Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Peer review/Gerard K. O'Neill

Gerard K. O'Neill[edit]

This was recently promoted to GA status and I am interested in improving it further. Areas in particular need of improvement are the introduction and the childhood/education paragraph. I would also appreciate feedback on readability, NPOV issues, reliability of sources, and anything else I may have missed. Thanks. Wronkiew (talk) 06:39, 20 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Review by Anne Teedham[edit]

First of all, let me say that as far as I read your article was very well-written, documented, and researched. Unfortunately, I stopped reading as soon as I determined that your citation-style would make it next to impossible for me to continue. I will explain—

As soon as a reader decides to click footnote ^[6], for example, he encounters a lengthy alphabetic line which leads to an author's name. So, then, a curious researcher clicks the author's name and he is quickly transported to the appropriate parameters of title, publisher, etc.. Unfortunately, herein is where the problem lies.

After a researcher has decided to return to his original query point, i.e. ^[6], there is no quick and precise manner in which that reader may return. Rather, the reader needs to scroll backwards to your article and needs to hope that he can recall exactly where he was before he began his quest for further knowledge.

If a reader is a short-way into your article, I suppose a fact that there are only six or eight ^[6]s to choose from may not be a problem. But what is a reader of half your article to do? Try to remember if he was at e, f, g? Or scroll up and down, from one minute to the next, pondering where he was before he began? (Thank Technology for center-scrollwheels, eh!)

I stopped instantly, and decided to explain: Although your citation-style is new, is unique, and is very well-organized, it is inoperable to a researcher who needs to move quickly back and forth from research note to manuscript. I would prefer that you abandoned your style, or made it more researcher-friendly.

I will come back some, other day and will tell you my reaction to the overall content—because the article is interesting—but I will do that only when I decide to ignore your references completely and just read the main-body. Anne Teedham (talk) 14:39, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You could just click the browser's back button to return to your previous position.--DavidCane (talk) 23:20, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

MORE

As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented the particle storage ring and the mass driver.^[1] (second sentence LEAD)

I understand how wikilinks work; however I believe it is sometimes necessary for a writer to provide a short phrase for the lazy reader who does not wish to spend his precious time wikilinking through Wikipedia. Thus, the reference to the "mass driver" in the very beginning of your article needs a quick phrase because the mass driver—more than any other O'Neill invention—is vital to an understanding of Gerard O'Neill's contribution to future space manufacturing and space colonization. I doubt that a lazy reader will be happy to wait until paragraph 19 for an appropriate explanation.

Citations

The subsection Birth, education, and family life is jammed with one reference after another; however in other places footnoting is sparse e.g. He even explored the possibilities of flying gliders inside a space colony, finding that the enormous volume could support atmospheric thermals. He calculated that humanity could expand on this man-made frontier to 20,000 times its population. The initial colonies would be built at the Earth-Moon L₄ and L₅ Lagrange points.

Or: In 1956, his second year of teaching, his two-page letter titled “Storage-Ring Synchrotron: Device for High-Energy Physics Research” was published in Physical Review.

I am certainly NOT suggesting that either procedure is better than the other; my concern is: How do you decide what is important to footnote and what is not?

I believe that once you decide the importance of one criteria over the other, then you will find a happy medium for your referencing. At present, I believe your referencing in places is excessive, specailly in subsection Birth, education, and family life.

Sometimes your prose gets excessively wordy e.g. This would increase the amount of energy involved in particle collisions over the method used at the time, which was to direct the particle beam at a fixed target.^[2]

I believe that it is just quicker to say: This would increase the amount of energy involved in particle collisions over the method used at the time to direct the particle beam at a fixed target.^[2]

Consequently, I think that your article would benefit from the introduction of an unbiased, unimformed good copyeditor, one with whom you would feel comfortable.

This brings me to structure. I am not certain that I found your constant repetition of material pleasing. For example, you refer to O'Neill's freshman physics class at Princeton a great number of times in a great number of different subsections. Perhaps if your biography were more linear in its approach i.e. 1927 to 1992 highlighting the various aspects of O'Neill's endeavors in depth, it would be less repetitive. Yet, on the whole, I found myself becoming bored and wondering when will this thing come to an end.

There is a lot here. And my final evaluation is not fair. I am sorry. I feel though that your article needs to be re-tuned for the lazy reader (like me) who is less scholarly than you and more interested in the simple facts.

Lastly, I would like to return to our discussion on your style for footnoting. I follow your reasoning for the use of the Back Button. Yet answer me this—

In the sentences: O’Neill was diagnosed with leukemia in 1985.^[58] He died on April 27, 1992, from complications of the disease at the Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California.^[6][7]

After I have read that, and have decided to click ^[6], I am taken to footnote 6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Daniels 1992. I click Daniels 1992, and receive Daniels, Lee A. (April 29, 1992). Gerard K. O’Neill, Professor, 69; Led Studies on Physics and Space, New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. I then decide to return. So I click my Back Button. This takes me back to footnote 6 (good). I then click my Back Button again. This takes me back to a screen which begins: On November 18, 1991, O’Neill filed a patent application for a high-speed train system. He called the system VSE, for velocity, silence, and efficiency.^[2] The trains, instead of running on tracks, would be propelled by electromagnetic forces through tunnels. He estimated that the trains could reach...

But I thought that I was reading something about leukemia? But where? (darned IE ver 6.0, Win 98 SE...dump this archaic software on the Chinese, eh???)

Do you understand what I am saying now. The use of your Back Button produces a return to the previous PAGE, not the previous CITATION.

I doubt that this is a real big deal for anyone other than a nitpicking fool. My only reason for bringing it up is to suggest that your style is less satisfying than existing examples that I have seen elsewhere.

In closing, I find it necessary to say that I have been unnecessarily harsh only because I believe that your article would benefit by closely evaluating my silly remarks, and by deciding do you want lazy readers such as nitpicking Anne Teedham to read completely through your article without struggling with minor technicalities.

It is a good article. But I think that it can be better. Anne Teedham (talk) 16:29, 16 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for your extensive review of the article. I will try to address as many of the points that you raised as I can. It would be helpful to know in which parts of the article you found yourself losing interest so I can try to cut down on the detail and repetition. Also, do you have any ideas for alternate structures for the space colonization section that would place all the text in chronological order instead of a summary followed by subsections? The summary does seem a little repetitive. Sorry about the back button thing, I really appreciate that you finished the review even though you found the ref/cite structure annoying. I can't think of an alternate style that would solve the problems you encountered without breaking something else. Wronkiew (talk) 06:25, 18 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This review is closed. Many thanks to Anne Teedham for her helpful comments. Wronkiew (talk) 17:58, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]