Wikipedia:Peer review/British Empire/archive2

British Empire

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A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for November 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because there are some disagreements about the right level of "interconnectedness" of the various paragraphs. Most of the article has been written with self-contained paragraphs, where the first sentence of the next paragraph does not directly follow on from last sentence of the previous. The interwar period section, however, has been written in the style where each paragraph is connected to the previous, beginning with words or phrases such as "Nevertheless...", "A similar struggle...", and several uses of "also".

I support (and am responsible for) the former style, but another editor views this as resulting in "choppy" or "bitty" paragraphs. This editor prefers interconnected paragraphs, and is responsible for the interwar section, but I view these "connection phrases" as unnecessary and not adding any information for the reader.

I would be interested to know what outside editors feel about this.

Thanks, The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick^t 03:21, 28 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review is not for dispute resolution. I would try a WP:RFC on this. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:31, 2 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. We're not trying to resolve a dispute per se. We are trying to understand what the recommended style is for good and featured articles, and thought that a peer review would help us understand this. We have a difference of opinion on this, not a dispute. We are not asking people to discern the truth, falsity, verifiability or unverifiability of anything, just a neutral assessment of the quality of the article. If the answer is that it comes across as too choppy, or the paragraphs do not flow from one into another, then we need to change that. Otherwise we don't. The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick^t 01:12, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification. It is on the Peer Review backlog, so someone will get to a review in the next week to ten days, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:44, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You might try taking a read through User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a to see if it is helpful in this regard.—RJH (talk) 22:45, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: To answer your main question, I found the prose generally to be flowing and pleasing. I'd suggest eventually heading to FAC with this article, and I don't think your prose would be a big issue there after a bit more polishing. The one prose issue I have relates to sentences that exceed my run-on threshold. An example is "In 1902, Japan and Britain signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance which allowed Britain to leave the policing of the Pacific to Japan but the alliance fell apart in 1922 after the Washington Naval Conference when Britain opted to side with the United States." You might improve this by adding a comma between "Alliance" and "which" and another between "Japan" and "but". Better, I think, would be to break the big sentence apart. Maybe this would work: "In 1902, Japan and Britain signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which allowed Britain to leave the policing of the Pacific to Japan. However, the alliance fell apart when Britain opted to side with the United States after the Washington Naval Conference in 1922." I think you could improve the prose by tracking down any other over-complex sentences and dividing them. I have some other mostly minor suggestions for improvement, as follows:

MOS:IMAGES says, "Do not place left-aligned images directly below a subsection-level heading (=== or lower), as this sometimes disconnects the heading from the text that follows it. This can often be avoided by shifting left-aligned images down a paragraph or two." It also says, "Images should be inside the section they belong to (after the heading and after any links to other articles), and not above the heading." About a half-dozen of the images in the article violate either one or the other of these guidelines.

The Manual of Style suggests that date ranges such as 1852-1877 use en-dashes rather than hyphens as connectors. Also, it suggests shortening the second set of four numbers in a range like this if the first two numbers are the same. Thus the range should appear as 1852–77. Here and there throughout the article are other hyphenated ranges and a few ranges that could be compressed.

Page ranges also get an en-dash.

On my monitor, the five-column "Notes" section looks very strange. It's much more readable in a four-column layout. I have never seen five used in any article.

The spacing in the Notes is odd. For example, "Madisson 2001, p.98,242" needs a space between "98," and "242", and I think one between "p." and "98" is usual as well.

If you go to FA, you will want to add the place of publication to the entries in the "Reference" section. "Yale University Press" would become "New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press".

The Contested Vocabulary subsection of WP:MOS advises against using the word "whilst". I remember seeing it in the article in at least two places. "While" is the better choice.

Numbers expressed in imperial units need also to be expressed in metric units and vice versa. Thus, in the lead "14 million square miles" should read "14 million square miles (36 million km²)". I see a few more expressions in the article that need conversions.

Digits should be tied to the units they modify with a non-breaking space to prevent separation by line-wrap on monitors. Please see WP:NBSP.

The MoS generally recommends spelling out "percent" in regular text rather than using the symbol, %. Exceptions include complex lists of demographic data and science articles in which the symbol is the norm. For this article, "percent" would be better.

Some of the citations are incomplete. For example, see 164, 165, and 167.

Numbers from one to nine are generally spelled out. Numbers from 10 on up are usually written as digits in Wikipedia unless they start a sentence. These rules apply to constructions like 19th century as well. The article as it stands has some one way and some the other.

I think "slave trade" should be lower-case in the second section subhead.

MOSNUM generally recommends against full-date formatting. I ran a script to unlink these. I think there were only three.

I don't know enough about the content to give any expert advice or to weigh in on debates about which reliable sources are the best reliable sources. As a general reader, though, I can say that this seems to be neutral, well-supported, and broad in its coverage.

If you find this brief review helpful, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. As you know, that is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 05:07, 12 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thankyou very much for this review. The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick^t 14:30, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe all the above points have now been addressed. The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick^t 03:31, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]