Wikipedia:Peer review/Emma Goldman/archive1

Emma Goldman

This article seemed to have reached a fairly stable and mature state. It's informative and interesting and would probably make a good feature article (especially since there are so few feature articles about women). I would like to get other people's opinion of the article and how it can be improved. Also, extra fact checking and copyediting would be helpful. Mostly though, I want to know if the organization and content of the article are appropriate for a feature article, and what could be added or changed to make it better. Kaldari 17:56, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Overall, a good basis, but I find it to be laregly too light on details (some sections acutely so); and on that note, more emphasis could be placed on her body of works and theory which could certainly be expanded further.

Best of luck with the article,

El_C 20:54, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree with El C, this is a mere outline of Goldmann's life, rather than a comprehensive article. The life and especially the works need to be treated more fully. Also, you might possibly want to think about re-organizing the material, as well as expanding it. The text contains a collection of short summaries of Goldmann's discussions/agitation/writings wrt many different topics, and these summaries have been carefully formulated to fit into a chronological account of her life. I do see the advantages of such a structure: for instance, it allows a harmonious melding of each particular view with its consequences (like prison sentences or deportations). That's fine, and there certainly is a close and interesting relationship between life and works in this case. But isn't a structure like that also a bit of a straightjacket for the presentation of her writings? I get the feeling that squeezing Goldman's works and theories into a chronological framework makes it harder to do them justice. An example of a first-the-life then-the-works-and-ideas structure you may care to take a look at is Max Weber, I don't know if you think something like that might suit your material, which is of course different: Weber is a more academic and influential writer, and Goldman's life was a thousand times more eventful than his, but those differences don't necessarily mean that Goldman's writings should be given less weight, in the context of an article about her. But I suggest this reorganisation with some hesitation, as something for you to ponder, more than something necessarily better.

(If the text is going to stay this short—but I hope it isn't—you need to merge these much too short sections together into perhaps 3 or 4 longer ones.)

Sources: there is a lot of good material about Goldmann on the web, and I think your selection of external links is excellent. But the reader needs more information about the relationship between these websites and your text. To this end, you need to divide the links into a References section (=material used for the article) and an External links section (=further reading). (I don't know if maybe the second category would be empty, I should think you've used most or all of the websites.) Anyway, I think it would lift the encyclopedic quality of the text if you also engaged with your sources in the text itself. Bishonen | Talk 21:10, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the excellent suggestions. Per your advice I'm thinking about reorganizing it into three sections - her life, her politics, and her writing. The current content could mostly go into the section about her life and the 2 other sections will need to be further developed. I added a References section per your advice as well and will try to use more citations in the article text. Kaldari 06:33, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)