Wikipedia:Peer review/Charles Babbage/archive1

Charles Babbage

This peer review discussion has been closed.
This vital article is being improved as an entrant in the Core Contest: Wikipedia:The Core Contest/Entries. This peer review is part of the process, which runs from 0.00 hrs UTC 15 April to 0.00 hrs 12 May 2013. All editors are invited to offer suggestions for article improvement.

On behalf of the Core Contest judges, Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:14, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I can't think how I missed spotting this until now in the list for PR. I'll read it tomorrow and come back to this page with any comments. At first glance I think I'm going to enjoy this. More soonest. Tim riley (talk) 19:32, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Comments from Tim riley

This is a very well-written article, well laid out (with one exception, to which I shall come later) and in prose that is a pleasure to read. It gets a bit technical here and there (deltas and Ds and thereabouts) but I doubt if you could make these bits more accessible to innumerates like me without dumbing down.

• General
  • –isation/ization etc – inconsistent forms within article. As this article uses English rather than American spelling I'd go for the usual (admittedly unscholarly) modern English "–ise/isation".
• Headings and paragraphs
  • There are a great many headings and sub-headings; I think this spoils the flow of the article without adding all that much. For example, you could combine the first three sections into "Early years" or some such title. See Pierre Monteux, Richard Nixon, Charles Darwin – all FAs that follow that layout. You also favour short paragraphs to an extent that I find breaks the flow of the prose from time to time: for instance (and by no means an isolated one) the first two paras of "Background on mathematical tables" would be better as one.
• Lead
  • As a rule uncontentious info in the lead that is repeated with citation in the main text does not need a reference.
• Birth
  • "In 1808, the Babbage family moved into the old Rowdens house in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby St. Michael's Church." – a lot of information here – rather too much, perhaps. What does it tell us about Babbage to know the name of the house or the fact that his father was a churchwarden?
• After Cambridge
  • "his father's attitude to his early marriage" – first we've heard about a marriage; details needed at the appropriate point in the narrative
  • "he met Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany" – unclear why this fact is worth mentioning
• The British Lagrangian School
  • Does the citation at the end of the first para cover all the statements in the three sentences (most particularly the emphatic first one)?
• Academic
  • There's a bit of editorialising in this section: "Not in the slightest", "quite unacceptable", "never in fact"
  • "inclusion of manufacturers as stakeholders" – in what?
  • "missing out by some 500 votes" – this is the second "miss out"; to my eye it is a touch colloquial for an encyclopedia, but then I'm nearly as old as Babbage, so allowance should be made
  • Note 56 – unclear what it is that we are invited to note; as you have two citations for this statement why add this evidently dubious one?
• Publishing
  • "of exposing the trade's profitability to outsiders" – I think the sentence would be stronger if you omitted "to outsiders"
• Later life
  • "focussed" – "focused", please! It's one of those words like "biased", "budgeted", and "benefited" that disobligingly have a single letter where any reasonable person would expect a double.
• Cryptography
  • "Joseph Henry later defended interest in it, in the absence of the facts, as relevant to the management of movable type" – not clear what you mean here. Is it that JH, ignorant of the facts, defended interest in it, or that he maintained that as nobody knew the facts, interest in it was defensible?
  • "wasn't" – "was not" would be more appropriately formal
• Public nuisances
  • "Michael Thomas Bass, Jr" – As with Grand Duke Leopold earlier, it isn't clear what mentioning this personage adds to the article. If it had been Gladstone or Queen Victoria it would be noteworthy, but Mr Bass?
• Death
  • "favoring"? – sudden burst of Americanism
  • The second para has too many instances of Babbage's name. The "Charles" is not wanted at the first mention and the third "Babbage" should be "his"
• Computing pioneer
  • "the Treasury lost confidence in Babbage" – perhaps "the Treasury lost confidence in him" would flow better.
• Background on mathematical tables
  • Unexpected encore for the blue link to Royal Society here
• Ada Lovelace and Italian followers
  • As with the Grand Duke and Mr Bass, mention of Fortunato Prandi seems to me of doubtful relevance here
• Legacy
  • Trouble with tenses here (see WP:DATED). I think I'd make "they will" into "they announced that they would" or some such, and I'd be inclined to look at "They hope", too.
• Family
  • I think it highly unsuitable that "Family" is tucked away below borderline trivia stuff as Babbage's appearance in the video game Civilization Revolution. It should surely go immediately above "Death", with the opening statement about the marriage taken out and put in the biographical narrative after the Cambridge paras.
• References
  • You offer us the full set of options for page ranges: ref 5 has "84–87", ref 45 has "122–3", ref 82 has "629-653", ref 89 has "228–32" and so on. As well as standardising the number of figures after the en-dash you should check that it always is an en-dash. It isn't at ref 82, for instance.
  • There is a naked url link at ref 155 which needs to be turned into url/title/site/date format.

That's my lot. I hope some or all of the above is useful. Happy to discuss any point further if wanted, but I don't watch PR pages and you'd best leave a note on my talk page if you want further comment from me here. I seem to have come up with a great many quibbles, but, I repeat, this is a fine article, and I greatly enjoyed it. – Tim riley (talk) 09:25, 10 May 2013 (UTC)