Belgium national football team

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I've listed this GA-rated article for peer review because I would like someone to screen it on text parts or sentences with a less encyclopaedic tone. Ultimately, I want to nominate this article for featured status. So, the main issue is identifying rather poorly written text, but suggestions on how to improve the text or other aspects of the article are also welcome.

Thanks, Kareldorado (talk) 20:03, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Cirt

Comments (having stumbled here from my Peer Review)

1. Thank you very much for your efforts to contribute to Quality improvement on Wikipedia, it's really most appreciated !!!
2. NOTE: Please respond, below entire set of comments, and not interspersed throughout, thanks!
3. The next two attempts to reach the finals of a major tournament were also in vain. = unsourced factual assertion.
4. and in the last they shared the 1999 Kirin Cup with Peru. = unsourced factual assertion.
5. previously, the badge depicted a yellow lion on a black shield, an emblem similar to the escutcheon in the national coat of arms. = unsourced.
6. was engaged as godfather, and also other (ex-)footballers of foreign origin in the Belgian top division participated. = unsourced.
7. several of these Olympians later appeared in the senior team. Even though the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012 were not reached, the popularity and belief in an upcoming major tournament continued to rise again. = unsourced.
8. Very nice job with in-line citations for the factual assertions in the Footnotes sect, nicely done here !!!
9. Lack of balance in lede sect, last paragraph is two-sentence-long-paragraph. For article of this size, recommend four paragraphs of 4-5 sentences each.
10. Recommend posting to WP:GOCE to request a copyedit from the WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors.
11. Suggest placing neutrally-worded notice to talk pages of relevant WikiProjects linking to this Peer Review and asking for additional comments.
12. Overall article could be more concise with more succinct wording. I see there is already a daughter article at History of the Belgium national football team -- perhaps try to split off some info there, and summarize, back in this article, instead.
13. Similar to lede, some imbalance in size of paragraphs in article body text. Some are short, others quite long. Recommend trying to increase balance and help reader with overall article flow, break up some big paragraphs, try to get them to about 4-5 sentences each, max.
14. Mascot/logo - two-sentence-long-paragraph deserves its own entire subsection? Suggest expanding this one to one full paragraph, or upmerge somewhere perhaps.
15. NOTE: Please respond, below entire set of comments, and not interspersed throughout, thanks!

I see quite a lot of research and effort has gone into this. Quite well done so far. Good luck, — Cirt (talk) 23:04, 19 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your support and for indicating these working points, Cirt, in upcoming two weeks I will try to get most of them sorted out. Regards, Kareldorado (talk) 20:41, 23 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Your comments - by number - that I still have to do away with: 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 9 / 11 / 12 / 13(sort of, but larger paragraphs in History section, following comments of the reviewer below) / 14 Kareldorado (talk) 20:41, 23 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Parutakupiu

I must congratulate you Kareldorado for your work here. This an excellent, thorough and widely comprehensive article. Still, here are some issues I spotted, together with prose-improving suggestions:

•  Done "Belgium's national team have competed in three quadrennial major football competitions." – "Competed" in "competitions"? Maybe "... have participated in three quadrennial major football competitions." or "... have competed in three quadrennial major football tournaments."

A bit shameful, but such combinations can always occur... Kareldorado (talk) 19:39, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Denied "The squad has been known as the Red Devils since 1906." – Shouldn't the "the" be in uppercase?

Deliberately not, in plain text never, compare it with Peru's "la Blanquirroja" - maybe we should use lowercase in the infobox, but people have argued against that. Kareldorado (talk) 19:39, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, leave it be. I confirmed it is correct to have it in lowercase within the text. Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Done The "History" section is almost too long, and it appears too fragmented with so many short paragraphs. Since it's not that long enough to introduce sub-sections breaks, I would suggest paragraphs with related content be joined to give it a more cohesive and organised look.
•  Done Refs. 8 and 16 are not properly formatted in the Citations list (bullet items are not displaying as such).
•  Done Remove "against them" in "... the traditional derby against the Netherlands was kept alive with unofficial matches against them." as this is perceived from the previous "against the Netherlands" part.
•  Done "wry" does not seem to be a familiar term for non-native English speakers; at least, I was not aware of its precise meaning. Could you replace it for a more common one?
•  Done "The next two attempts to reach the finals of a major tournament were also in vain." – I would say "were also unsuccessful".
•  Done "... World Cup finals stages... " – "finals" or "final stages".
•  Done Add a comma after "1973" in "In 1973 the denial of a match-winning goal...", and after "final" in "After reaching the Euro 1980 final..."'.
•  Done Why is "golden age" between quotation marks in "Although the greatest talents of the Belgian national team during this "golden age" were retired from international football by 2000...", when previous instances don't have it like that?
•  Done Remove "stayed" in "The veteran Dutch coach remained only stayed six months...".

Also a bit shameful, I think once I inserted "remained" when I thought the verb went missing. Kareldorado (talk) 19:39, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Happens to the best. Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Done "... but lost the first FIFA-recognised game between the two countries in 1905 1–4 in overtime." – That last part would read better as "...in 1905 by a 1–4 scoreline after overtime."
•  Done Use the acronym RBFA in "Since 1981, the Royal Belgian Football Association emblem...", since it was already used before this instance.
•  Done Remove extraneous "for Oranje" in "The overall balance favours the Netherlands, with 55 wins for Oranje against 41 Belgian victories."

