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West Liberty Foods

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I would like to bring this article up to featured article status and would appreciate comments and suggestions on how to bring the article up to that standard.--Dekkanar 18:12, 31 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some sections should be expanded as they are very small (ex: the headings under the Management section) -- Underneath-it-All (As-Salamu Alaykum) 02:06, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thank you for your comments. That sounds like a good idea. I guess I'm just not sure what to expand it with. Do you have any suggestions for particular information or types of information that would be helpful in expanding the management section? Looking at it, I can see now that it is much smaller than the other sections of the article, but I don't want to add information that is not useful to people.--Dekkanar 02:20, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I looked at all of the other GAs on businesses and none of them had a management section at all, so I decided to merege the information in the Management-History subsection into the article's History section and eliminate the management section.--Dekkanar 15:10, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone know if there are any FAs on businesses that I could use as a reference, I can't seem to find one. I'd also like to see what the article's file size is, but I don't know how to do that. I took some pictures of the WL plant today and will add them tonight.--Dekkanar 15:10, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Prose — looks good, but a few things:

  • The three plants owned by West Liberty Foods have different focuses with the West Liberty plant slaughtering, processing, and packing product, the Sigourney plant only processing product, and the Mount Pleasent plant only slicing and packing product. - This sentence seems awkward and lengthy. I'm not sure what it's saying.
  • I performed a light copyedit, but there may ahve been a few errors due to the unfamiliarity. I also only copyedited up until the labor section. Redundancies are usually what the prose voters get us FA writers for. — Deckiller 02:17, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • As a law student, I'm a citation nut. I look at featured articles and think: "These don't have enough citations". I realize that the level of citation I would prefer is impossible here though, so I try not to enforce that standard on others.--Dekkanar 03:05, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I performed a light copyedit, but the prose may still need a thoughough workover from someone more dedicated. Users like Tony1 look for removal of redundancies and whatnot for crisp wording, so I tried to help out a bit with that and remove some examples. It still needs a bit more work before it goes to FA, unless you want to deal with the prose during the nomination and get more feedback that way. — Deckiller 02:26, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Deckiller's edits have helped improve the prose rather significantly, but there's still quite a few redundancies and places where the Manual of Style should be implemented. I'm going to perform some light copyediting as I go over the page, and then I'll let you know anything else I think should maybe be focused on. Ryu Kaze 12:06, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I've made several changes to clean up the prose and reduce redundancies, as well as various MOS changes and rearrangement of links, but one thing I'm noticing that should probably be touched on is that some of the references don't utilize a citation template. Typically, all of your references should follow a standard format. I fixed one or two, but there's quite a few more that need some attention. Still looking over everything. Ryu Kaze 12:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've finished my copyedit of the lead and the first subsequent section. It is my belief that -- since you obviously wanted advice so that you could finish construction of the article yourself -- that advice should be limited to such a demonstration. That being the case, I'll give you all my notes on the article, and hopefully you can use them while continuing to polish up the page. I've tried to implement several of these suggestions into my copyedits so that they can serve as a roadmap for how you proceed from here. If you would like additional advice after you've implemented these ideas, feel free to ask me to take another look. I'll be glad to.

Here's my notes:

