# Talk:Mary Fortune

I was asked to provide some feedback on this article, in preparation for a possible FA nomination.

Overall, the article looks outstanding, and is nearly ready for FA nomination.
Consider alphabetizing the Categories at bottom of the article: not required for FA, but every little bit helps.
The Australian Journal was a weekly magazine that borrowed from the successful London Journal.   Borrowed what?  articles or style?
 It attempted to attract readers by heavily featuring locally-written fiction  "heavily featured" sounds awkward. Maybe delete "heavily"?
  "The fortunes of Mary: authenticity, notoriety, and the crime-writing life". Women's Writing.  In sources, article is capitalizing all words of the book/journal title; but only capitalizing first (non proper name) word of article title.  Some FA reviewers are picky about that.  I use the Title Case (all words initial cap) for all titles, so I've never had an issue.  It is not a WP MOS requirement, but it may make FA go smoother if you use initial cap for all words in all titles (except prepositions and a/an/the).  PS:  WP MOS says that the capitalization of a source title does NOT have to mimic what the source itself uses, so e.g. if the source newspaper only capitalized the 1st word, the WP editor can safely capitalize all words - that is not a violation of MOS.
 p. 197,219.   p vs pp error.  There is a tool called "Ref Check" or "Show Ref Check" you can run to identify such errors.  It appears in the "Tools" menu after you enable it.
location London  There are five book cites; four have "location" field, one does not. Some FA reviewers insist on uniformity and will want all books or no books to have a location field. I always omit "location" for all sources, just to be safe.
 ISBN 9780140123029 article has some ISBNs with hyphens, some without.  Some FA reviewers will insist on all with or all without.
Police records of George Fortune  Consider inserting "son" ... many readers will quickly scan only  the pics/captions, so they should be self-contained, if possible.
Quote box Information is required by the Russell-street police respecting... WP MOS discourages template:quote box  quote boxes.  Instead, articles should use template:blockquote.  See MOS:BLOCKQUOTE and MOS:PULLQUOTE
Prose quality: overall, the prose is excellent quality, good grammar, easy to understand.
I think if you address the above items, the article should be ready for an FA nomination. If you want to be double-sure, you can list it for a Peer Review at WP:Peer Review.  To get the Peer Review done in a week or so: do this:  (1) add the article to PR list; (2) look thru other articles listed there and find and editor that may be interested in this article; (3) post a note on their Talk page asking if they want to exchange Peer Reviews ... 99% of them will agree.
Before starting the FA nomination: double check two things: (a) all images have valid "free to use" licensing information; and (b) all citations have correct page # and the source material supports the body text.  The latter is key: the rule in FA is the first article a nominator nominates must be heavily scrutinized by reviewers to make sure the citations are valid. It will be bad if a reviewer finds that a cite is not consistent with the body text.
Some reviewers may remark on the reliance on a single source: Sussex.  That is inevitable with minor/obscure topics, so it is not a problem.  But, you may want to inoculate the nomination by mentioning the paucity of source material in the introductory paragraph (that you supply at the time you create the FA nomination).
One thing to bear in mind: no matter how perfect the article is, FA reviewers will always find some suggested changes, so be prepared for that.  If you want the FA review to go smoother, some nominators will implement all suggested changes (that are sensible and not incorrect), even suggestions they find  distasteful.  That is a choice you will need to make: some nominators have no problem pushing-back against suggestions, but it can delay the nomination process.  Your call.
Great article ... good luck!  Noleander (talk) 13:17, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Great advice from Noleander. It's not unknown to have one reviewer make a suggestion, and another later suggest the opposite! Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:01, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
In fact, I'll make one such contradiction, by saying that I don't think the box quote should be changed into a block quote; it's not a "pull quote", which is a chunk of article text made big and catchy like in a magazine, but instead, functionally, an "illustration" making up a shortcoming in the article's available visual material. Using them this way is quite common in literature articles, eg Dracula#Reception. Everything else, though, I think is very wise!~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:44, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

This article seems to keep using incorrect country names. Previously it used Northern Ireland, despite the fact that it never existed in their lifetime. Now it's using Canada a lot, despite the fact it wasn't Canada at that time (not until 1867.) Montreal and where she moved was Lower Canada during this time range and Quebec didn't exist at all during the time she was there (Quebec City did however.) Just because the source is apparently using modern terminology (which calls some questions on the source, but not interested in going there), doesn't mean we should. We should be using the country names and references of what they were at the time being discussed, not modern names that didn't exist then. Canterbury Tail talk 00:59, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

@Canterbury Tail I’m a bit confused by your edit summary saying that Canada didn’t exist at the time. Admittedly I’m no expert on Canadian history, but Wikipedia tells me that the Province of Canada was established in 1841. In any case, it’s not like I’ve linked at any point to the article about the modern country of Canada. I’ve just said that she lived in a place known as Canada, which I don’t think is inaccurate. So I don’t really think we need to change every instance of “Canada” to “Lower Canada” throughout the article. For instance, the country of Australia didn’t exist at the time either, so technically she lived in the Colony of Victoria, but we can still refer to Australia as that was the name that the colonies were known by.
I also strongly disagree that the sources are using terminology incorrectly or that this casts doubts on their reliability - the sources I’ve used make it very clear what the names of these places were at the time. The mention of Northern Ireland was my mistake, not the source’s, and I appreciate you correcting it. MCE89 (talk) 01:30, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
To expand on this slightly, my worry about this change in particular is that we don't actually know when Mary Fortune moved to Canada. My understanding is that before 1841, you're correct that the name should be given as "Montreal, Lower Canada". But if it was between 1841 and 1849, the name should probably instead be "Montreal, Canada East, Province of Canada", because the name Lower Canada was not officially in use during those years. Given that we don't know the true date, my sense is that it would be most accurate to just say that she moved to "Montreal, Canada" some time during her childhood. Let me know what you think - alternatively we could just change the sentence to She moved to Montreal as a child...? MCE89 (talk) 04:16, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Honestly yes, I think you're probably correct there. Do we know it was Montreal that they moved to? I'm perhaps too hasty, but I got the impression from the article originally that it was clearer when she moved but it has evolved a lot since then. Canterbury Tail talk 18:17, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Yeah looking over again, you're completely right and I'm wrong. I'm going to bow out of the article that you've worked so hard on. Canterbury Tail talk 18:39, 15 October 2025 (UTC)