Wikipedia:Peer review/International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry/archive1

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry

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I've listed this article for peer review because…

I have done a lot of work on this article in conjunction with Scotty450. It has made huge strides and is definitely deserving of a greater status than start class. A 17 page article is usually more than start class.

Any criticisms or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Salamakajakawaka (talk) 01:40, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: While it is clear a lot of work has gone into the article, more needs to be done before it would pass WP:GAN. Please note that this is a review, not an assessment (I would ask at the WikiProject: Chemistry for a re-assessment and note that it is a matter of article quality, not quantity of pages). Anyway, here are some suggestions for improvement.

The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article and per WP:LEAD can be exapnded to three or perhaps four paragraphs.
As a summary, 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. However, the current lead has this on the NAOs There are fifty four National Adhering Organizations and three Associate National Adhering Organizations.[1] which is not really repeated in the body of the article (as an example)
In order to be a true summary of the article, my rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way
References generally come after punctuation, without a space, so fix things like These commities all run different projects which include standardizing nomenclature[3], finding ways to bring chemistry to the world[4] , and publishing works.[5][6][7]
Many of the current references are incomplete in that they do not include enough information - Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE
Most of the sources used come from IUPAC itself and so are primary sources - where possible these should be supplemented with independent, third-party sources - see WP:RS and WP:V
Watch WP:OVERLINKing - for example Chemistry is linked twice in just the lead, and a total of six times in the article. Or the red link to the International Union of Chemistry appears at least three times in the article.
I believe that Kekule's involvment and the roots of IUPAC almost certainly come from the 1860 Karlsruhe Congress, which should be linked. As it is this is just muddled The need for an international standard for chemistry was first addressed in 1860 by a committee headed by German scientist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. This committee was the first international conference to create an international naming system for organic compounds.[8] The committee and the conference were not the same thing, for example.
For an article on IUPAC, there is a lot missing - what year was it founded? All it says in the article body now is This prompted the creation of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)[missing period?] Since this time, IUPAC has been the official organization held with the responsibility of updating and maintaining official organic nomenclature.[10] (it does say 1919 in the lead, but again the lead is a summary - needs to be in the main article body too)
Or where is IUPAC headquartered?
The writing needs to be cleaned up in several places - for example this is just fragments During World War II, IUPAC by the allied powers[11] IUPAC had little involvement during the war.
There is little on the history of IUPAC since the end of WWII
The images of the various books are all copyrighted and thus must be justified under WP:FAIR USE to be included here. The official policy here is WP:NFCC and I fail to see how any of the book covers shown meet the policy. The logo of IUPAC is OK, the logo for the International Year of Chemistry is probably OK, but how does seeing the book covers increase the reader's understanding of IUPAC?
I also wonder about the criteria for including books - surely IUPAC has pulished many more books than these over the years? See WP:RECENT and WP:WEIGHT
I think it is fine to decribe the books that IUPAC publishes and I would go into more detail on the Orange / Red / Green / Gold / Blue and other color books (many of which have their own articles already), but I am not sure about including the other books. I think it is fine to say IUPAC publishes series of books and to decribe these series, but I am not sure the current level of detail on most of the books is justified - are these books notable? See WP:NN for guidelines on notability.
The article uses "current" or "currently" where it should use the current year or "since year". Time flies and if the article is not updated, current becomes quickly outdated. At leadt if it says "the 2010 officers are" or something similar, the reader in 2011 or 2012 knows they are out of date (whereas "the current officers are" seems OK even when it is not).
The toolbox in the upper right corner has some good suggestions - for example, make sure either British or American English is used consistently throughout.
There are multiple links to disambiguation (dab) pages that need to be fixed.
The external links include at least one dead link
There is no alt text for those who cannot see the images in the article.

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 _><>°^° 17:15, 11 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

More comments

I added alt text to the image of Kekule - this is an example of how to do it.
I see the images of the book covers have been removed, which is good in terms of copyright worries.
I still do not understand the criteria for inclusion of books in the article. On what basis are the current set of books described listed? It looks to me like it is just the most recent ones, which (as noted above) runs afoul of both WP:WEIGHT and WP:RECENT.
I would also look at Wikipedia:Notability (books) - as noted above, the color books seem to meet this standard for inclusion, but the rest are doubtful.
If books are included, then more information about them is required. Most of the books do not include the authors or main editors, do not include year of publicatiopn, and do not include ISBN information (though this might be better in a footnote).

Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 20:29, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Overuse of tables to hold prose in ==Publications== section; I'd use a more free-form and standard approach. Too constraining as-is; as a reader I just wanted to skim past those tables. Current projects section is pretty much a list. Post-WWII history is missing. --mav (Urgent FACs/FARs/PRs) 01:14, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]