive scale, of which Speer was in charge." Speer was in charge of the plan rather than the scale. This might be better: "Much of Wolters' work at GBI was connected to Hitler's plan to reconstruct Berlin on a massive scale. Speer was in charge of this plan."
• "a three-mile-long" MOSNUM suggests expressing quantities like this in both imperial and metric units. I like to use the "convert" template for this because it gets the spellings and abbreviations right as well as the math. I added one of these to make the three-mile conversion. Since this is a German-centric article, metric comes first. You shouldn't convert the quantities in quoted passages, though. The 1,000 kilometers in the Wolters' quote about Churchill, should stay as is.
• "The material which he recorded" It should be "that" rather than "which". They aren't generally interchangeable. My rule of thumb is to use "which" when it starts a clause that needs to be set off with a comma or commas.
• "The material which he recorded would later prove embarrassing to both Wolters and Speer, since it detailed the GBI's responsibility for administering a 1939 amendment to the Nuremberg Laws which allowed non-Jewish landlords to evict Jewish tenants with virtually no notice." Too long and complicated.
• "which would utilize" The Manual of Style prefers "use".

Architectural work "Lübke instead turned to politics, rising quickly through the political ranks of postwar Germany, and in 1959 became President of the Federal Republic of Germany, a position in which he served almost ten years before he resigned over questions about what he may have known about forced labor while working in Speer's department." Too complex.

The Spandau years

• Shouldn't have "The" in the head, per MoS.
• "anything to apologise for though the" Needs a comma between "for" and "though".
• "even though Lübke, President" President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
• "above all to delete certain parts on the basis of which Speer and one or another of his colleagues could still have been prosecuted. The Ludwigsburg Central office for 'war crimes' was still at work and an end of the persecution of National Socialists was not in sight." Something seems to be missing here. It seems unlikely that Wolters said all of this.

Speer released

• While Speer's initial draft of the book, written while in Spandau, does mention his "old university friend, Dr. Rudolf Wolters, to whom was assigned the most essential task, the Prachtstrasse" in connection with the Berlin project, Wolters' name appears nowhere in the published version, and no mention is made of Wolters' help, essential to the writing and preservation of the draft memoir." Too complex.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 05:19, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm a lousy reviewer though, but I will see what I can do. Wolters pictures seem to be almost unobtainable, but I'm still working on it. "Party" with a cap P, is considered appropriate when you are repeatedly referring to the same party, especially in this case. The bulk on the Speer relationship is unavoidable, Wolters did not come to public view until Schmidt published his book in 1982, by which time he was dying. Kindergarten under these circumstances is a proper noun. The long quote is direct from Wolters; he did indeed say all that. I suspect in Segments (which is not obtainable, I've searched google in both English and German) he was trying to justify for posterity his decision to censor the Chronik. The rest sound good. I don't know what do do about the images, though.--Wehwalt (talk) 13:44, 17 January 2009 (UTC)