Wikipedia:Peer review/Pe̍h-ōe-jī/archive1

Pe̍h-ōe-jī

This peer review discussion has been closed.
This is my first request for peer review. I'd like to prepare this article for FAC (also my first nomination) and would appreciate the input of an experienced editor.

Thanks, Taiwantaffy (talk) 20:03, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This seems excellent to me, a non-linguist. It's professionally written, well-illustrated, stable, neutral, and well-structured. I think this is pretty close to FA quality. Even so, I have quite a few suggestions for improvement, most of the nit-picky sort related to prose, style, and layout issues.

Lead

• "Chinese Southern Min language/dialect" - Generally it's best to avoid link bumping such that it's impossible visually to tell where one link ends and the next one begins. Three are bumped together in this phrase. If all the links are necessary, you might have to re-cast the sentence in some way to separate the individual links. Also, another kind of ambiguity occurs with the front slash in language/dialect. It's generally better to avoid the front slash as a connector and instead to say "language or dialect" if the front slash means "or".
• "in the nineteenth century and refined by missionaries working... ". - Generally the centuries are not linked unless there is some special reason to do so.
• "and there ongoing debate within the Taiwanese mother tongue movement" - Missing word, "is"?
• Taiwan Church News needs italics.

Name

• I see some apparent discrepancy in the spelling of romanize (romanise); e.g., "Though the name vernacular writing could be applied to many kinds of writing, romanised... " but later "There is some debate as to whether Pe̍h-ōe-jī or Church Romanization... ". You may actually have to use both variants in places because they appear in direct quotations or titles; otherwise, they should all be the same, either "s" or "z", your choice.

History

• "Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organisations who propagated it" - "that" rather than "who"?

Early development

• "missionaries in Manila in the sixteenth century" - Wikilink Manila?
• "Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, with the most crucial being consistent tone markings... ". - "With" doesn't make a very good conjunction. Perhaps "Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, especially the consistent tone markings... "?
• "The system expounded by Medhurst had some influence on later dictionary compilers with regards to tonal notation and initials... ". - Tighten to "The system expounded by Medhurst influenced later dictionary compilers with regards to tonal notation and initials"?

Maturity

• "although the resulting blend in the southern city of Tainan was different to the Xiamen blend" - Maybe "differed from" rather than "was different to"?
• The two images in this section should be moved up or down relative to one another so that they no longer form a text sandwich between them. I think I would try moving the newspaper page image down a bit; moving Thomas Barclay up may make things worse rather than better.
• "Taiwan Prefectural City Church News" - Italics since this is a newspaper name?
• "the government banned the Taiwan Church News" - italics?

Post-World War II

• Maybe "After World War II" to avoid the awkward hyphen?
• "Government activities against POJ intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with several publications being banned or seized in an effort... ". - Perhaps "when several publications were banned or seized" to avoid the awkward "with" plus "being" construction?
• "The Taiwan Church News (printed in POJ) was banned in 1969" - Italics?
• "Official moves against native languages continued into the 1980s, with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior deciding in 1984... " - Another "with" plus "-ing". Maybe " ...1980s; the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior decided in 1984... "?
• "took a "divide and conquer" approach by promoting TLPA" - Spell out and abbreviate Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA) on first use?
• "fiercely debated topic in Taiwan to this day" - "This day" is ambiguous. Perhaps "through 2010" or "through the early 21st century"?

Tone markings

• "Most modern writers follow the following six rules:" - Tighten by deleting "the following"?
• I'd try to move images here too to eliminate the text sandwich between the tone-markings image and the table.
• "Morphemes following a double hyphen are often (but not always) grammatical function words." - Wikilink morpheme?

Regional differences

• "represented with non/semi-standard spellings" - Probably more clear would be "represented with non-standard or semi-standard spellings".

Han-Romanization mixed script

• "(estimated to be around 15% of running text) - In simple cases like this, "percent" is usually spelled out rather than represented with the symbol, %.

Adaptations for other languages/dialects

• Probably "languages or dialects" would be better.
• "Materials produced in the orthography, called Pha̍k-fa-sṳ, include:" - The bolding here should be replaced by italics, per the Manual of Style.
• "A modified version of POJ has also been created for Teochew;[85] there is currently a test version of Wikipedia using the orthography." - The embedded link to an external site [1] should be removed. It is a candidate for speedy deletion, so you can't move it to the "External links" section or to a footnote, where it would normally go. Perhaps you can find a substitute.

Notes

• Newspaper names such as Taipai Times should appear in italics.

Other

• The dab tool in the toolbox at the top of this review page find five links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.
• The alt text tool shows that the images lack alt text, meant for readers who can't see the images. WP:ALT has details.
• A caption consisting solely of a sentence fragment does not take a terminal period.
• With books that have no ISBN, it's helpful to add the OCLC number, which you can usually find via WorldCat; e.g. OCLC 20605114 for Anglo-Chinese manual with romanized colloquial in the Amoy dialect. This catalog is also a good source for missing information such as the publisher and place of publication.
• It is probably not helpful to list a non-existent category, Teochew language.
• File:Kau-hoe-po.png has been flagged for having no categories. This should be fixed before going to FAC.
• File:Thomas Barclay.jpg has a source with an url but no link. It would be easier for fact-checkers if you could make this a clickable link.
• I have never seen the skip-to-table-of-contents template before.
• The citation-needed tag in the first sentence will need to be addressed in some way.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:54, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

• Details matter! Please order your references alphabetically. [There may be one or two small errors esp. as subsorted by date... I just used MSWord to sort these]. I placed an ordered list on the article's talk page, but those do not include your template of choice, so in the article you'll have to sort them by hand....then look carefully at the notes. Are all the sources that are in the notes also given in the references section? If not, add the missing sources. Then, to be extremely correct, you can consider removing sources that are in the references but not in the notes. Adding missing references is necessary; removing extra sources is good form but is not strictly necessary. GlitchCraft (talk) 04:47, 18 May 2010 (UTC)