Talk:Al Jazeera Arabic/GA1

GA Reassessment

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

I will be doing the GA Reassessment as part of the GA sweeps on this article. H1nkles (talk) 21:29, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:LEAD the lead is supposed to be a comprehensive summary of the article. The lead in this article is very short and certainly not comprehensive. It should be expanded to cover all the subjects in the article.
"It is widely believed internationally..." Who believes this? Watch weasel wording. "Considered by some..." Again who considers this? Can't claim credibility by using such terms. Provide polling data, expert evaluation, and the like to support these assertions.
The "Viewership" section is in need of work, including a citation at the end of the first paragraph.
The first paragraph in the "Staff" section is a stub, please expand or combine.
There is no referencing in the "Staff" section. This needs to be referenced.
I added another ^{[citation needed]} template to the assertion about Al Jazeera reaching out to Pakistan in the "Future Plans" section.
"On 27 January 1999, several Algerian cities lost power simultaneously, reportedly to keep residents from watching a program in which Algerian dissidents implicated the Algerian military in a series of massacres" This is duplicative statement consider either expanding the info or removing it.
There's no need to wikilink country names per WP:Overlink. H1nkles (talk) 21:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In the Iraq sub-section of the Controversies section the first two paragraphs have no cites. This should be referenced.
The Israel sub-section of the same section is not referenced at all.
The second paragraph in the United States sub-section should be referenced.
"In light of this allegation, Al Jazeera has questioned whether it has been targeted deliberately in the past–Al Jazeera's Kabul office was bombed in 2001 and another missile hit its office in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, killing correspondent Tareq Ayyoub. Both of these attacks occurred subsequent to Al Jazeera's disclosure of the locations of their offices to the United States." This statement is (for the most part) repetitive of a previous statement, please remove or expand on unredundant info.
There are four competitor entries that are unsources as well as the statement about the languages that Euronews broadcasts in.
There are several references to websites that have no publisher, author or accessdate. Author may be hard to get but each site should have a publisher and the accessdate is required per WP:CITE. This should be updated.
Cite [74] has three websites strung together, can this be broken out into separate citations? Why are they listed together?
Refs [18], [5], [39], [55] and [78] are dead links that will need to be repaired.
There are a couple of unnecessary (in my opinion) external links, US-Arab Relations, Arabic in Graphic Design: Al Jazeera's Cartouche, are two that jump out as being off topic.

(outdent) At this point I feel there is enough here to warrant a hold and delisting if work is not done. Please feel free to contact me at my talk page if you have questions regarding this hold. My primary concerns are as follows:

Referencing: There are many unreferenced allegations that need to have citations. There are also several dead links that need to be repaired. The citation formatting is wrong on many references and should be improved.
MOS compliance: Weasel wording, overlinking, and honestly the article has a very pro-Al Jazeera bent to it. I don't really want to go into POV issues on this because it's likely a land mine but it bears mentioning that the article portrays the news agency is a very positive light. I won't hold back keeping it as GA on this issue, that's just my opinion.
Prose: duplicative information is sprinkled throughout the article. The writing is barely passable, I made some copy edits but the article could use a good prose review.

I'll hold the article for a week and see what improvements are made. H1nkles (talk) 22:48, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]