Wikipedia:Peer review/Coca-Cola/archive1

Coca-Cola[edit]

I am requsting a peer review for Coca-Cola because it has been recently promoted to Good Article Status and I want to know what needs to be done to promote the article to Featured Article Status. Natl1 18:18, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The most obvious thing the article needs are references. There are a few very well sourced sections and others, which barely have any references.

The lead section includes the phrase "well into the 21st cenury", which should be changed to "to the present day", because the current version implies that the drink stopped being popular after some time in the 21st century.

Done--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 21:17, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It would be cool, if the year Pemberton's French Wine Coca was invented was mentioned

Done.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 21:52, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Coca-Cola did actually contain cocaine at one point per se, which is a highly refined extract of coca leaves and was always far too expensive to use in a mass-market beverage. However, as cocaine is one of numerous alkaloids present in the coca leaf, it was nevertheless present in the drink." These sentences need to be re-written.

Done- I also rewrote most of the paragraph the sentence was in.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 21:02, 11 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is no information on the period between 1891 and WWII or the period from WWII to 1985

A few senteces in the first paragraph of the New Coke section use present tense. If the studies that are mentioned are indeed recent, than they do not belong in that section, if not some kind of past tense should be used.

Done.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 21:24, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The sub-sections "Coca-Cola and local competitors" and "Coca-Cola and Islam" do not belong in the history section. The latter should probably be moved into the criticism section

Done-both sections have been moved.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 23:13, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The "Coca-Cola and local competitors" needs to be turned into prose.

Done--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 15:21, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The prase "is seen as a competitor" should be clarified (by whom, are these brands really competitors)

Done--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 19:41, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The "Coca-Cola formula" section should be expanded

The phrase "is said" in the "Franchised production model" and "Bottle and logo design" sections should also be clarified or replaced

Done--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 19:35, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Bottle and logo design" should cover all notable bottle and can designs

The infromation about the SINALTRAINAL lawsuit should probably be moved into the criticism section.

Done-I moved the SINALTRAINAL lawsuit section.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 23:40, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It would be nice to see some statistics on sales, popularity, brand recognition, etc.

Those are just the first things I noticed, but there are plenty more. All in all the article only seems to cover three parts of the drink's history (early history, WWII, and the New Coke incident), but I'm sure there is more to say.--Carabinieri 19:26, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel Case[edit]

In response to a request on my talk page, as a member of the soft drinks project I printed this out and went through it with a red pen.

To be brutally frank about this, I would not have passed this were I the GA reviewer, and I am strongly tempted to put it on GA review. There are some major problems here.

Here are just the general ones.

Lack of needed references, as noted here already. To give just one example: "In the United States, there is only one plant in New Jersey authorized by the Federal Government to grow the coca plant for Coca-Cola syrup manufacture." This cannot stand uncited.

Tendency to confuse history of the drink with the history of The Coca-Cola Company. The article wanders off-topic a lot as a result. This is evident right at the third graf of the intro, which goes off on a tangent dicussing the company's relationship with its bottlers. That deserves one sentence there at best. Stay focused on the sweet fizzy brown stuff.

Fragmentary presentation of information. There's a brief discussion of the bottles (which creates some confusion ... if the drink was first bottled in 1891, why wasn't it sold in bottles until 1894? This needs to be fixed or explained) in the history section, then a whole section "Bottle and logo design" several screens down in Production. Why not put all that history together in that latter section? And this isn't the only example.

Clunky prose."During the 1980s, Pepsi-Cola ran a series of television advertisements showing people participating in taste tests in which they expressed a preference for Pepsi over Coke" Even if we didn't already have an article on the Pepsi Challenge that could render most of this sentence unnecessary, it's still horribly wordy. "Although endorsed by the company, this version of events is not considered authoritative by many who cite its implausibility as difficult to believe". The implausibility is difficult to believe? Also, note the weasel words here.

And whatever the straw poll on the talk page said, the local competitors section is, to me, better off as a list (and probably a shorter one, as it's terribly crufty)

Not Done-Sorry alot of users put that they wanted the section as prose in their reviews/ or comments--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 20:48, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Coca-Cola has a policy of avoiding using children younger than the age of 12 in any of its advertising as a result of a lawsuit from the beginning of the 20th century that alleged that Coke's caffeine content was dangerous to children". I can't get through that classic run-on sentence without losing my breath.

Done--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 20:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A veritable nest of weasels

It is possible that customers would not have noticed the change if it had been made secretly or gradually, and thus brand loyalty could have been maintained. Coca-Cola management was unprepared, however, for the nostalgic sentiments the drink aroused in the American public; some compared changing the Coke formula to rewriting the American Constitution.

These are all over the place.

Contradicts itself on a key point:

Although numerous court cases have been filed against The Coca-Cola Company since the 1920s, alleging that the acidity of the drink is dangerous, no evidence corroborating this claim has been found. Under normal conditions, scientific evidence indicates Coca-Cola's acidity causes no immediate harm.
Like most other colas, Coca-Cola contains phosphoric acid. One study has shown that this hastens bone loss, contributing to illnesses such as osteoporosis.

So first its acidity isn't a problem, then it is. This needs some explanation, to put it mildly.

The New Coke section. OK, I'm probably not the most impartial reviewer here because I've put so much time and effort into New Coke myself, but the article could use more than a nodding acquaintance with what's written there. Since they don't have much to say other than their connection to New Coke, I made the Mullins and Old Cola Drinkers' articles into redirects a long time ago. There are cited sources there aplenty for quite a few things in that section; feel free to borrow them for this article. The bit about Madagascar absolutely needs to be sourced; it sounds very UL-ish. And I don't see what semantic purpose is served by "volte-face" beyond confusing most readers.
I can also say that reading the New Coke article closely would allow for writing some better history; you can't avoid mentioning Sergio Zyman's role in that.

Overall structural and organizational flaws. There are paragraphs within sections, and indeed sentences within some paragraphs, that I want to take by the hand and introduce to their neighbors, since they've obviously not yet met.

Enough. I would really love to see this article get back to featured status, but it's a very long way yet. It needs to be taken into the shop for a major overhaul. There is potential here, as there once was, but that's almost all there is right now.

Given the subject's overreaching importance within the WikiProject and indeed within the modern world, I think it needs a lot of daughter articles spun off. History of Coca-Cola should be made a real article instead of a redirect, and we could have Advertising of Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Bottle as well. There's just way too much here for one article to embrace. But that doesn't mean the one article can't be a good or featured one.

For research, I heartily recommend not only the Prendergast book already cited a few times (probably the best history of Coke), but the Constance Hays and Tom Oliver volumes cited extensively at New Coke.

I'll see what I can do in the immediate future regarding the more specific and minor things on my printout. Daniel Case 05:02, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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Headline text[edit]

New Coke Section[edit]

Much of this is unreferenced - seeing as claims are made that one person told another person something, there should be a citable reference. People are quoted, a lawsuit is claimed to have been filed -- better cite references for all of this. Squamate 14:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC) ==[reply]