Wikipedia:Peer review/Poundland/archive2

Poundland

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.
This retailing article was reviewed just over a year ago when it was in this state, and has since grown significantly and achieved GA status in that time. Long-term aspirations are to get it up to FA status (I know it isn't at that stage yet), but as there has been alot of expansion since the last review, I think it would help having another one.

Thanks, Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:55, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is interesting, broad in coverage, neutral, stable, and nicely illustrated. To make FA, though, the article's prose will need to be more polished. This might be the toughest of the FA requirements. I see redundancies, dangling modifiers, and awkward sentences. In addition, the article has problems related to the Manual of Style guidelines. I've tried to indicate specific places in the first few sections that need polishing, and I'm hoping these will serve as examples. Perhaps you can enlist the aid of a copyeditor who is on the list at WP:PRV. One thing that really bothered me was the inconsistency in the number of Poundland. Is it singular or plural? In the U.S. it would be singular. In any case, you start with "Poundland is" in the first sentence but later in the lead you use "Poundland have enjoyed strong sales growth". "Is" is singular, but "have" is plural. This inconsistency bothered me the whole way through the article.

Lead

• "Established in April 1990 by Dave Dodd and Stephen Smith, Poundland stock a variety of around 3,000 different products, such as home and kitchen-ware, gifts and healthcare products, many of which are brand name and clearance products." - I notice a pattern of repeating the same noun several times in a sentence. This sentence, for example, repeats "products" three times. It would be easy to add a little variety. Suggestion: "Established in April 1990 by Dave Dodd and Stephen Smith, Poundland stocks a variety of around 3,000 kitchen-ware, gift, healthcare, and other products, many of which have brand names." (I'm not sure what "clearance products" means in this context since everything sells for the same price.)

Formation

• "The retail chain was founded in April 1990 by Dave Dodd and Stephen Smith with a starting capital of just £50,000, claiming to have introduced the concept of single-price retailing." - The starting capital didn't claim to introduce the concept. Suggestion: "Claiming they were introducing the concept of single-price retailing, Dave Dodd and Stephen Smith founded the retail chain in April 1990 with a starting capital of just £50,000."
• "Growth continued throughout the early 1990s, with 6 stores by December 1991 and a further 7 a year later." - Generally numbers smaller than 10 get spelled out; i.e, "with six stores by December 1991 and a further seven a year later".
• "A difficult year was during 1995, when Smith failed to plan for additional warehouse capacity, and it soon became apparent their retail growth was pushing the capacity of their warehouse past its limits, with stock theft reaching unacceptably high levels." - "With" doesn't make a very good conjunction, and "a difficult year was during 1995" seems awkward. Suggestion: In 1995, Smith failed to plan for more warehouse space, and retail growth pushed their storage capacity past its limits. In the same year, stock theft reached an unacceptable high."

Early 2000s

• "with its 150th store opening in Northampton in mid-2006 and a gross turnover of £311 million in 2007, up from £281m the previous year" - Combinations like £311 million need to be held together with no-break (nbsp) codes to keep them from being separated on computer screens by line-break. I usually add them to things like "150th store" or any digit–noun combination that I think ought to be kept together. I added a couple of codes to the lead, but I'll leave the rest to you. WP:NBSP has details.
• "as Poundland revealed it had invested £20-25 million... " - Date ranges, page ranges, and ranges like this one take en dashes rather than hyphens; i.e., "£20–25 million".
• "when actually they're better during normal economic conditions, but are very robust to manage well despite the state of the economy" - "difficult rather than "robust"?
• "Poundland operate a recycling initiative where they will give money for old mobile phones, whilst at the same time making charitable contributions and helping the environment." - "Whilst" and "amongst" should be replaced by "while" and "among" throughout the article.
• "Poundland operates a recycling initiative where they will give... " - "through which" rather than "where"?

Late 2000s' economic crisis"

• "Despite this, Poundland have not been totally immune to the recession, with the retailer being forced to close down stores which they deem to not be financially viable, even if well positioned." - Sentences that use "with" as a conjunction can generally be re-written more clearly. Suggestion: "Despite this, Poundland has not been totally immune to the recession. The retailer has been forced to close stores that are not financially viable even if well-positioned."
• "have kept the same single price point of £1 for 18 years and during that time have always absorbed duty and increased supplier costs without raising its price point." - Tighten "price point" to "price"?

References

• The date formatting in the citations needs to be consistent. Most of the existing citations seem to use a combination of d-m-y and yyyy-mm-dd. You can choose one format or the other, but they should all be the same.
• Some of the citations, such as 33 and 47, lack access dates.

General

• The images lack alt text, which explains the content of the images to readers who can't see them. It takes a bit of practice to write these, and they are not the same as captions. For information on how to write them and where to put them, see WP:ALT. You can also look at what other editors are doing with alt text by visiting WP:FAC.
• I might suggest moving the Poundland truck image to the right so that it runs into the page instead of away.

This is not a complete line-by-line review, but I hope these few suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 03:51, 8 October 2009 (UTC)