Wikipedia:Peer review/History of macroeconomic thought/archive1

History of macroeconomic thought

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I would like to get this article listed as a good or featured article. Work still needs to be done on it, but I would like to get feedback on the general approach before I do more fine tuning.

Thanks, Bkwillwm (talk) 02:27, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Thanks for your work on this important article, here are some suggestions for improvement.

• I am not sure the first sentence of the lead follows WP:LEAD, which says in part The article should begin with a declarative sentence telling the nonspecialist reader what (or who) is the subject. The current first sentence is only about Keynes and his 1936 book.
• The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way - not sure if that is the case here or not. For example Heterodox is mentioned, but neither Post Keynesian or Austrian theories are mentioned specifically in the lead.
• 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. The part in the first lead paragraph about Before Keynes, economists used microeconomic methods to explain aspects of economics like employment, price level, and interest rates.[2] seems to only be in the lead, and the phrase "Keynesian Revolution" is also only in the lead as far as I can tell. I owuld also mention MONIAC somewhere in the article besides the caption (great picture)
• Abbreviations like RBC should be given in parentheses directly after the first use
• The section headers in Wikipedia articles tend to be more concise (telegraphic) than these are and avoid the use of articles where possible - see WP:HEAD
• I would start the article body (after the lead) with a brief definition of macro vs micro-economics for the totally uninformed.
• I would add years to the Keynes and the beginning of macroeconomics section to increase understanding. I would also add the year to photo caption of Keynes (1946)
• File:ACEGESGUI.png is very likely a copyright violation - the copyright belongs to the creators of the software, not the person who made the screen shot
• I have had some Economics, but found this pretty rough going. I think it would help to make it as accessible as possible, without dumbing it down. The lead is fairly accessible, but I think if some basic terms were briefly explained (in addition to being wikilinked) that might help. So, for example, explaining breifly what clearing a market (or failing to do so) is, might help.
• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in all peer reviews, in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

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 _><>°^° 18:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

PS Where two or more refs are to the same page(s) or a source, they should be combined (the ref name = tag works here) Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:41, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. It is very helpful. I have a few responses.

• I omitted any discussion of MONIAC because it is not very significant. It's mainly a curiosity. I don't know how I'd tie it into the text unless it was an aside about Philips.
• The uploader of File:ACEGESGUI.png claims to be the author of the software program. He exclusively edits the article on ACEGES and his user name is the same as one of the ACEGUS researcher's names. I think it's more likely that there's a COI issue than a copyright one.
• I'll try to make the article more accessible. Let me know if there were particular sections that were unclear.
• I'm not a fan of the ref name template form of citations. I'd rather keep them out of the article unless someone can convince me they're worthwhile.--Bkwillwm (talk) 01:11, 23 March 2011 (UTC)