Wikipedia:Peer review/Evolution of Timpani in the 18th and 19th centuries/archive1

Evolution of Timpani in the 18th and 19th centuries

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I've listed this article for peer review because I am working on it for a class and I would like some helpful criticism on layout and content.

Thanks, Timpguy22 (talk) 04:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As well as introducing the topic, the lede section needs to be a concise version of the whole article. A one sentence defintion of what a timpani is would also help in the lede. Alt text needed. Copyedit needed to fix some odd and wordy prose (examples with rewrites to show better wording): "Music historians trace instrument's history to the ancient times when the drums were used in religious ceremonies." -> "The instrument was used in ancient times in religious ceremonies." & "The horse-mounted timpani of the Ottoman Empire was sure to be one of the sources of inspiration for the European adoption of timpani into their cavalry." -> "Horse-mounted timpani from the Ottoman Empire likely inspired European adoption of the instrument into their cavalry."(this also need a cite) Bad idea to have images right and left of each other at the same line with text squeezed between. Arrange the photographs so people are looking toward the text, not away from it. Words like "huge" and "very" are peacock terms and should be avoided. Other than that, a nice article. Good work! --mav (Urgent FACs/FARs/PRs) 01:33, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: I agree with all of the above comments by Mav. While it is clear a lot of work has gone into the article, more work is needed before it would qualify as a WP:GA or a-class article. Here are some more suggestions for improvement.

Make sure to provide context to the reader - not only does this include things like defining what a tympani is in the lead, but also adding a caption to the lead image so the reader knows what exactly is pictured.
I see no need to have the lead image repeated in the article later - once is enough.
Per WP:MOS#Images, images should genrally be set to thumb width to allow reader preferences to take over. For portrait format images, "upright" can be used to make the image narrower.
The MOS also says images should not sandwich text between them, but the image of the modern horse mounted tympani does just that (getting rid of the duplicate image will help here).
The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself. My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way
In addition to the need for a copyedit, the biggest problem I see with this getting to A class is a lack of references in places. For example several sentences at the end of the sections on Berlioz and Schumann have no refs and need them. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
Passages like This passage is another great representation of how far the timpani had come both compositionally and developmentally since the early days of timpani writing. Strauss’s writing in many ways is far more challenging than that of Haydn and Beethoven, but if it had not been for timpanists ability to come up with new ways to develop their instruments design, passages such as the one from “Der Rosenkavalier” may not even have been written. read like Original Research without a ref, so please add refs.
Section headers do not follow WP:HEAD - this says to avoid repeating all or part of the title of the article in section headers if at all possible, and to avoid repeating section headers in the titles of subsections. ALso avoid the use of articles (the) if possible, and the capitalization needs to be fixed as well. The idea is the reader already knows the article is about tympanis, so the headers do not need to repeat this.
So "Changes in Timpani Composition" could just be "Changes in composition" or perhaps even "Compositions" and the sections on the composers could just use the composer's name, i.e. "Haydn" not "Haydn's Timpani Writing"

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:19, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]