Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Peer review/2007 USC Trojans football team

2007 USC Trojans football team

I want to know what this article needs to minimum, be a B-class article, but I want it to become a Good article. Adsms (talk) 05:07, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Review by Phydend

I've never done a peer review before, but I pretty much brought 2005 USC Trojans football team to GA, so I hope my comments can help. I think this is easily a B-class article and could pass GA with a few improvements.

• Per WP:Lead, the lead needs to be expanded. It should be at least three paragraphs and needs to summarize everything in the article.
• Not everyone understands all of the positions and rules of college football so all the positions mentioned should be linked the first time they are mentioned (I think that is done though) and perhaps there should be a {{seealso|}} link to American football rules, American football strategy, and American football positions (the positions one could be put in the Roster section).
• All numbers of things should have a Non-breaking space following them (i.e. "10 former high school players" should be "10 former high school players") and things like scores and yardage should have Ndashes following them (i.e. "5-yards" should be "5–yards").
• Per WP:Dates, all full dates (month and day, or month, day, and year) need to be linked so people with different date preferences set can see it their way. Even in the "accessdates" in the references.
• All of the references should have "accessdates" ("Retrieved on" dates).
• A couple of the references had dead links and these should be fixed.
• The picture of Danelo needs to have a Fair Use Rationale for use on this page.

I think, depending on the reviewer, with an expanded lead and none of the other fixes, it might pass, but it's close to GA either way. I hope this helps and if anything that I said needs explaining just leave me a message. Phydend (talk) 00:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Yikes... So soon! I was planning to bring this for review once I had a chance to go over it a few more times (I wrote 95% of the article). A lot of the ref links need to be converted to the LA Times archive (damn their paid archive, I added info when it was a "fresh" link and they break their links when they move to the archive). I will be happy to make all of the above changes. Actually, I envisioned this article having one last piece of data once we past the 2008 NFL Draft (a number of USC players are likely to be drafted from this senior class). --Bobak (talk) 01:08, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Rise from your grave! I have finally gotten around to making all the fixes I had planned, as well as following all the requests by Phydend. I think this is ready for a GA push, but I wanted to get someone to take a look. I was fortunate that the LA Times, a major source, has recently turned its archive into a free archive --allowing nearly all the citations to be examined by readers. I also sprinkled in a lot of photos I was able to take of key players during the season. --Bobak (talk) 22:57, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Review by JKBrooks85

Pretty good article. I love it when there's over 100 cites ... makes me feel as if I'm reading something that someone really put a lot of time into. I do have a few suggestions before you take it to FAC -- it's good enough to stand for good article right now.

• Expand the lede. Right now, it's only three paragraphs and doesn't quite cover everything that's in the article. My personal rule of thumb is to never have a lede longer than 3/4 of the article's infobox.
• Watch out for weasel words. Though you've done a great job of citing places where you call something the "greatest upset ever" or something along those lines, the article also tends to call things "incredible" or "fantastic" without backing it up. I'd suggest removing those adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. They tend to draw flak during the FAC process.
• Trojans fumble or Trojan fumble? I'd pick one and stick with it throughout the article -- it's not a big thing, but it could be brought up.
• The size of the article is the biggest thing. Right now, the total size is over 160k, and if there's one thing that FAC reviewers like to pick out more than anything else, it's article size. I don't know what the prose size is, but any article with a total size over 100k tends to draw a lot of criticism. I don't particularly agree, but there are a lot of sticklers for rules there.
• There's a redlink for David Watson ... try stubbing it or just remove the link.

That's what I've got so far. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff that I didn't catch ... I didn't look at it that closely, but those were the big things that caught my eye. JKBrooks85 (talk) 21:08, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Good input, thanks! Yeah, about the only time I allowed strong adjectives were in describing Stanford's upset. I suppose I can let the "41 point underdog" do the talking, so to speak. From reading USC materials over the years, "Trojan" is acceptable, but the press generally sticks to "Trojans", so for simplicities sake I'll try to keep it to the plural (I thought I had been but obviously I missed some). On the size issue, its definitely been in the back of my head: Looking at the 2005 Texas FA, I think I'll have to break out a few of the individual game articles like JohnTex did; and perhaps some more. I guess it depend on the back-and-forth with the reviewers. I will stub Watson. --Bobak (talk) 16:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)