FanPost

Browns History Project


Comrades: I've been trying to improve the Browns' history page on Wikipedia during the offseason and am hoping to enlist a coalition of the willing to make it even better. If you've got a free minute (actually, more like an hour if you want to read the whole thing) I'd be grateful if you could go over there and review the thing. I'd like to elevate it to what Wikipedia calls a "good article," which requires a peer review and involves a lot of nit-picking. I'm trying to model it on the History of the New York Jets, which has been deemed a "featured article" -- one step above good article status.

The article is already far better than the crap-taculous History of the Pittsburgh Steelers and miles ahead of the History of the Baltimore Ravens, so we can at least take heart in that. But it still needs a lot of work. The main things I can see it needs are:

1) It needs to be a lot shorter. The Browns history article is about 17,000 words long, while the featured Jets article is about 10,000 words long. The Browns' history is longer than the Jets, but I think reviewers will want it to be something ilke 15,000 words at the outside. I'm working on ways to shorten it now, but any help in that regard would be appreciated. Combining descriptions of losing seasons and/or non-playoff seasons might be a way to get rid of some of the verbiage. I'm also thinking about cutting it down by summarizing some material about Modell's move and putting an expanded version on a separate page.

2) Is there anything really important that's missing? This isn't a down-to-the-last-detail telling of the team's history -- it's an encyclopedic treatment -- so there are plenty of things that don't warrant inclusion. I think most if not all of the significant events are in there, but I may well be mistaken.

3) Are the facts correct? A thorough fact-checking would be great. But keep in mind that per the standards of Wikipedia, we've gotta source everything we can from reliable secondary sources, i.e. books about the Browns. Newspaper articles are acceptable sources, but they are considered second-hand primary sources, and secondary sourcing is preferable. Right now, everything in the article (outside of the lead section, where it isn't necessary) is sourced somehow.

4) Does anybody have pictures that they own copyrights for that show a) the Browns in the late 1960s, b) the Browns during the Kosar years and Bill Belichick, c) fans protesting Modell's move and d) anything else where there's a clear lack of pictures in the article? Wikipedia won't allow you to just upload stuff you find randomly on the web because of copyright issues. Which means putting up photos that we've taken. Ideally they should be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which gives anyone the right to use it. We have some pictures from the Browns' early history that come from the Cleveland Press, which donated all of its photos when it went bust.

Thanks in advance, and I'm going to keep plugging away on this thing. The link is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cleveland_Browns

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