Talk:Sam Brownback/GA1

GA Review

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Unfortunately, Sam Brownback currently falls short of a good article is several ways. The first and most serious problem is that is not sufficient broad in coverage. Mr. Brownback was elected U.S. senator 3 times, and U.S. representative once yet there is virtually no information on any of these campaigns - there is probably not too much to say about his two landslide re-elections, but the '96 campaign and the associated primary were seriously contested and should be covered in the article. Along the same lines, about half the article talks about his political positions; this is undue weight. Either more needs to be said about his career or the political positions split into a separate article, or perhaps both.

The other significant problem the article faces is the prose. There are several one sentence paragraphs. If the information is important enough to warrant a paragraph, it should be expanded; if not, these sentences should be combined into related paragraphs. Additionally, the "Religious views" section is very confusing and needs reworked. I would suggest handling the evolution of his views in a chronological fashion.

The article also has a few minor issues that individually aren't enough to keep the article from being a good article, but ideally should be addressed:

Several citations are not properly formatted - a publisher, author, date, and title are required whenever possible
The article has an usually large number of dead links - these should be updated or replaced where possible (but NOT simply removed under any circumstances)
There are only 2 images in the entire article. Ideally, it should have a few more. All pictures taken by the U.S. Gov't are in the public domain, so it shouldn't be too hard to find some more.
Why his environmental record singled out? This should either be supplemented with his record on other issues or trimmed down. Right now it seems pretty POV to push his "poor" environmental record without even mentioning how he is rated on other issues.

Overall, I have to fail this article at this time as I believe it would require significant work to reach the GA standard. I would however encourage interested parties to work on the article and renominate it after my concerns mentioned above have been addressed. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions, ThaddeusB (talk) 02:35, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]