Wikipedia:Peer review/Optics/archive1

Optics

• 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 June 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Previously a start-class article recently expanded ninefold. Interested in GA/FA. Suggestions welcomed. Thanks, Durova^Charge! 04:12, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

• For FA (and perhaps GA - depends on reviewer) you'll have to reformat all refs into {{cite web}}, {{cite news}}, etc., templates. You'll also have to provide "accessdate" and "publisher" for weblinks and news and page number(s) for books. In my personal experience, I first opposed that, but now format all my refs within those lines and am happy about it :). Materialscientist (talk) 06:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Many of the pagenumbers for books are included as chapters since we're doing a lot of summarizing of material. ScienceApologist (talk) 16:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
• What is the benefit of {{Refbegin}} tag? On my PC it only eats some space on the left, which is a drawback for this long article.Materialscientist (talk) 06:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
• You will have to cut material from this overly long article. I am hesitant to do that myself and will only suggest:

  "Societies" - every country has one. No way to keep the web-link list here.

  Replace "degrees" by °

   Done. ScienceApologist (talk) 17:32, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

• I have started tweaking what I find incorrect. Please comment if I missed something. Materialscientist (talk) 06:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
  • What is the current thinking on article length at Wikipedia? The last article I got to GA status was Force which is of a comparable length. ScienceApologist (talk) 16:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
    • Look at the readable prose - there are tools for doing this (used to be on FAC, I think may be on the DYK pages somewhere now). Articles often seem much bigger than they are because the refs and Wikicode take up a lot of space. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:33, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Nice job of exapnsion and generally well done. With an eye to FAC, here are some suggestions for improvement.

• The lead seems sparse to me for an article of this length. While it is the maximum number of paragraphs allowed (four), the paragraphs are fairly short and there seem to be at least some topics that are not in the lead but are section headers (like the sections on the human eye) My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way.
• I also think the third paragraph of the lead goes about the things the wrong way. Current physics understands all electromagnetic radiation in terms of quantum mechanics, it just happens that much of optics can also be expalined in terms of classical physics (Newton's Opticks and all that).
• While this is well-cited in amny polaces, there are still some parts that need more references, for example the Reflections section has several places. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
• Agree that the references need to be more complete before any sort of serious effort at FAC can be undertaken. Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
• Also not sure that all of the refs cited are Reliable sources - for example Ref 18 is to this http://cnx.org/content/m11932/latest/ which seems to be an "anyone can edit" site - not sure this is a RS (there have to be lots of good books on Galileo and his telescope)
• Very nice images, but per WP:MOS#Images, images should 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. Things like File:Wave group.gif are OK set wider, but I fail to see the usefulness of the huge triple figure with all the white space beside it in the Polarization section.
• Per WP:HEAD, section headers should try to avoid repeating the name of the article, but at least five headers contain the word optics. This may be a case for WP:IAR, but I would see if the number of such header could be reduced if at all possible.
• There are several places that have short (one or two sentence) paragraphs, which impede the flow of the article. These should be combined with other paragraphs where possible, or perhaps expanded.
• In Geometrical optics the second paragraph on Fermat's principle appears to use italics to indicate a direct quotation which violates WP:ITALIC and MOS:QUOTE. There are a lot of places that use italics that may be against WP:ITALIC
• Writing is generally decent. There needs to be a bit more flow within sections, if possible (seems like a collection of cool facts at times)

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). Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:33, 30 June 2009 (UTC)