Gabriel García Márquez

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I've listed this article for peer review because it has recently passed GA and the editors are keen to take it to FA. The editors are part of an active project: see Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast ( talk) 02:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC) reply

Thanks, Wassupwestcoast ( talk) 02:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC) reply

• For FA-quality articles, it is customary to only include general references in the References section (i.e. books and major journal articles completely devoted to the subject), while listing newspaper articles, minor journal articles, and citations for books in which the article subject is mentioned but not the main focus, only within the notes section. For an excellent example of what I'm talking about, please study the notes and references sections of the Emma Goldman article. Along these lines I would move references like the New York Times and Film Quarterly articles out of the References section and just list them in their entirety in the Notes section (like you have with the BBC Mundo article). A good rule of thumb is that if the source is cited more than once, it probably belongs in the References section, while if it it's only cited one time, it's probably better to list it entirely in the notes field. The idea being that the References section should act as a sort of general bibliography for people doing research on the subject. Hope that makes sense. Kaldari ( talk) 21:22, 2 April 2008 (UTC) reply

• It is not customary to list the place of birth in the parentheses with the date of birth. It should instead be in the narrative text of the lead section. Also, I'm not sure the last paragraph in the lead (about where García Márquez lives now) is appropriate for the lead (unless, perhaps, it were augmented with a summary of what significant work he is doing currently). Kaldari ( talk) 21:28, 2 April 2008 (UTC) reply

• A better picture for the infobox would be nice. See if you can find anything CC-licensed on Flickr. Kaldari ( talk) 21:29, 2 April 2008 (UTC) reply

This was a very interesting article to read and it has been a pleasure watching it develop over the past few weeks! Here are my comments to help improve it still further:

Revision, expansion, and deletion

• The lead needs to summarize the article and include references to all of the major sections of the article per WP:LEAD. See WP:BETTER#Lead section for further hints on how to write a good lead.

• Too much of the early life is cited to primary sources (that is, sources that are presumably autobiographical). Think of it this way - if you told the story of your own life, wouldn't you massage the truth a bit? Autobiographies are not the unvarnished truth - they need to be supplemented with well-researched biographies.

• The "Life" section needs to make mention of when Garcia Marquez wrote his works so that the reader can put his writings into a biographical context. See Jane Austen for an example of this. The life briefly discusses her works. The page doesn't discuss her novels yet (we're still working on that section), but the "Life" section still mentions them in passing.

• The "Life" section skips from 1975 to 1999. What happened in between?

• The article should either focus on describing the works individually OR focus on them by genre OR focus on describing the style and themes of Garcia Marquez's works. Doing two of these things, as the article is currently trying to do is too much - there will be repetition of ideas and the article will become too long. When a writer has written a few books (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft), it is easy to write about each work, but when a writer has written more than a handful, it becomes more difficult. I think the best decision for this article would be to either write about Garcia Marquez's works by genre (e.g. Anna Laetitia Barbauld) or by style and theme (e.g. Balzac).

• The "Film" section needs to be expanded since he is the author of screenplays.

• I would delete the "Political views" section and integrate any important political events he was involved in into the "Life" section (and it looks like there are several). Since people's political opinions are not stable, these sections rarely work out well.

• The "Legacy" section is thin - it needs to be explained and filled out. Remember, this is for readers who know very little!

Prose

• The article needs a good copy editor - these are some examples that I found while copy editing the "Life" section. I also did some copy editing myself. However, the above issues are more important.

• Colonel Márquez was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War and was involved in founding the town Aracataca, near Colombia's Caribbean coast - Can you link "liberal" to an appropriate page?

• He was well-known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year García Márquez was born, which he emphasized by a searing denunciation of the murders to Congress in 1929. - I can't quite follow the "which" clause.

• Like many of her sisters, she had distinctive folk beliefs: "All treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." - Is this quote complete?

• He was not exactly the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter, especially since he was a Conservative and had the reputation of a womanizer. - Can you link "Conservative" to an appropriate page?

• However, during the riots on 9 April 1948 in Bogotá the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house burnt down. - What riots? Explain in a phrase.

I hope this helps the editors develop a plan of attack for the article. Awadewit ( talk) 23:43, 2 April 2008 (UTC) reply