Perhaps I was not clear: my suggestion was to remove "for Orange" altogether, leaving "... with 55 wins against 41 Belgian victories." Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In fact you were, but at first I thought it was a bit confusing. I applied the suggestion now. Kareldorado (talk) 04:51, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Done Unlink "quarter", "national stadium" and "European continent".
•  Done Ref. 140 should come before the em-dash.
•  Done The [G] note could and should be integrated in the prose.
•  Done "Belgium could not yet distinguish themselves during their first five World Cup participations, in which they failed to progress past the first round." is too complex/pompous. It should simply be "Belgium failed to progress past the first round of their first five World Cup participations."
•  Done "... and in 1970 they won their match against El Salvador (3–0), their first World Cup win." → "... and in 1970 they won their first World Cup match against El Salvador (3–0)."
•  Done "World Cups" or "World Cup finals" in "From 1982 until 2002, Belgium reached six successive World Cup...".
•  Done It should be "second-round match" in "In the 1990 FIFA World Cup, Belgium dominated their second round match...".
•  Confirmed Is the expression "phantom foul" cited directly from the source? If not, it should not be used at all and replaced for a more neutral expression.

Yes, these were the author's words. Maybe I should add "(sic)" ?. Kareldorado (talk) 20:02, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the use of "[sic]" applies here. I was just not sure if it was a direct citation, hence my asking. Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it applies either - usually a writer uses [sic] to indicate a vocabular or grammatical mistake was made by the original author, right? I hope that it is clear enough that I try to show the story from two sides, and not just things that flatter the national team: the odd gold medal win, Ceulemans' offside goal in 1986, journalists who described the jersey as "the ugliness record" and the footballing nation as "deadly sick"... :) Kareldorado (talk) 04:51, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Done The sentence "16 years later, Belgium automatically reappeared at UEFA's national team tournament as co-hosts." should not start with numerals per WP:NUMNOTES.
•  Done "In six Summer Olympics between 1908 and 1936, football tournaments for senior men's national teams took place." → "Football tournaments for senior men's national teams took place in six Summer Olympics between 1908 and 1936."
•  Done "Belgium's 1920 Olympic squad was given a bye into the quarter-finals where they won 3–1 against Spain and reached the semi-finals where they beat the Netherlands 3–0." should have commas after "quarter-finals", "Spain" and "semi-finals".
•  Done "The first live coverage of a football match of Belgium's national team was given on 3 May 1931..." – Not sure a coverage is "given", rather "was made" or "occurred".
•  Done "The 8th final against the United States..." is wrong and misleading. You surely meant "The round-of-16 match against the United States..."?

I sure did, and recognise that it is misleading but thought it was okay since I received no remarks. In my mother tongue, Dutch, tournament stages are more explicitely stated as portions of a final: with us "semi-final" is literally "half final", likewise we talk about "8th final" and "16th final".

I know, it's the same in Portuguese ("oitavos-de-final", not "ronda de 16"), but not so common in English, at least from my experience. Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

•  Done The ((reflist|20em)) makes the citations look to tight. Maybe the 30em width is more appropriate?
•  Done Ref. 85 is dead since 21 October.
•  Done Some citations display the website, others display that website's publisher, and others display both. In between, most are wikilinked, but a few instances are not. Consistency is key!
  • Hey Kareldorado: to use the ((cite news)) template for newspapers, you can put the newspaper name in |newspaper= even if the source is the online (not printed) version of that newspaper; that's what the |url= parameter is for. Under |publisher=, you have to put the name of the company that owns that newspaper; if it is the same as what you put in |newspaper= you can omit the |publisher= parameter. Parutakupiu (talk) 19:21, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense, Parutakupiu, thanks for that. A more tricky one perhaps: I have a website that provides scanned old newspapers from various newspaper companies... What is the logic then? "publisher" for the company that published the scans? Kareldorado (talk) 20:04, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, not sure, Kareldorado. But if that website provides you all the data required to use the newspaper-specific form of ((cite news)), then I guess you can do that; the only exception is that the url does not point to that newspaper's online page (if it ever had one). If not, just use ((cite web)). Parutakupiu (talk) 21:04, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Not sure. We shall see. As for the images used, you may be questioned about the licensing of most of them, especially the older ones using the "life of author + 70 years" tag, despite their authors and/or sources being unknown.

Yes, it is likely that I will receive comments on that, Parutakupiu. For the "unknowns", I double-checked them but there could no author be found. Until recently, in that case the rule was "date of publication +70y", but this remains arbitrary. I hope none of the images used in the article are regarded as unacceptable use. However, it doesn't matter what I think is acceptable use or not. Kareldorado (talk) 18:20, 8 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hope this helps. Give a "shout out" when this goes to FAC, so I can again provide my feedback. Good luck! Parutakupiu (talk) 20:51, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It sure does. Great thanks for the widely contemplative and razor-sharp analysis, I couldn't expect anyone else to do so! If you ever pass by I'll invite you on a Belgian specialty (or two), but since we're building an encyclopaedia here I'll first try to sort these things out, one by one. Kareldorado (talk) 19:17, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Chocolate-covered waffle... *drool*. Parutakupiu (talk) 20:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]