Wikipedia:Peer review/Locally connected space/archive1

Locally connected space

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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 I think that it is good enough to be a good article (!). User:Plclark has given many contructive comments (thankyou) but I would appreciate any help with regards to the following:

a) Is this article good enough to be a FAC or at least a good article? If so, can I nominate it for one of these? If not, what major cleanup is required to make the article good?

b) I would also be grateful for any comments with regards to the improvement of particular sections in the article. For example, the 'theorems' section which according to User:Plclark, needs to be contracted.

c) Any images illustrating particular concepts would be much appreciated. For instance, I would really appreciate an image of the broom space (currently there is no article on the broom space).

d) References and inline citations are ample and this leads me to believe that the article can be a good article. However, if additional citations could be added, I would appreciate someone doing so.

Thanks, Topology Expert (talk) 10:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry to have to say this, but it is a very long way from FAC, and quite some way from good article. Remember that Wikipedia is not a textbook, but an encyclopedia. At the moment the style is very textbook.

The reader needs to be able to verify that everything in the article is a balance of material which can be found in reliable sources. For good articles and featured articles, the reader needs to be able to do this easily. An inline citation is not just a link which says "see the references section" or "see the external links section", but direction to a specific source or sources where the stated fact can be found. I have made a start by adding a notes section, but do not have Munkres to hand, so was not able to supply page references.

At the moment this article has only one main source, Munkres. Although MathWorld is a useful reference, it should ideally only be used as a supplement. How about adding another popular textbook or two?

I agree with Plclark that the Theorems section needs to be shortened. In fact it should probably be removed or renamed and the material in it distributed elsewhere. For example, the article lacks a "definitions" section, where the definition and equivalent definitions are explained. Theorem 1 belongs there. Theorem 2 belongs in the section on local path connectedness.

At the moment the definitions are in the lead. However, the lead is supposed to summarize the rest of the article and give an overview of the subject. At the moment it does neither.

I may add further comments once there is progress on these basic issues. Geometry guy 21:44, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Jakob Scholbach

Thanks for working on the article. I totally agree with the points raised by Geometry guy above. The article is at the moment far from GA or FA standards. I'm personally not a fan of citing guidelines etc., but this article is strikingly not adhering to "WP is not a textbook". The article is basically like a section in some introductory topology textbook. I have no experience with writing articles about minor technical notions such as this one, so it's not clear to me whether most of the content can remain while fitting to the not-textbook idea of WP. From a glance at the Mathematics Good Articles, it looks like Znám's problem is roughly a reasonable model for comparison.

Some more details

The lead is too short, and does not cover the content of the article. As a rough rule of thumb, every section should be compressed into one sentence in the lead.
You give hardly any references. (BTW, MathWorld is not so good a reference, I think, since it usually contains only little information. I count this more as an external link). This is crucial for a satisfying reading experience (and a must have for GA and beyond). Every mathematical claim should be backed up by a precise reference (book / journal with chapter or preferrably page). Phrases such as "as the reader can check" have to be eliminated by providing a reference for the facts in question.
Avoid using "we" where possible (usually this is always possible). Also avoid collocative style such as "Here is a picture", "the previous property may seem strange"
The article is a bit hard to read since the definitions are pretty much dispersed. I would prefer a Definitions section or better a "Motivation and Definitions" section.
Another problem is that the article does not tell whether this is a crucial notion in topology or just a technical thing. I'm not a topologist, but I would expect a statement like "Virtually any space in geometry is locally connected, but there are some pathologies" (I think "Counterexamples in Topology" would be a good reference, btw)
The article is very short on images. (Comb space should be easy, for example). Also the caption of the first image should make clearer the relation to the article's subject.
Examples, 2.: "local property" is not defined nor explained
The picture (in Examples 4.) does not give (at least not to the illiterate reader) the "intuitive idea".
"Applications of local connectedness": what do you mean by "other mathematical fields"? Also, the sentence "Also, in the study of ..." is pretty vague (and should have a reference).
"The Jordan curve theorem is also one of the most famous theorems in topology" -- according to whom? REFERENCE!
Definition in Quasiconnectedness: what does "separation" mean?
The proofs of the theorem are distracting my attention. I would not go as far as saying removing this kind of material would improve the article, but try to find a more inviting way of presenting the facts.
The "see also" section should not repeat items covered in the text.
Who developed all these notions? , i.e. a (small) history section would be good, too.

My overall suggestion is trimming down this article by removing all unencyclopedic content (e.g. replacing wordy proofs of easy/trivial statements by precise references), aiming for a presentation that focusses more on (and thus makes clearer) the interdependence of the various concepts, guiding the reader to the literature. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:03, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]