Wikipedia:Peer review/Complete list of United States Supreme Court cases/archive1

Complete list of United States Supreme Court cases

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for July 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it was requested that I do so when I nominated it for featured list status here. As was explained to me, the article has the following problems:

1. Prose. It features professional standards of writing. Not done - virtually no prose at all.
2. Lead. It has an engaging lead section that introduces the subject, and defines the scope and inclusion criteria of the list. Not done - no lead other than the repitition of the title of the list.
3. Comprehensiveness. It comprehensively covers the defined scope, providing a complete set of items where practical, or otherwise at least all of the major items; where appropriate, it has annotations that provide useful and appropriate information about entries. Done - although it would need to be checked.
4. Structure. It is easy to navigate, and includes—where helpful—section headings and table sort facilities. Not done - nothing other than a series of numeric links which non-experts cannot relate to or find any context for.
5. Style. It complies with the Manual of Style and its supplementary pages. Not done - several WP:MOS breaches.
6. Visual appeal. It makes suitable use of text layout, formatting, tables, and colour; it has images if they are appropriate to the subject, with succinct captions or "alt" text; and it has a minimal proportion of red links. Not done - a morass of numbers with no additional information.
7. Stability. It is not the subject of ongoing edit wars and its content does not change significantly from day to day, except in response to the featured list process. Done - can't see major problems here.

I personally like the way the list is right now (that's why I nominated it to be a Featured List). It's minimalist but effective in allowing quick navigation to any of the over 10,000 cases that the Supreme Court has decided. But apparently I'm in the minority there. However, I can see that maybe it needs a better intro. One more thing was that the list has been moved from "Complete list of United States Supreme Court cases" to "List of United States Supreme Court cases" which has caused a few problems because there's already an article at that location. Anyway, I nominated the list in part to get feedback but peer review may have been a better place for that so I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions. Thanks, Cdogsimmons (talk) 13:30, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

• Please read the directions - "Please do not include any images, such as done/not done templates with tick/cross graphics" Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 15:04, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure of which directions you are referring to. The section with the images was left as a message on my talk page by an Administrator and is a direct quote. Apologies again if I am ignoring rules. --Cdogsimmons (talk) 00:53, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
    • (note: no longer a direct quote since images removed).--Cdogsimmons (talk) 16:27, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments by Samuel Tan (talk · contribs)

Summary: indeed, minimalist, but confusing at first glance

Per WP:SAL, "Lists should begin with a lead section that presents unambiguous statements of membership criteria."

Your lead section is unambiguous because it is phrased awkwardly. Read plainly, you seem to be saying that your list of lists is obtained from the Reports, which is not true because the Reports do not contain the complete list of lists. You can make it less ambiguous by zooming in to what your list actually contains.

Your list contains the volume numbers from the US Reports. So you can simply begin the lead section with "This is a complete list of volumes from the United States Reports."

Doing so will comply with the suggestion in WP:SAL to start each complete list with a sentence like "This is a complete list of Xs."

Right now, the list is confusing at first glance because it looks like a list of integers. Make it clear that it is a list of volumes, and it will be vastly improved.

I don't have any comments on the structure of the list itself, although some editors may want you to divide it into sections by starting numeral. You may want to consider that, or wait for comments from other editors.

That's all! :)

-Samuel Tan (talk) 15:50, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I rewrote the intro to the list.

This is an unusual list. Standing alone, it has no encyclopedic content. It is not, for example, a list of the capitals of countries in Africa sorted by population, or a chronological list of the queens of Belgium, or a ranking of the world's 428 richest people in the year 1977. It is, and is intended to be, a meta-list of U.S. Supreme Court decisions organized in the same way the Court's reporter of decisions organizes them -- by including the decisions in successive volumes of United States Reports. As such, some of the featured list criteria don't apply, and some only apply trivially.

I disagree that "nonexperts" have no context for the links on this page. First, I doubt any nonexpert will come to this list without seeing any individual article about a Supreme Court decision, or any smaller list, or knowing what United States Reports is and how it is organized. Armed with that small bit of information, the nonexpert will understand that this is a list of links to the tables of contents for each individual volume.

Second, anyone who undertakes any legal research project -- lawyer or not -- will know that legal research is tedious because multiple searches through multiple types of information are required to obtain the information he seeks. To the lawyer, these searches are second nature (or facilitated by tools like Westlaw); to the nonlawyer, he understands that he needs patience in order to arrive at the information he seeks.

For these three reasons, I don't think that this list should be "featured" in the sense of exhibiting to the general public how useful Wikipedia is. I like the list -- a lot -- exactly the way it is, and don't want it to go away. But I find it difficult to evaluate this list against the criteria for featured lists because the criteria so obviously don't fit this list.

---Axios023 (talk) 03:53, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. The list is not exactly encyclopedic in a conventional sense but is extremely useful for the creation of new and important encyclopedic articles. Perhaps I have exhibited some frustration with the Featured List criteria because I also like this list for those reasons and the criteria don't seem to apply. Another reason for why I may seem a little confrontational is that I have the bar exam in less than a month and I don't seem to be able to stop editing wikipedia!--Cdogsimmons (talk) 16:27, 2 July 2008 (UTC)