Talk:Unemployment/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

I think this is a highly important topic and the article did receive a lot of work already. However, I think it is still quite a mile to achieve Good Article quality. I should say I'm not an economist or sociologist, nor did I read the article from beginning to end. However, a few issues come to mind very quickly:

The prose needs an overhaul. E.g. the very first sentence "Unemployment occurs when peolpe are without a job and has actively looked for work within the past two weeks." already has one typo and a grammar issue.

Someone corrected the first sentence and I have also revised grammar throughtout. This is an ongoing task. Peace01234 (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The lead section does not summarize adequately the article content, which however it has to (WP:LEAD). The lead talks a lot about the unemployment rate and the way to measure it, but nothing is said about the effects of ue. nor the ways of controlling it.

I revised the lead section to summarize the article. I moved subtleties regarding measurement to the measurement section. Peace01234 (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The history section, like the other parts of the article, has a focus on Anglo-American (mostly just American) aspects of the topic. Another example: the external links section is blatantly US-centered. This creates an undue balance.

I added more global discussion, reduced anglo-american focus where possible. Also, see my comment and call for help below regarding global focus Peace01234 (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Linked to the previous issue: at times, the article is overly specific, such as talking about the unemployment rate in particular cities. Having a top-to-bottom approach may work in some cases, but for a topic as broad as this, mostly one has to stay "top", I think.
The article uses jargon all over the place. It should not (WP:JARGON). Terms like "market-clearing level", "equilibrium level", "aggregate demand", "inflation barrier" are not explained, but are being used many times. (We do have the blue links, but much more of an effort should be made to explain this terminology to the reader). I think the article would profit a lot by explaining (probably in a separate section) the mechanics of ue., so to speak. I.e. what are the factors leading to unemployment (wages, inflation etc).
There are a bunch of ^{[citation needed]} tags which have to be resolved. Also, there are entire sections (e.g. Cyclical or Keynesian unemployment) which are unreferenced.

I resolved missing citations and completely revised the Keynsian section for readability and added citations there too. Peace01234 (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If no major improvements occur, I think I will fail the GAN in one week time (or two, if anyone wishes?). In case there is disagreement, I'm happy to provide a more detailed and comprehensive review. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 20:16, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Jakob.scholbach (talk) 20:16, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback, Jakob.scholbach. I will work on readability and jargon as soon as I have time. However, regarding the Anglo/U.S. focus: I created some of the charts for this article and I have searched broadly for international data. However, historical data is rarely available for countries other than the U.S. and U.K. Many countries only began surveying unemployment recently. I was very happy to find the the Japanese data even though it only goes back to 1953 and the E.U. data which only goes back to 1993. I also was happy to find the image of an unemployment protest in India. I appreciate constructive criticism; can you — or anyone! :) — suggest international sources to improve the global perspective? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Peace01234 (talk • contribs) 20:56, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think your point that no historical data is available for other countries than the US/UK is unfounded. The most immediate google.books search reveals, for example, this (German) book on German unemployment in history. I'm sure that the same will work for virtually every other country: Italy, India...

About missing citations: the "Limitations of the unemployment definition" has still the same problem.

Jargon: from what I can tell, there has not been much of an improvement.

About the US-focus: you (still) have a whole long section "United States Bureau of Labor Statistics", together with another one, about half as long, about the EU, but nothing on the rest of the world. This is just unbalanced. This is not to say that the US-material is badly done, on the contrary this seems to be the part which has received most of the attention, this is just to say that an equally good coverage should be given to other countries. Consequently, much less space can be devoted to any single country.

I hope to have your agreement that none of these issues is a something to be solved in one afternoon's or one week's work. Therefore, I'm going to fail this GA nomination, chiefly because of its failure to be "broad in its coverage" (criterion 3). This is also touching the criterion 4, neutrality.

Despite this, I'd very much like to encourage editors working on this to keep up the work on this topic. The article does have potential, but for such a world-spanning topic, more of a global account seems necessary to me. May be a WP:peer review might be helpful to recruit more people? Jakob.scholbach (talk) 10:31, 23 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]