Wikipedia:Peer review/Wikipedia/archive3

Wikipedia[edit]

Previous peer reviews: 8 January 2005, 10 March 2005
Previous featured article candidacies: 1st, 2nd, 3rd (was promoted 3rd time)
Featured article review: here (was un-featured)

I've made quite a few changes to this article recently; in summary, the size has gone down by 7Kb, the number of references has increased by 16, and it's hopefully better than it was before. However, considering it's, well, Wikipedia... the first link on Main Page, and one of the most-viewed articles, it's far from perfect. The talk page has a "to-do" list some of which I think has been addressed, though I've added some more things too. Some related articles still need a lot of work... Criticism of Wikipedia, Reliability of Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia and Wikipedia in popular culture, so a look at those would be appreciated too. I've made a couple of edits to them as well, but there's still a long way to go. Looking at Wikipedia:Article Creation and Improvement Drive, it seems very likely that Wikipedia will be the next collaboration in three days' time, so ideas for improvement here would give them things to work on too, which would be nice – Qxz 07:51, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just an update to say that User:WillowW has made some very helpful changes; the article now has a whole new section that tries to compare Wikipedia with other encyclopedias, and the size has gone up by 12Kb (perhaps a bit of a trim may be needed again, but I think the new material is useful). More references, too – Qxz 19:29, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR _t 15:49, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There are some technical terms in this article, such as "mirroring" or "forking". They may need to be put in quotation marks to make it clear that they're somewhat uncommon terms. A more common word such as "vandalism" might also need this the first time it's used if they have a different meaning in Wikipedia's context. —msikma (user, talk) 17:07, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I'll see what I can do about it – Qxz 21:20, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You've been doing excellent work to fix this article up, by the way. It was just inching along before, and one dedicated editor working on it for a short time is so much more useful than 10 minor edits per day. —msikma (user, talk) 21:37, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes; I did a complete rewrite over four days, then copied the changes over. (You can look at the history of User:Qxz/Sandbox to see the whole process). I like to think I made an improvement; at the very least, I cleared the way for new content to be added, which has indeed happened. Not just me now, though, it looks like at least two others have joined in. Hopefully we can settle our differences and perfect the changes. More comments welcome, of course – Qxz 21:52, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There are still some of weasel words in the article, unfortunately. Such as here. I changed the wording slightly, but "Wikipedia users generally do not consider Wales to be a dictator or to be one who gives non-negotiable orders." is still subjective. —msikma (user, talk) 21:56, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Also, someone should go through the article and place a ^{[citation needed]} on every single dubious claim. I'll help with this as well, although I'll be pretty busy the upcoming days (maybe weeks). Claims such as "The editors of any encyclopedia have a responsibility to keep its articles as free of bias as possible. Historically, even the best encyclopedias have suffered from bias; for example, the "Lynch Law" article of the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Ku Klux Klan as a "protective society" and unabashedly defends its actions." should be sourced. —msikma (user, talk) 21:56, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's WillowW's new section, which is barely a day old and I guess is still somewhat in draft form, at least insomuch as it's likely to change substantially in the next few days. I've removed or reworded some of the more biased stuff, and Bramlet Abercrombie's contributions reflect a similar concern, but the section fills what was previously something of a gap in the article. It just needs to be trimmed down (right now I think it's a bit more extensive than it needs to be), neutrally worded and cited where possible. Peppering the page with {{fact}}s won't necessarily help much, because we know it has problems. But I understand your point — it needs doing – Qxz 22:11, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This may be the most tedious work, but I also believe that we should use the proper citation templates in this article. As it is right now, lots of references are written in text, while they should be converted to proper Template:Cite web instances. This makes it easier not only to keep the references consistent, but it's also generally a good idea to use correct markup for an article (for screen scraping purposes et al.) —msikma (user, talk) 22:02, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
All the web citations are in text form; partly because there's so many of them. As far as I'm aware there's no policy or guideline to say that we have to or should use those templates. Indeed it seems many editors prefer them in this form. But consistency is good – Qxz 22:11, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It generally is useful. If someone were to make a bot that could scrape all references from an article and then check whether they're still operational (and if not, grab an Archive.org link that's closest to the date the reference was accessed instead), it would be much more complicated to check every reference to see if it's a web reference. And even then, to find out which part of the reference contains the access date. Abstracting adds meta-data to the text. But it's probably of small concern at this point. —msikma (user, talk) 22:27, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
From Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles#Citations of generic sources:

"The use of Citation templates is not required by WP:CITE and is neither encouraged nor discouraged by any other Wikipedia citation guidelines. They may be used at the discretion of individual editors, subject to agreement with the other editors on the article. Some editors find them helpful, while other editors find them annoying, particularly when used inline in the text. Because they are optional, editors should not change articles from one style to the other without consensus."

In other words, it's very definitely saying don't change them without consensus. I'm not sure I really want to have to start trying to get consensus to make a change like this – Qxz 23:07, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Look here, what's the reason for you posting that on my talk page? All I said was that I believe we should do this. I'm fully aware of the fact that these things need consensus, which is why I'm bringing it up here. If you don't want to do it, then don't. I believe we should, as the citation templates were made to make life easier. I'm not sure if you actually have an argument against using them (since all you did was mention that "there's no guideline that says we should"). —msikma (user, talk) 07:02, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Due to the change in layout as a result of the thorough editing, the layout of the images in the article has gotten quite cluttered. It should be checked to see whether some pictures should be repositioned. —msikma (user, talk) 19:12, 1 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think over the past week two images have been removed, and one has been added. The second half of the article seems to be lacking in images; unfortunately, I don't think there's really much that would be appropriate there `– Qxz 22:21, 1 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It seems awkward, to me, that there are now only level 2 headings in the article. There isn't a single level 3 heading in here. Let's see if I can change that around a little... —msikma (user, talk) 20:01, 2 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, it's better with some level 3 headings. Many of the ones that got removed came as a result of "Criticism" being shrunk to a single paragraph and "Encyclopedic characteristics" being removed – Qxz 10:59, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
In the rewriting of this article, a lot of information was trimmed. The article became significantly smaller. However, there are some sections which genuinely seem skinny. Especially the "Academic evaluation", "Criticism and controversy" and "Related projects" sections are very short even though there is much information on these things as well. Some parts of these paragraphs have a gigantic amount of references for a very short amount of text; it should be noted that good encyclopedic prose isn't just about writing the neutral truth and then providing a reference for the claims, but it should also attempt to explain the subject matter thoroughly. I think that some information can be slightly rewritten to be more carefully worded. For example, "Scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[11] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[12]" really doesn't have to be one sentence. Why not explain a bit more about what a "scholarly study" really means, and why Wikipedia is found to be accurate? The current version forces people to check out the footnotes, while they're really just references (and not simply external links). —msikma (user, talk) 21:54, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Criticism and controversy" has a whole article to itself, which is longer and goes into more detail, so that section only really needs to be a summary. I agree "Related projects" could be expanded (though again the individual projects have their own articles; the reader can refer to those if they want more detail) – Qxz 22:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm actually not just talking about the information, I'm also talking about the flow of the article. It's pretty bad prose as it is right now, for most of the article. Reading the talk page, I see that Willow has written a much better explanation of this. —msikma (user, talk) 07:15, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, in my opinion, this peer review is done. I can't think of any other particular things that need to be improved, although I do believe that especially the last point I made does require a lot of work. I hope that future editors will address at least that one. —msikma (user, talk) 12:55, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]