Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Malaysia (Re-review)
Malaysia [edit source]
We like some peer review thanks for Malaysia. This article was restored and reworked on for about two months. Now it's in their former glory. 
|Si Plebius Dato' Joe ang Pinoy CUN|IC Kill 
| 06:29, December 10, 2011 (UTC)
- Give me a day or two and I'll get this done. --Writey 16:11, December 10, 2011 (UTC)
| Humour: | 6 | Just to preface, this would be 8 if the article didn't drag on so much. Literally, I was bored of reading about Malaysia in the last 4 or 5 sections, any humour they may have had was lost because I was just so tired of reading the same article for so long.
CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM IS THE NAME OF THE GAME! Hello, I'm Writey, I'll be your Pee Reviewer for today, if you have any problems with the review... too bad, I'm in power here. Hokay, so lets get down to business. Firstly, giving it a score of 6 for humour is realistic at the moment, however I do believe that with a bit (maybe a lot) of reworking it could be a 9 or 10. Your main problem is the formatting and structuring letting down the humour, I'll talk more about how to improve the structuring later. The article is held back by the structuring, all the jokes necessary to get a 9 or 10 are "there" but they just lack any set up or execution. It's like a Cream Egg with no chocolate, nobody wants to just eat all the rich gooey stuff in the middle on it's own, but with the chocolate around the outside it's delicious. For this section I'll just give my thoughts on paragraphs which best illustrate the problem with the humour in the article, the entire article suffers most severely from poor structure and formatting, so I'll discuss that as a single entity in the formatting section. Moving onto the humour side though, the article seems to be very cluttered and "meme-y" at points, there are a lot of unnecessary elements throughout and random instances where you bring up thing completely unrelated to the title, what has Captain Obvious got to do with Malaysia for example? Is he Malaysian? Introduction: This is a good example of what I mean by cluttered and "meme-y", the quotations at the top are just unnecessary and don't add anything. I don't mind quotations when they directly serve the purpose of the content, but these just seem to be there for the sake of getting a cheap laugh at the start of the article. In my opinion, they should be deleted. So should the banners below them, they just clutter up the screen and make it look messy. Putting them there actually made the introduction a little less funny for me, I kept being distracted by them and just on a personal level, the bright yellow hurt my eyes! However, the actual introduction is good. There are a few red links and typos which should be gotten rid off but I liked the humour. I would, however, suggest two things, first that starting your article with a "penis" joke may not be the way to endear your reader to you. Second, just a general point to improve the article, but it would be nice if you elongated your summary of what Malaysia is, it's kinda important for the reader to have a decent understand of the subject before you dive in and start making jokes about it. Lots of the jokes throughout seems like "in jokes", which is fine if you explain them and make them a little more "out", a middle class Westerner like myself needs some help to get them. The sidebar as well is fine, I'd just change the two "National Flag" and the "Coat of Arms" to the their real life variants. It's not really funny having those pictures there and personally I was interested in what they really looked like. I've illustrated the points in the intro, but they go for the entire article. Corruption in Malaysia: What is PDRM? I understand it stands for "Polis Dibenarkan Rasuah di Malaysia", but what the hell is that, how is it funny, what am I supposed to think? There a numerous references to it through that section and I don't get any. Through the entire article there are a number of in jokes which I don't get. Are you Malaysian? Because I would hazard a guess you are with the amount of humour that only a Malaysian would get. You need to appeal to a wider audience through the article. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it or find it funny, some of the bits are hilarious, but there are far to many jokes that I can imagine a lot of people simply wouldn't get. Therefore they are just wasting space and making the article unnecessarily long. Whats a Pelancong Angkasa? It sounds like an exotic variety of bird. Whats a Hari Raya? Angkasawan? Pontianak? Momok? I could go on but you get the idea, there are literally dozens of times you refer to things I have no idea what they. No matter how funny what you are saying may be, you need to consider your audience, and a confused reader is not a happy reader. And wading through a massive article like the one you wrote here was not fun when every paragraph I had to Google about 5 terms. Just generally throughout the whole article... set up! Back story and set up is so important. 90% of the time a list is not funny. Jokes need a set up, unless you're Tim Vine you can't just stand up and churn out one liners and expect to get laughs. You need to rewrite all those lists into comedic set ups, whether they be misdirection, play on words, whatever. They need, they deserve, to be more than just a list. |
| Concept: | 9 | Not a lot to say here,the concept is strong, the headings are genuinely funny and have a lot of potential for humour. It's good that an article about a country (which could be quite boring) has an original take on it which facilitates satire and parody. For example the section, "Intellectual jobs in Malaysia" was hilarious, it concept was really strong and it was a great set up for humour. Yep, concept is definitely not a problem with this article. |
| Prose and formatting: | 2 | Generally pretty horrific, for a Grammar Nazi like me to read it was torture, I had to hold a cup under my eyes a few times as I wept sad tears of blood that the English Language was so brutally murdered - Gitmo ain't got nothing on you. I went back and forth on this score between 1 and 3 but settled on a 2. I am so frustrated that the formatting lets down such an otherwise great article. This is your fundamental problem, it underpins every element of the article. There are a number of problem here that apply to the whole article and that I will deal with individually.
