Talk:Abseiling/GA1

GA Review

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

Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 05:21, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the information in this article is in its image captions and embedded lists. The actual text of the article consists only of the three paragraphs of the lead (much of it saying things that do not summarize later parts of the article), one paragraph of history, and a short paragraph about safety. One could read the whole article and still not have any idea what an anchor is, why it is necessary, or how abseiling protects anchors; how to go about a multi-pitch descent; what the differences are between single-person double-rope abseiling and belayed abseiling (or even that there is such a thing as belayed abseiling), etc. There are many images but they are not well-integrated into the text; many of them appear decorative rather than having any relation to the text they appear next to. As such I think it is very far from meeting MOS:LEAD and WP:USEPROSE (Good article criterion 1b), broadness of its coverage (criterion 3), and appropriate use of images (criterion 6b). Additionally, although most of the sources appear reliable, I am skeptical of the reliability of the 3D Rope Access one, and the Sydney and Moab sources are about very specific situations but are used as sources for a more general point that they do not really support (WP:SYN and criterion 2c). It looks more like class C than GA to me. Because this is very far from passing, I think it falls under the "immediate fail" option of WP:GACR. Incidentally, Earwig's copyvio detector found a likely violation (very similar looking text in a Youtube video description) but I think the copying went the other way. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:21, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned in the edit summary, the undue weight template was added because the controversey of redirecting a term to a page of a term that is used 3 to 4 times less frequently worldwide, and squelching all debate in the talk page and declaring anyone who would dare say otherwise as "nutso" would be bad enough. But it didn't stop there. In the text of article itself, the word "abseil" is used far more often than is necessary, even appearing in the same sentence as an American subject almost like a bully pulpit and rubbing it in the face of the "losers". How is any of this the least bit consistent with WP:ENGVAR? All else being equal, regional variants should be used somewhat interchangably but with some effort to match a given locale's preferred term with its usage in context. Even though all else is not equal, the aforementioned edit attempted to do this somewhat by removing a few of the more "in your face" appearances of "abseil" while leaving most mentions as is. But as I stated in the edit summary, the article, as it is currently written, exemplifies an anglish bias and explains why so many 'muricans complain about how there should be an en-us.wikipedia.org, and why most teachers forbid students from referencing Wikipedia in research projects. Regardless of its stated policies, systemic bias has always caused en.wikipedia.org to lean more heavily towards being en-gb.wikipedia.org than the other way around, but regardless of which way a particular article leans, such biases are an unnecessary distraction from the article's content, especially when they are given undue weight as this article does. 161.149.63.239 (talk) 08:54, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]