  • Watch out for redundancies. The lead introduced us to the company, and then most of the first paragraph in the "Information" section reiterated all we had been told. While people often will not read every section in an article, and the lead is supposed to act as a summary of sorts for the information present, the basic assumption to make when writing an article is that someone will read the lead and then a section. So if you're working on each section with the idea in mind that someone might not read the entire article, imagine that they read the lead and then they'll read the section you're currently working on. They'll only need introduction info once
  • Explain operations better to the uninitiated. Problem sentence: "The West Liberty plant participates in the entire process by slaughtering, processing, and producing finished product, while the Sigourney plant focuses on the processing step only, and the Mount Pleasant plant only produces finished product." Now, you're not necessarily going to explain what all these terms mean or add parenthetical notations (that would be considered messy), but what you can do is use a replacement term that more readily identifies what you're trying to explain. Even though these words are the "proper" words to use in discussion of the subject matter, that could be a little confusing to someone with no familiarity with meat processing. So, if using "packing" could be substituted at one point, use that instead. To many people, "processing" and "producing" might sound synonomous, even though they're not in this context
  • Typically, you'll want to use as few words as possible so that sentences are crisp, while also trying to prevent any unnecessary pauses or full stops, so that things flow. Example: I changed "While West Liberty Foods has grown and received awards since its creation, it initially faced a difficult market for turkeys. It has since experienced an episode of labor discontent among some employees" to "While West Liberty Foods has grown and received awards since its creation, it initially faced a difficult market for turkeys, and has since experienced an episode of labor discontent". "Labor discontent" is, by context, associated with employees, so it isn't necessary to identify them in this sentence, and the pause at the end of the other sentence isn't necessary since both sentences are about issues the company has dealt with, and both can be mentioned in a single sentence without it being too long-winded. It's a difficult balance to find sometimes, but that's really what you want to shoot for: no unnecessary pauses, but no mouthfuls either
  • This kind of overlaps with the previous suggestion, but pay close attention to how you use commas and the word "and". Sometimes it might appear that things are being linked to things you might not intend for them to be, or it can make for run-on sentences. Example: "The R&D facility includes testing space for both raw and cooked product and can create test products from start to finish including initial formulation and final slicing and packaging". Sentences like this can be a mouthful because they lack proper pausing. You wouldn't want to use a full stop here with a period, but you do want to implement a pause to display a change in train of thought. I change the sentence to read thus: "The R&D facility includes testing space for both raw and cooked product, and can create test products from start to finish, including initial formulation, final slicing, and packaging". By the way, using the comma before the final "and" in this sentence wasn't necessary, but I did it because it seemed to be the style you prefer throughout the article. There's no correct or incorrect way of implementing a comma in those kinds of situations, but I think it would really look a little cleaner and maybe be less confusing to the reader if that final comma wasn't used. Me personally, I don't use commas in those situations most of the time so that the reader won't be expecting a pause where one might not really be needed. Typically, if you're just listing (ex: "I like dogs, pizza and lemonade") you won't need that final comma. If, however, you're using descriptions of each item after mentioning them, it's best to use the comma for clarity on the basis of description-to-subject (ex: "I like dogs, which are furry quadrupeds, pizza, which is a flat, oven-baked bread covered in cheese and tomato sauce, and lemonade, a beverage that is made from the juice of lemons")
  • You won't need the external link to the official site at the bottom. The company template box already has that taken care of
  • Watch out for the placement of links. They should occur where the terms in question are used first, except in the case of proper names. For instance, I've turned the second use of "Iowa" into a link to the article about the state, because the first use was in the title of the Iowa Turkey Growers Cooperative. I noticed a lot of links showing up when they should have been a line or two before, or much earlier in the article
  • Be sure proper capitalization is followed, even with words that are linked
  • In cases where you're going to use the name of something commonly abbreviated, use the full name first and then have the abbreviation follow in parentheses. For example, "polymerase chain reaction" should occur first, and then be followed by "(PMR)". Also, you don't have to link both uses. Just the first
  • Identify which currency you're operating with. If you use the dollar sign with regard to the US dollar, indicate that it's the US dollar by using "US$" instead of just "$". Also, in cases of currency in general, link the first use (ex: US$; I've already taken care of it in this case, though) and use the currency which applies best to the article. In this case, it's a US company so you'll obviously stick with using US currency
  • Standardize the formatting of your references

I hope all of this helps you out, and like I said, feel free to have me look the article over again later if you'd like. Good luck with it. Ryu Kaze 13:31, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • The prose still needs work. As Ryu said, we're not going to do the entire article for you ^_^ — Deckiller 15:15, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Avoid additive terms like "additionally", "moreover", and "furthermore" when necessary — having more than 5 in an article may cause some objections. Also, try to avoid words like "currently" and "over the years", they don't add much to a sentence. — Deckiller 15:16, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • "efore people apply, they must spend their own time completing a 16 hour food safety training course through Iowa State University." You can probably live with out the "spend their own time", since if they're going through a course, they're taking the time to do it. Or, if it needs to be clarified, "Before people apply, they must complete a 16 hour food safety training course through Iowa State University." — Deckiller 15:21, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The three plants combined can convert 4.5 million turkeys, raised exclusively by ITGC members, into product annually" - seems awkward; perhaps move the "annually"? — Deckiller 15:28, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for all of your feedback. I think this is a lot more than I was expecting there to be to deal with. It will probably take me some time to address all of this. Thank you though for your time.--Dekkanar 12:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, this is probably the most thorough peer review I've ever seen. While it is a lot for Dekkanar to deal with, kudos for restoring my faith in the process. -- Zanimum 14:13, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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