Wikipedia:Peer review/Chatteris/archive1

Chatteris

This peer review discussion has been closed.
The Chatteris page was recently awarded GA status, and a number of reviewers hinted that it might be a reasonable candidate for FA status at a future juncture. However, I suspect it's probably not ready for that just yet and was wondering what I would need to add or improve to fit the tighter guidelines of that process. Thanks, Rob (talk) 15:42, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is most interesting and enlightening. I love reading about towns, especially small ones, all around the world. Although good, the article will need quite a bit of work to get ready for FAC. I have a fair number of suggestions for further improvement.

Lead

• MOS:INTRO says in part, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." A good rule of thumb is to try to include in the lead at least a mention of each of the main text sections. The existing lead doesn't mention education, religion, sports, culture, notable residents, or the economy.

Metric conversions

• "The parish of Chatteris is large, covering 6099 hectares... " - Wikipedia articles by convention give measurements in imperial and metric units. I like to use the {{convert}} template for handling the math, spelling, abbreviations, and spacing, thus: 6,099 hectares (15,070 acres) or 6,099 hectares (23.55 sq mi). It takes a while to get used to the convert template and its precise data-entry, but after that it's quite handy. All of the metric expressions in the article need to be expressed in imperial units as well.

Medieval period

• "The miraculous story of the first known parishioner of the town... " - Delete "miraculous" since it is an interpretation rather than a verifiable fact?

Early modern and contemporary

• "A small market is still held every Friday." - It might be helpful here to provide more context for foreign readers. I assume these are agricultural markets selling fruits and vegetables from stalls set up by farmers in a designated area in town. Is this so? Do or did the markets offer other things? What specific kinds of produce? (I don't mean a complete list, but a few examples would be good.)

Geography

• To provide more context for readers who do not live in the U.K., it would be good in this section to mention that Chatteris is in southeastern England, X miles north of London and Y miles west of the North Sea, or something like that.
• It would be helpful to say where the two drainage rivers go. Where are their mouths?
• Adding something about the geology and soil types of the region might be useful. Where did the peat come from? What's the deep (geological) history of the region?

Religion

• "In 1935, a new two manual Harrison & Harrison organ was installed, a fine example of a pneumatic action instrument." - Delete "fine" as judgmental rather than factual? Perhaps this would be better: "In 1935, a new two manual Harrison & Harrison organ, a pneumatic-action instrument, was installed." As I type this, I realize that I don't know what "two manual" means. The organ probably should be explained in more detail.

General

• "(1075 - c.1142)" - Date ranges take unspaced en dashes rather than spaced hyphens, thus: 1075–c.1142.
• "The town is in the North East Cambridgeshire parliamentary constituency, with the incumbent MP being the Conservative Malcolm Moss." - I regard any sentence held together by "with" as a conjunction as suspicious. I would suggest hunting these down throughout the article and considering alternatives. This one might be re-cast as "Malcolm Moss, an incumbent Member of Parliament (MP), represents the town as part of the North East Cambridgeshire parliamentary consitituency."
• I'd suggest wikilinking parsnip, nave, and bowls.
• Almost any terms that are only abbreviated in the article or are abbreviated in some places should probably be spelled out and abbreviated on first use. I did that with MP in my suggested re-casting of the Malcom Moss sentence, but another example appears in "under the government's BSF programme". Foreign readers won't know what BSF programme refers to unless it is explained. Does BSF stand for Building Schools for the Future?
• It's often helpful to look at FA articles to see how other editors have handled similar material. You will find a list of FA articles about cities and towns in the sublist at WP:FA#Geography and places.

Images

• To succeed at FAC, the images will need alt text. It's a good idea to include alt text in any case for readers who can't see the images. You'll find an explanation of how to write alt text and where to put it at WP:ALT, and you can look at current examples by viewing ongoing FAC discussions.
• I like the aerial shot of Chatteris and the scan of the Park House. The other three have problems. The lead image is only 21 kilobytes at full size and is fuzzy. If you have a digital camera and can re-shoot this one and the one of St Peter & St Paul Church, you are virtually certain to get better results. If you stick with the existing church image and the signpost (which is a weak subject to begin with), they need to be rotated to make the church and the signpost stand up straight. Photo-manipulation software makes it possible to rotate and crop existing images, which can be re-uploaded. Better, though, would be to replace the weak photos with stronger ones if possible.
• Images shouldn't overlap two sections if the overlap can be avoided. On my computer screen, the Park House image extends into the "Early modern and contemporary" section by about three lines. The problem can be fixed by moving the image up a bit. The aerial view overlaps two sections by quite a bit. Perhaps the aerial view would fit nicely into the "Culture and community" section.

References

• If you eventually take this to FAC, you will be asked if your references meet the WP:RS guidelines. Dot-coms like Enjoy England might or might not pass the test. Generally, travel web sites, personal blogs or web sites, and general encyclopedias are weak sources, while articles published in newspapers, magazines, and books and on reliable web sites such as government sites and newspaper or magazine sites are stronger.
• Many of the existing citations are incomplete. A good rule of thumb for citations of Internet sources is to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date, if all of those are known or can be found. Even if you don't choose to use templates for the citations, you will find handy lists of data categories at WP:CIT.
• The link checker that lives here finds two dead urls in the citations.
• The dabfinder tool that lives here finds three wikilinks that go to disambiguation pages rather than to their intended targets.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article about a subject of your choice. Finetooth (talk) 20:40, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this highly detailed and contructive review. Rob (talk) 23:41, 26 September 2009 (UTC)