Wikipedia:Peer review/Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel/archive1

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

Salute to All - I request your help and advice in transforming this into a featured article. Rama's Arrow 16:20, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

• Comment — Looks mostly good/featurable at first glance. Please delineate the references used/cited in footnotes in a separate "References" section. If none of the "Further reading" sources were used to build the article, then you can also recreate that section. You should use "Patel" (his last name) throughout the article, not his first name (see WP:MOSBIO). Also, the positive/approving tone of the article needs to be somewhat neutralized. I've done some copyedits as an example of these and other hints. I'll post other comments later. Saravask 01:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

• Great job so far! Here are some of my thoughts and suggestions:-
  • Maybe this has been discussed in the past, but I just wanted to be sure - per convention, Indian personalities are mentioned by name and not title. Given the tremendous progress this article has made, are we too far down the path to move this article to Vallabhai Patel instead? Just a thought.
  • Per Saravask, refer to him as Patel and not Vallabhai or Sardar Patel in the article
  • There is an amount of verbiage and sentiment contained in the article that could be construed as being POV. I think the language should be toneddown somewhat to present a more dispassionate, comprehensive picture of Sardar Patel.
  • Per the point above, "Congress boss" should be changed to President of Indian National Congress, or a similar title
  • Appropriate in-line citations should be added to the Fighting for Independence and Personal Life sections.
  • "..Patel would be protective of his integrity and reputation as far as possible." How do we know this?
  • "Historians consider that Vallabhbhai Patel's most important contributions came to have occured in the period between 1946 and 1948"
  • "when over 5,000 people were killed in violence instigated by Jinnah" Do we know Jinnah instigated the violence. Sources will be needed, in the absense of which, this phrase may come across as POV.
  • (ironically, he was often portrayed with an anti-Muslim bias) We should not opine on behalf the the reader. Let us delete that phrase.
  • We will need to incorporate criticisms of Sardar Patel's political policies and his handling of the integration of India to present a more balanced image of the Sardar. Furthermore, phrases such as graciously accepted, raucous welcome etc should be done away with.
  • On the whole, very interesting read. Content wise, we will need to incorporate criticisms of Patel's policies, etc. Structure wise, we will have to go through the article with a fine comb to restructure/delete sentences that could give the impression of being POV/non-encyclopedic during FAC. Good luck! Since most of the work that needs to be done now is structure related, I will start helping with toning down the article. I think, quality wise, this is right up there and stands a great chance at becoming FA. AreJay 02:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Some observations

This is one of my first reviews, so its more of an observation as I am myself not sure of the norms. Please go through them. If they are not relevant, ignore them.

1. The wikipedia policy on wikilinking years and dates is that they should be made into a link only when clicking on them will give some additional information to the reader. Here, I see that all dates and years of his birth and death have been made links, while the linked pages don't even carry any mention of him. For example, neither 31 October, nor 1875 mentions that Sardar Patel was born on that day, even though it can be added in a few seconds.
2. Other language pronunciations/spellings have to be provided to guide the readers. But here, I feel they have been overdone with 4 languages. The first useful word to a casual reader comes in the 4th line.
3. Congress Boss seems to be informal usage. Wouldn't it be better if it were replaced by As Congress President or Congress Presidentship.
4. Initially I was convinced with the actual hosting page, i.e. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but after going through the template of Indian Independence Movement, I began to think otherwise. As far as I know, the Wikipedia policy is that the actual page should be hosted at the name by which the person is mostly known for. That is, what is the most common word that the user will type so as to reach the page in question. This is because it is suggested that the text at the top saying "Redirected from ..." should be encountered be least number of users. Now the template at the bottom suggests that his most common name is Sardar Patel. So shouldn't the original page be also at Sardar Patel.
5. In the first paragraph, Satyagraha is defined as non-violent mass civil disobedience, while in Satyagraha, it is defined as any effort to discover, discern, obtain or apply Truth. This definition clearly does not imply Civil Disobedience explicitly. While the satyagraha in Gujarat may have been civil disobedience, the phrase can confuse the readers that all satyagraha involve civil disobedience.

Hopefully my comments add value to this article. Looking forward to see this article on the front page. Best of luck. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 07:49, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Photos

Can we add some more photos to the article? The job may be tough.But from my experience of watching other people going through Wikipedia, a long article without a considerable number of images has a tendency of being subject to non-adherence, I mean people often start to skip reading, even abort reading, long articles without images!!This may sound trivial, but I think collecting some interesting images could br really beneficial for the article. Also, as per Ambuj, the translation of the name in 4 languages in the very first para seems inhibitory.Bye.--Dwaipayanc 20:11, 7 March 2006 (UTC)