I'd be grateful for any ideas on how to best improve this article. I know we still have some distance to go before this is FA material, but that is the goal. Please advise... -- Visviva09:19, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This article's looking really good, but I'm gonna get nit-picky (to help it get great). Things that strike me on my first read through:
I notice that you've footnoted the issue over the name. It's good to disambiguate, but according to WP:Ref, this needs to either (a) be in a separate section from your references, or (b)be in a section labelled something like "Notes and References". My personal preference would be to see footnotes and references separated; one recent FAC article which did this really well was Rabindranath Tagore.
Why was Korea divided by the Soviets and the Americans? Why did they then try to reunify? I'm sure that this is dealt with in the seperate articles, but for my tastes, the summary is a **The "Provinces and Cities" section seems a bit off. It's basically just a list, and I'm not sure if it adds a lot to the article. Maybe the lovely map could be added to Subdivisions of South Korea and that article could get a reference in the "Geography" section.
Korea's incredible economic growth. It's fairly well-described in the article on the Economy of South Korea, but I feel like South Korea's astronomical economic growth deserves more treatment in the main article. Their rise from one of the poorest nations in Asia to one of the richest gets one paragraph, while some not-as-exciting developments in the past 5-10 years gets three paragraphs.
Some important claims in the "Demographics" section aren't cited. Examples:
There are 378 000 foreign labourers in SK, and half are illegal
This estimate is likely low
85% of Koreans live in urban areas.
Also in that section - A tautological statement: "the annual birthrate has dropped steadily...as a result of people choosing to have fewer children that in the past."
In the culture section, Japan doesn't get mentioned at all. Japan and SK have a funky relationship, given that Japan is a former colonial power, and Korean attitudes towards Japanese culture are similarly interesting. Korea had some severe cultural restrictions on anything from Japan from post-WWII onward - it's mentioned in the Contemporary South Korean Culture article, and since this ban wasn't lifted until 1998, I think it's really significant. In general, I don't think there's enough in this article about SK's relations w/ Japan.
In general, I think that this is a strong article, but the referencing is spotty, not enough facts are cited, and footnotes are mixed with references. The people at FAC are getting pretty stern about this kind of thing, so I think referencing should be your number one priority. This article is looking very good, though. Keep up the good work! The Disco King03:34, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the great comments! Those are mostly very well taken, and I (or maybe someone else?) will get to them ASAP. However, I would have to take issue with the idea of removing the "Cities and provinces" section. This is a fairly standard section in country FAs; see, for instance, India#States_and_union_territories, which is also little more than a list. Again, thanks for the input. -- Visviva03:42, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, one more thing -- what do you mean by separating footnotes and references? There are already separate "Notes" and "References" sections. Should specific citations actually be separated from informational footnotes? That seems complicated, especially since some footnotes combine the two functions. -- Visviva03:44, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For another good example of what I'm talking about, see today's Featured Article, Katie Holmes. References and footnotes separated. This is a matter of personal preference, really, and you'll see other FAs doing this differently (such as, for example, Algerian Civil War), but it's getting to be more in vogue to do it the way articles like Katie Holmes are doing it. My biggest issue with the footnotes, however, is that not all of the important facts in the article are cited. The minor problem is whether they should be divided into a section of footnotes and a section of references or not. (If you keep them together, WP:CS recommends calling the section "Notes and References." Hope that clears things up. The Disco King03:32, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
OK. I've been a bit snowed-in by work lately, but I will be acting on your recommendations soon. Thanks again for your input! -- Visviva05:38, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
