Folks, I've finally completed a total rewrite to this article. Rather than do the editing on the main article and cause it to be in an unfinished state for long periods, I wrote a draft and polished it their. The draft can be found at Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft.

I have worked on this in sections. The edit history can be found at:

• Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft/Lead
• Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft/Background
• Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft/History
• Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft/Titles summary
• Talk:USA PATRIOT Act/Draft/Controversy

On a personal note, had I known the time and effort that this was to have taken me, I might have chosen an easier topic! There is information out there on the Partiot Act, but much of it is distorted or biased by either supporters or detractors. Another issue is that many of the titles just aren't documented, so I've read the entire Act on my own, aided by Patrick Leahy's section summary, CRS's summary and many other sources that do actually talk about the Act. This took me over two years to do, in which time I neglected editing other articles.

Along the way, however, I've learned a lot. I have a better understanding of how the U.S. Government works, how laws are created, how the U.S. Code is put together and how to read Acts of Congress. I've also learned how to use THOMAS and that the U.S. has this great service call the Congressional Research Service, which does an invaluable job of summarising and providing info about U.S. legislation.

I am now taking this article to peer review to get the comments of others. It's obviously too long (160KB) but I'm not sure rightly how to summarise it further. If I could get feedback, that would be great :-) - Ta bu shi da yu 09:38, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• This is quite an effort, amazing work, you deserve a barnstar for this. I'm almost speechless. Which is why it makes it hard for me to say that I think this article needs to rewritten from scratch in a summary style. It should probably not exceed 80kb, at 160kb it is an enormous burden on the reader to make it through the article (prose alone approaches 40 pages in MSword). All the research work is done, but I think it will be much easier to start with a clean slate than trying to amputate parts of the article until all you have left is a ragged mess. Either that, or just publish this as its own book! Jeff Dahl 04:35, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hmmm... I'm not sure I could stomach rewriting the article again... :-) This effort took me 2 years! If we could summarise the article, the main bits we could do would be the history section. There isn't really any way to summarise the titles sections further than I'm aware of - they are already summaries of articles about the title. Maybe we could create an article Titles of the USA PATRIOT Act and summarise this... not sure how you would do this though. - Ta bu shi da yu 07:14, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR _t 13:47, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, When I picked an article to peer review, I no Idea what I was in for this one. I've read the first 1/3rd of the article, need to let my mind clear before I read the rest =-). My initial thoughts are very impressive. You've done a good job of remaining neutral on such a controversial bill. Congrats. I hope the article can remain in its objective state. Well Done. Davemeistermoab 04:13, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! - Ta bu shi da yu 04:32, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

O.K. I've got about 2/3rds now. I still say the article is amazing. But would suggest breaking it into sub articles (moving re-authorization, titles, etc. to sub-articles). I don't think the article needs to be purged, but it is very long and most people (myself included) couldn't read the article at one sitting.

Davemeistermoab 04:29, 23 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]