Talk:Murder of Tammy Alexander/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Zaostao (talk · contribs) 19:12, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I am going to review this article soon, but just from a brief reading, I believe WebSleuths.com could be de-linked as I have doubts as to whether it will have its own wikipedia article anytime soon and the red link is unattractive. I also noticed a few typos, one that stuck out was in the 'Identification' section; "Such ceremony" makes little grammatical sense in the context, with possibly 'Said ceremony', or 'Such a ceremony', being more appropriate.

• In the lead, "the confession was never considered credible", 'never' is needlessly contentious, it would have been very dismissive of investigators to have 'never' considered Lucas' confession as credible. 'Not' would be preferable.

• "Alexander was buried in a cemetery in Dansville a village in the southern part of the county" has some issues, she was not Alexander, she was buried as Jane Doe. The sentence is also lacking a comma. 'Alexander's unidentified remains were buried in a cemetery in Dansville, a village in the southern part of Livingston county.' or 'Alexander was buried as Jane Doe in a cemete...' would be superior.

• "The body, later named "Caledonia Jane Doe" or "Cali Doe" by investigators, was fully clothed. It showed no signs of sexual assault". These two sentences could merged to improve the flow of the passage considering the fact she was fully clothed is relevant to the absence of any sings of a sexual assault.

• "died from severe hemorrhage" is a typo, 'a severe hemorrhage' or 'severe hemorrhaging' is correct.

• "In 2006, after the 2005 exhumation of the body, Paul Chambers, a recently hired investigator in the Monroe County, New York medical examiner's office, which handled that aspect of the case since Livingston County, where Caledonia is located, lacked the resources, asked for and received permission to send her clothing to the Palynology Laboratory at Texas A&M University, where it was checked for plant pollen trace evidence." needs re-writing, 9 commas in a 3-line sentence makes said sentence difficult to read.

• Headings 'Pollen evidence' and 'Other details' have chronological order errors, ideally things regarding the case which happened in the 2000s should appear after such events as the description of the murder weapon and the primary suspect, as well as Henry Lee Lucas' confession which occurred well before the 2000s. Possibly headings 'Other details', which would include description of the murder weapon and possible suspects, and then 'Exhumation' with a subheading under Exhumation for 'Pollen evidence' would create a better chronological structure to the article.

• "The Dougherty Funeral Home, in Livonia". Livonia needs to be disambiguated. Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

@Zaostao: Just made the recommended changes to the article. Hope it's what you're looking for! --GouramiWatcher^Talk 16:54, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

@Gourami Watcher: Feel free to challenge my reasoning for these suggestions, I am not a professional or expert reviewer nor do I have much knowledge of this article's subject, I am just trying to help clear the backlog of GA nominations. Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• From re-reading, "which continued to investigate the case, processing thousands of leads and tips from the public" could be merged to make "her case was well publicized by the Livingston County Sheriff's Office, which continued to investigate the case and processed thousands of leads and tips from the public" as the current "her case was well publicized by the Livingston County Sheriff's Office ... processing thousands of leads and tips from the public" does not make sense.

• "Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas at one point confessed to the crime, but like many other such high-profile crimes he claimed to be responsible for, the confession was not considered credible" should be "...but, like many..., the confession was not considered credible.". Again, it's just an issue of the the sentence not reading correctly.

• "a village in the southern part of the county." should be changed to '...southern part of Livingston County'. There is no harm in reiterating what county the crime took place in.

• CPA needs to disambiguated in "a CPA and artist". I assume you mean certified public accountant but certainty is better than assumption.

• The numbers in "Cali was believed to have been between the ages of 13 and 19 (born sometime between 1958 and 1967)" seem to be off, if the crime occurred in November, 1979, born in '58 would make her 20/21, and '67 would make her 11/12. I imagine it's just a typo and you meant 1959 and 1966.

• "5 feet 3 inches" and "five feet eight and five feet nine inches tall" could benefit from hyphens, 5-feet-3-inches, 5-feet-8 and 5-feet-9-inches or five-feet-three-inches etc. You should also add metric conversions to the suspect's height.

• " in the Monroe County, New York" could be shortened to "in the Monroe County" to give a better flow to the sentence.

• " including those of unidentified corpses", after the description of websleuths.com, could be removed. It is superfluous and makes the sentence rather clunky. Possibly the description of websleuths.com could be removed too, but that is discretionary.

• " "I'm truly glad for the closure," she said. "But it hurts to know she died that way. It's terrible, nobody should have to be shot and dragged out into the woods." " has punctuation errors, the comma after closure should be moved to replace the full stop after 'she said'.

• I haven't checked all of them, but some of the references seem to link to non-existent articles. You'll have to find alternative sources or replace the current sources with archive.org/web/ links of them.

Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll work on these changes and get them adjusted into the page within the next few weeks, as I'm busy with college. Thanks!--GouramiWatcher^Talk 02:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Gourami Watcher: I removed some suggested changes as I don't think they're helpful in retrospect, sorry for not being active on this for the past while, forgot I started the review. Zaostao (talk) 22:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

@Zaostao: It's my fault for not jumping on the changes. I've had some writer's block lately and haven't gotten to making the changes yet. Hopefully by next week, I'll get everything finished.--GouramiWatcher^Talk 19:18, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Non-reviewer comments

This review has been open for over three months now, and Gourami Watcher hasn't edited the article since April 3, nearly three months ago. My suggestion, Zaostao, is that you close the nomination as unsuccessful. Once Gourami Watcher has been able to make the fixes you've requested, the article can be nominated again at GAN. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:43, 1 July 2016 (UTC)