Talk:Comparative law and justice/Oman

Mid-Semester Comments

You're off to a very good start on your Wiki, but I do have some suggestions to help you improve your work. In terms of content, there are a few things that could use further clarification--for instance, you could say more about the Shura. I'm glad to see that you are already addressing some of the issues about how government rhetoric may deviate from reality; this is a grading criteria for the final Wiki (see the grading rubric on the last two pages of the Wiki assignment handout for more). Your images are good, though they could use captions--and you might want to add a map. There are a couple of places were you need to fill in a bit more, but concentrate on the upcoming deadlines before you go back and fill in the older sections.

The problems that your Wiki has, however, are more about style and formatting than about content. So here are some comments about what you may wish to improve:

• Your Wiki is still not signed; be sure that you are logged in, then replace the timestamp at the top of the page with four <~>
• While using quotations is 100% ok, make sure you are not using so many quotations that your Wiki becomes like a patchwork quilt instead of your own work. Also make sure you weave the quotations into the body of the text so the style fits nicely with your own.
• While the lists of facts and numbers are OK for now, you will want to turn at least some of them into narrative text. You might also consider using bullet lists or tables to clean some of that up.

  *Where your text looks like this

it is because you have a few spaces or a tab in front of the line of text; delete those spaces and your text will go back to normal.

• You are doing a good job of using references, but you are not always using the best sites. It is of course 100% fine to use sites that are not on the recommended source list, but those sites might be less reliable. For instance, anyone can edit Wikipedia just as easily as you are editing this site right now. Do try to use the recommended sources first and only turn to other sites if you can't find information there--one good rule of thumb for using Wikipedia is to use the sites it references instead of just referencing Wikipedia itself. Using the Omani government website is great! But it does also bring up those rhetoric vs. reality issues...
• When you provide a reference, you need to provide a complete bibliographic citation and not just a URL. See the sociology term paper guide for more help with that.

Keep up the good work! Mlarthur 15:26, 18 March 2010 (UTC)