Length: The article is very, very, very, very long. It's the first article on Uncyclopedia that I've ever had to use the scroll bar to scroll with rather than mouse wheel. I pasted it into word to see its word count and it was almost 17,000 words, it needs to be shortened! I admire you for writing such a long piece but I can't help but be annoyed. Has someone told you longer = better? Well, it does in some areas, but not in writing. Short and dense is much better than long and sparse. Ok, this is getting weird, let's get back on track. It needs to be condensed, a lot. Many of the paragraphs are boring after a while, and some, like "Transportation In Malaysia" just feel like they can be removed all together. Enjoyment of a single article for me is curbed at around 2/3,000 words, which I'm sure is higher than most and only if the writer keeps up a consistently high standard of writing. Such a long article (regardless of if it was amazing or terrible) is just going to tire the reader, for that reason I'd suggest merging current paragraphs, cutting some and shortening others, aim for about 1-1,500 of dense writing with well picked jokes. You seem to repeat yourself a lot in paragraphs, for example, saying (in the 5th paragraph of culture) that Malaysians receive pathetic pay and then saying again they take up all the low earning jobs is very similar and implied by the first statement (just a side note here but we're talking about Malaysia, not sure that the prawn joke works, District 9 was set in South Africa). You can condense that entire paragraph to something like: You seem to have deleted (blanked?) this paragraph now (weird seeing as I thought it was pretty strong) but I'll leave my version in anyway so you can compare yours and mine and get an idea of the changes I would make. "Recent statistics show that Malaysia is primarily inhabited by Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Thais, Burmese and Nepalese, Malaysians are slowly being fazed by the government in a scheme designed to combat laziness and wastage in the country. These new natives possesses almost every job the Malaysian economy has to offer now; they work in restaurants with pathetic pay, they work in construction jobs with pathetic pay, and some offer their bodies to the police so their fellow man can continue to work for pathetic pay. The Bumiputras (pronounced Boo-Me with an S), the men who work in restaurants and on construction sites and on the police force watching the “new Malaysians” work for high pay constantly complain about the new natives. The Bumis complain that the new Malaysians are stealing all their jobs, raping their daughters – that right is reserved for horny uncles only – and committing numerous crimes. The Bumis don’t want to do any of the hard work themselves and are too afraid to blame fellow “true” Malaysians so they blame the honest, hardworking immigrant. But after all, the Bumis were there first, right?" I'm not going to give you a definitive plan of how to condense it all but I'll try and guide you in what I feel could be done:
Grammar, links, sloppiness: Seriously, the article is redder in places than a picture of a strawberry, covered in blood, wrapped in Rose petals, being developed in a room under a red light. In comparison there is relatively little blue. A wise old sage once told me that links in an article are like the veins in the human body, only a few ever go anywhere worthwhile... err.. I mean, they provide the infrastructure of a wiki. In your article there are many broken links on words, and at one point, under "wonders of Malaysia" there is a whole swath of broken pictures. It's just sloppy really, its not a difficult issue to fix and would give the article a much better impression. In terms of Grammar it is also poor at times. Spaces get missed out everywhere, even in the introduction. Capital letters are erratic to say the least. Punctuation clearly forgot it's script and makes random cameos when it feels like it (unrelated hint: more than 2 exclamation marks just looks tacky). The sentences are sparse and often end abruptly, before the punch line of the joke can actually be fully elaborated on, and at points you seem to make up your own words, call me ignorant, but what does "bannination" mean? I would say you badly need to go proof read the article, maybe its a product of its length, but there are many mistakes! It's impossible to give a good score when something so fundamental as grammar is wrong. This issue isn't particularly hard to fix, you just need to go over the article and fix it up; I'd even do it for you, if it wasn't 17,000 words. Aesthetics: Maybe this point is slightly pedantic, but It's an ugly article and its hard to read. The paragraphs are all over the place and just the whole structure of the article looks messy and unappealing. I know it's not a beauty contest, but if you were served the most delicious Lobster Thermidor in the world with tomato ketchup strewn carelessly around the edge of the plate what would you say? Looks are important, mainly your images are weirdly placed and your paragraphs are really erratically spaced, but you need to fix up the article so its more appealing to the eye. |
| Images: | 5 | Two problem here (3 if you count that a bunch of the images don't actually work), but unfortunately more problems of formatting, I've tried to give an independent score for the images regardless of the formatting but it's difficult because the placement, size and symmetry (how all the images together looks as whole) is just as important in my opinion as their content. Sometimes there are no images for a few sections, and then there are a vast cluster. The actual content of the images is mostly just very average, and placement lets down even the good ones. First I think you should evaluate which images actually work and which don't, a number of the images simply aren't funny. By choosing relatively bland images you have to justify them being there with a humorous quote. A lot of the images I really couldn't work out why they were there. Some of the images were ones I would except to find on BBC News, not Uncyclopedia. I gave a 5 because images are there, and they do sorta contribute averagely in parts. There are no striking images or hilarious captions though and their placement is odd. You need to re evaluate the images and captions and place them better to get this up. |
| Miscellaneous: | 6.25 | Not really sure what to write here, I've covered pretty much everything I need to already. I don't really believe in scores for a purpose such as this. Use the score just an indication as how far away from being great (10) you are. Don't get hung up on the score, its nothing but an indicator. So, I've just given you the average of all your previous scores here. |
| Final Score: | 28.25 | First, if there are any points in any of the sections you want me to clarify then message me on my talk page. Ok, lots of potential, but really let down by the formatting. Humour is good, concept is great, the whole article could be hilarious. If you take my feedback on board and make the changes I suggested then feel free to message me on my talk page and ask me to look at it again when they are done. If it's significantly better (which, don't get me wrong, will take some work) I see no reason why it shouldn't have a chance for a highlight. When you rewrite it just think, "How can I cut this down?" on every single sentence you read. |
| Reviewer: | --Writey 23:06, December 14, 2011 (UTC) | |