Wikipedia:Peer review/Banner of Poland/archive1

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I would like to prepare the article for a GA nomination. I'm not a native English speaker so any comments on the language will be particularly helpful. — Kpalion(talk) 11:31, 4 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I copyedited the "Banner of Poland" article, and I'll try to keep an eye on it. Your English is pretty darned good, if you don't mind my saying so. Critically speaking: Obviously, the pictures need to be arranged more pleasingly. And more facts would help a lot; in an article about what is essentially a flag, one expects something like a timeline of the changes in it. It might not be too hard to flesh the article out with modern examples. –Milkbreath 23:05, 5 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your review, Milkbreath. I have a few questions though: You only copyedited the first section, so I'm not sure if that means that the rest is simply good or you just didn't go through other sections. I don't know what you mean by modern examples, since the article is about a historical banner that is not used anymore. Obviously, I will be trying to find some more facts and examples of historical variants of the banner, and put them in the article. As for the images, I arranged them as nicely as I could, so if you have an idea how to do it better, please let me know. — Kpalion(talk) 08:22, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I screwed that up. Forget what I said above. Sometimes I don't know where my head is. And "hoist" is correct, obviously. Sorry, must have been tired. I will pull myself together and give the remainder of the article my very best edit job, which is normally at least adequate. —Milkbreath 10:16, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As penance for being such a bonehead, I spent the morning playing with this article in my sandbox trying to arrange the pictures. I think I've got it looking pretty good. I'd like to edit it in over the present page, but I don't want to give anybody a heart attack. Would that be OK? --Milkbreath 15:41, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for not having replied earlier, Milkbreath. I appreciate your help, especially with grammar. I see you went ahead and changed the layout of the images. I don't know if I'm really convinced to this new layout. It looks a little massy to me with images scattered on both sides sides of the page; and please see the automated review below which says "avoid including galleries in articles". Perhaps someone else could come and decide which layout looks better. It's not a big issue though.
One more little thing, why did you change all the n-dashes to m-dashes (with no spaces on either side)? I'm not complaining here, I just want to know, if that's some kind of policy (part of MoS?) that I'm not aware of. — Kpalion(talk) 18:16, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That layout looks ok to me, there were too many images crammed in before, and even with fewer, having them all on the same side makes it look like a wall of images, rather than visual aids, unfortunately. However, I would suggest flip-flopping them -- it's generally a better idea to not cut the header off from the text with an image, so either they should be moved to the previous section so they line up with the headers (a nuisance with the top ones because of the TOC), or just switch left and right for all but the first one. As for the gallery, are any of the images hosted at Commons? If so, add a {{Commons|Banner of Poland}} or the like to the external links section instead. If any aren't hosted there, perhaps try using those ones in the article, so the link will cover the rest, rather than leaving a bunch out entirely.
The dashes may well have an MoS thing to them, I'll leave Milkbreath to find that, but if not, it seems to be the standard usage around here -- ndash with no space for dates, mdash with no space in sentences, and who knows what other dash-based things. -Bbik★ 18:38, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the silence was deafening. I played with the layout for a long time. I think it looks better than the original layout with a column of pictures several pages long right down the middle before the text begins. You have to bear in mind that you can't just make it look good in your browser at your monitor settings. Try it at 640X480 16 colors and watch it morph. I see they took away the pic of the Congress Kingdom banner for copyvio. Too bad, it was needed. As for the gallery, I was aware of the Wikipedia policy on them when I made it, but I think a gallery is justified in an article like this one about a changing visual object—they also don't like pictures all over the page. But a link to an external gallery might be better here. And if anybody wants to have another go at the layout, more power to them. I'm no artist.
The dashes. The MoS accepts both styles, like the practically useless, wishy-washy document it is. What do you want from a volunteer ad hoc committee? It says to leave them alone if they're consistent in the article, but I always make them unspaced em dashes if I think I can get away with it. The reason is that I want the page to be printer-ready and modern-looking, and I often edit section by section, so I can't readily tell when I encounter one which way the writer had them in general. The space-en-dash-space version is a throwback to typewriter days to my eyes. But don't imagine that I have strong feelings about the matter. Lazy personal quirk. --Milkbreath 19:32, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I also think we may treat this article as an exception to the no-galleries rule. Images are too important to understand the subject to move them away to Commons and too many (and some of them too tall) to fit nicely into the text. So we'll have to live with the little gallery at the bottom unless for now. Thanks again for your help, Milkbreath. Do you think I might try nominating it for GA now? — Kpalion(talk) 13:00, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I'd like to see more pictures, though. One of each different incarnation would be nice. --Milkbreath 14:41, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
(Edit conflict) How's that work for image sorting? As for the intro, I'd try and summarize the history just a bit more to at least expand that paragraph, though leaving it at a single paragraph is probably fine, since the article is really about a single topic (history) rather than several (history, politics, architecture, whatever). Having a red link in the intro bothers me, too, especially since it's the only one in the entire article. Is there something else you can link there, perhaps? Or maybe move that link somewhere else?
Aside from those minor nitpicks, sure, go for GA! It's well-written, comprehensive (The only possible issues I can see here are perhaps complaints about how it is almost exclusively history -- are there any symbolic reasons for the colors or eagle that you could summarize in a separate section? Perhaps you could pull out/resummarize the parts about how it's used, when, for who into a separate section, too. Check flag pages for ideas of what they have beyond history, if that helps any.), has images (I assume they're all properly tagged for copyright stuff so they don't get deleted.), properly formatted references... Looks to me like it'll do just fine. Good luck! -Bbik★ 14:42, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I expanded the lead to two short paragraphs, with history summarized in the second one. I tried to make it clearer that this is a historical symbol, not used anymore, which should also eplain why the whole article is only about history. I don't have any more images that I could add at the moment, but I will as soon as I find some. Thanks to both of you, I'll go ahead with the GA nomination now. — Kpalion(talk) 23:09, 19 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Automated Peer Review[edit]

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Davnel03 15:13, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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