Talk:Decompression theory/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

GA failed SpinningSpark 15:27, 26 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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Reviewer: Spinningspark (talk · contribs) 15:51, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't be upset by this, but I am going to quick-fail this article. The page undoubtedly has the potential to be a good article, but the major problems are likely to take a while to sort out and a full review at this stage would be couterproductive as it would only need another review after the rework. You can resubmit the article any time you think it is ready. If you want, you can drop a note on my talk page when you have resubmitted it and I will take a look to save you having to wait in the queue again. Or you can wait for another reviewer, your choice. There are two major areas I am concerned about;

Lead

The lead needs to comply with WP:LEAD and is one of the six Good article criteria. It should be a summary of the article aimed at the general reader (not specialists). The lead should stand by itself as a mini-article if the reader reads only that.

The lead is much too long. WP:LEAD recommends no more than four paragraphs. This issue should really have been addressed before submitting to GA, it was raised by another editor on the article talk page in October.
Generally, the lead should not introduce new material that is not in the body of the aticle. For instance, the lead discusses mountaineers and astronauts but I don't see them even mentioned in the body of the article. By the way, I have never heard of either of them undergoing decompression so I would want to see an inline cite for that.
You might want to consider a different image for the lead. Perhaps a photo of divers decompressing, or a picture of the various gas bottles used. The current image is too large and squeezes the text to the right. It also needs a good deal of prose to go with it before a reader is going to get anything out of such a complex graph. It would be better off somewhere in the prose where it can be centred and properly explained.

Citations: Large chunks of the article do not have inline citations. Many reviewers more or less insist on an inline citation for at least every paragraph. That is not actually a requirement and I would not insist, but not doing it does make it difficult to confirm verification. What is a requirement is that every statement in the article is verifiable in one or more of the sources and it is the duty of the reviewer to ensure that this is so. Using general references is a perfectly valid way of referencing an article on Wikipedia, but we will need to find a way for the reviewer to check verification without having to obtain a copy of every source and reading it from cover to cover. One possible way forward is for the reviewer to nominate sentences or facts they want to check and you provide the quotations from the source that verifies this. SpinningSpark 18:01, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Spinningspark.

I was hoping for something a little more practically useful to improve the article, but I will see what I can do with what you have provided.

Could I trouble you to be a bit more specific in where you think more detailed in-line citation is necessary? I have a tendency to assume things are obvious or common knowledge where others with less familiarity with the subject and the basic physics and physiology involved may not. I am confident that I can find most if not all of the neccessary and desired references without much difficulty, since most of the uncited material is that which I considered basic and uncontroversial in the first place.

Exposure to a reduction of ambient pressure is decompression. This happens when one ascends to altitude. I will try to make this more clear. There is a long history of decompression problems for this, and there are plenty of references. I will find one and insert it.

It may be difficult to comply with the preference for a short lead and one which summarises the whole article. I will see what I can do. If you can suggest which parts can be omitted without depleting the summarisation too much, I would appreciate the guidance.

Your point about the complexity and need for explanation of the current image is taken. It should not be difficult to find a replacement image for the lead, but it might not be as relevant. This is, after all, the article on decompression theory, as opposed to those on decompression practice, recompression therapy and other aspects of decompression.

If there is anything that you think needs to be explained in more detail, or is unclear or ambiguous, please let me know.

Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:30, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Spinningspark. I have made a few changes and am adding citations inline. This will take a little while and I am adding what I consider more than strictly necessary. You may notice that in several sections the same reference is cited for each of the paragraphs. This is because they are all about the same thing and usually the same reference will cover the subject well enough to be usable. Where this is not the case I am using as many references as I think are useful to establish the point, but sometimes that requires a break between citations to fill the gaps, and some will take longer than others. It will be helpful if you would tag any sentences or paragraphs which you think specifically need citation so I can be sure not to miss them. Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:15, 26 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, the article has already been rejected and this page needs to be closed. The article can be submitted again when it is ready. If you want to come back to me do it on my talk page. What you need to do is carefully check the article against the GA criteria before submitting. I have highlighted two obvious areas of difficulty (particularly the lead), but a full review will look at all the criteria in detail. You did not get a list of simple actionable comments because I have not done a review in that depth, I did not consider the article to be ready for it. On the referencing, I am not requesting referencing for any one particular item, indeed I have not really done any reference checking. I have merely pointed out the difficulty you are going to have in relying on general referencing. But I also suspect that you have written the article as a subject matter expert, not directly referring to a source for much of it. While we appreciate expert editors here, you need to understand that they are not given a "free pass" on the referencing requirements. The requirements on Wikipedia are different from those in the academic community. Things you would not expect to have to reference in a scholarly paper will be expected here. We cannot assume that the editor is a subject matter expert (there is no system for checking) and you should not expect to get a subject matter expert for a reviewer (in all probability you won't). SpinningSpark 15:27, 26 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.