Wikipedia:Peer review/Rain/archive1

Rain

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I'm exploring what would be needed for this article to reach FA status. Thanks, Thegreatdr (talk) 17:34, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

• At the moment I only have time to comment on the lead, so I might come back later and add a lengthier review. I should also say that I know next to nothing about meteorology, so my feedback is that of a layperson. That said, in my opinion the lead suffers from two problems which are typical of many detailed articles on WP:
  1. The lead is trying to cover the entire article in a couple of paragraphs. The result is a sequence of unrelated sentences such as "The METAR code for rain is RA. Rainfall is measured through the use of rain gauges.... Australia is the Earth's driest continent." The purpose of the lead is not to contain everything in the article but to give a readable, concise overview of the topic. For this purpose it is not necessary to specify the pH of rain or its METAR code, unless those are directly relevant to a point being made within the lead. If I came to this article wanting to know only what the pH of rain is, I could jump to the Acidity section, or even search for pH. Rather, when I read the lead I want to know (a) the definition of the subject (currently well covered, I think); (b) what are the most important questions that experts ask themselves about the subject, and if possible, very brief answers. In the present case, the pH info could perhaps be combined into the issue of human influence (pollution, urban heat island), which (if I understood correctly) is one of those interesting questions. But other snippets of information (like the one on Australia) shouldn't be here.
  2. Some of the lead is overly technical. Especially in the lead, you should make an effort to help non-experts understand the material without clicking too many links. The first sentence does this really well - rather than just giving the definition "Rain is liquid precipitation", there is a further explanation "as opposed to other kinds of precipitation such as snow, hail and sleet". This is excellent - you don't even have to know what precipitation is in order to understand the definition. In the second paragraph, however, I was unable to understand most of the sentences, without clicking through to read about weather front, cumulonimbus, rainbands, and so on, not to mention terms that are neither linked nor explained such as convective cloud, upslope flow, compressional heating, etc. The problem is that many of these articles also have long, technical leads, so I run into a vicious cycle.

These points aside, the article looks detailed and informative, and I managed to learn quite a bit from this review. Thanks! Zvika (talk) 14:57, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

• • An effort has been made to explain terms within the lead to make it more understandable to the lay reader. Thegreatdr (talk) 20:12, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
• The Koppen map should be cropped and the information on the bottom right side should be merged with the caption. Nergaal (talk) 04:46, 19 February 2010 (UTC)