Wikipedia:Peer review/Economic history of China (Pre-1911)/archive1

Economic history of China (Pre-1911)

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for May 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want to get ways to improve this article and maybe one day bring it to GA and FA status(I've done quite a bit of work on this former stub already). This article, as you can see, deals mainly with Chinese Economic history before 1911(the modern article is a start ).Teeninvestor (talk) 15:16, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Teeninvestor (talk) 15:10, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments

This is not a full review, but a quick look has revealed numerous problems:-

• Length: WP:LENGTH says: Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 30 to 50 KB, which roughly corresponds to 6,000 to 10,000 words of readable prose. If an article is significantly longer than that, it may benefit the reader to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries (see Wikipedia:Summary style) This article has over 14,000 words of readable prose, and it seems obvious that it should be split. I would have thought that the end of the "Southern and Northern dynasties" section would be an appropriate cutoff point. This would give you two long, but not overlong, articles dealiing with Chinese economic history, and would significantly incease the chances of each article being read.

• Prose: from the little I've read – the lead and the first few sections – the prose is going to need a great deal of attention. Here are a few sample points that will need fixing:
  • Lead
    • The opening sentence does not conform to the requirements specified in WP:LEAD. See the section relating to the format of the first sentence.
    • "The early Chinese civilization..." – "The" not required
    • "sizable commerce" is not idiomatic. You could say "extensive"
    • Overlinking – "commerce" and "currency" are everyday terms
    • Non-encyclopedic language: "By 500 BCE, however, a new powerful government organized the economy like never before."
    • Incomprehensible: "A new merchant class sprung up, though it was surveyed." What does this mean?
    • "organized long wars..." Wars are waged, provoked, etc, but are they "organized"?
    • Unencyclopedic: "...and set the tone for things to come."
    • POV language: "...no less breathtaking than the reforms of the warring states period," "allowed astonishing advances"
    • "an event known as the Great Divergence." Known by whom?

These are a sample of faults found in the lead. The whole section needs the attention od a skilled copyeditor.

• • Feudal Era (c. 2100 BCE - 475 BCE): In this very short section I found multiple problems:-
    • Unencyclopedic language "The Chinese civilization started off..."
    • "...which is regarded by the Chinese as their ancestor." Huang Di was a person, and cannot be followed by "which"
    • "...appointed their vassals to the land." "Appointed" is not the right word here
    • "highly independent" is non-idiomatic. Perhaps "wholly independent"?
    • "monarchy" is an institution, and should not be followed by "who"

These examples seem fairly typical of the prose problems throughout the article.

• MOS issues:-
  • Many of the year ranges have hyphens, not ndashes
  • No-break spaces are missing throughout
  • Small numbers (under 10) should be written out, e.g. five not 5
  • Proportions should be written as "one-tenth" or "10 per cent", not as "1/10"
  • Metric measurements require conversion to imperial
  • Large numbers should be written as, for example, 2,200 not 2200

• Other points
  • Page ranges require "pp." not "pg"
  • Several of your sources lack information (publisher, publisher location, year, ISBN)

I hope you won't be put off by the apparent negative tone of these comments. The two big issues, in my view, are the splitting of the article and the bringing of the prose up to standard. The remaining problems can be quite easily fixed. I fully appreciate the effort that has gone into building this article and hope you will continue with the good work. Brianboulton (talk) 18:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your time. For the prose I have contacted many copyeditors to help, but the article itself has already be split(the original article was Economic history of China which was split into this article and Economic history of Modern China, so the prose size is now below 90 kb. This is itself quite a broad topic, after all.Teeninvestor (talk) 19:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate that the article has already been split – but it's still 14,000+ words. Economic history of Modern China has barely 3,000 words, so perhaps the splitting point was wrong? There is no reason why it shouldn't be split again. It is possible that your difficulties in finding copyediting help is related to the length of the article as it stands. Brianboulton (talk) 17:17, 12 June 2009 (UTC)