Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Ghost Dance/archive1

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[edit] Ghost Dance

Shameless self-promotion??? Yes. I have done most of the work on this article as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America and would love an opportunity to have it looked at critically. Featured article-hood is my goal and I am extremely interested in what other users think this article is lacking, I shall say no more. Tuna027 05:24, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: in the image captioned "Miniconjou Chief Big Foot lies dead in the snow," the Chief doesn't look very dead. He appears to be sitting up... Exploding Boy 05:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: hadn't given it much thought, looks dead and frozen to me. If you or anyone else insists then it should be changed. Tuna027 06:00, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

My actionable objections (I've decided I don't like "oppose" ;)

• No in-line citations. You don't have to over-do it for things that you feel any generic read will give you, but some places demand it. For instance: "this has been documented by letters between tribes and by notes that Jack asked his pilgrims to take upon their arrival at Mason Valley"--which researchers have gone over this? One other rule of thumb: any sentence with a number, including years, should have a citation.
• Due emphasis. There is a long section at the end about rejection by the Najavo which strikes me as almost wholly tangential. Yet the Dance's spread beyond the Paiute is only given a couple of sentences under the Wounded Knee section.
• The "History foundations" (should be "Historical...") should be reworked. Precursors first and then a description of why the Paiute were particularly ripe for it; and you should start the Paiute section with a sentence of that exact sort: "There were a number of factors that made the Paiute susceptible to..."
• Birth of the Ghost Dance should be Smith's or Wovoka's visions. Having a "Birth of..." and "Historical foundations..." section doesn't seem right.
• "History most vividly notes this Sioux sect of the Ghost Dance which displays extensive distortion toward millenarianism, thus driving it away from the religion’s core principals." This last sentence of the first paragraph is syntactically quite awful and it's also the only time in the lead you call it a religion. Was it a religion? If that's the scholarly consensus you should say so in the first sentence.
• There's some other mangled syntax and diction ("foraging subsistence methodology") and this needs a third-person copy edit.

All in all, good work so far but still a lot of work that needs doing. Marskell 17:09, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to look this over Marskell. I'm gonna put some more time into it soon. Tuna027 22:37, 11 May 2006 (UTC)