Talk:Disconfirmed expectancy

Disconfirmed expectancy was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 25, 2014	Good article nominee	Not listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 13, 2013.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that when a person's belief is disconfirmed, it can actually lead to stronger conviction?

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Disconfirmed expectancy/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Delldot (talk · contribs) 00:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can see that the nominator has put hard work into the article and has requested feedback from other editors, showing a willingness to put in more. So I'm certainly willing to assume that there's the drive to keep improving this, and I'll give it a thorough review if that's desired. I also see that the nom hasn't edited in a month so I'm not sure how interested they are on still working on it, so if there's no response to this within say a week, I'll assume that for now this doesn't need to be on the GAN page (although nothing's to stop anyone from picking it back up and editing again any time in the future). For right now I'll just mention some major things I see and then get into more details as those get ironed out.

So here are my main issues with the article on a brief read-through:

too technical: the language of the article reads more like a professional paper than an encyclopedia article. Please check out the subsection Wikipedia:Technical#Avoid_overly_technical_language in particular to get an idea of what I'm looking for. So for example, how could you put this sentence into plain english, the way you would say it in an informal discussion with an uninformed listener (someone who might need to read an encyclopedia article!): As Carlsmith and Aronson (1963) extrapolated, it follows that this discomfort puts the individual in a negative hedonic state. The article is full of examples like this. Please give the whole thing a copy edit to get rid of jargon and technical language where possible. Another example: "including but not limited to selective attention to confirmatory evidence and biased labeling." could be written, "people pay attention to evidence that supports their predictions and ignore evidence that contradicts it."
Comprehensiveness: is this really a thorough survey of the topic? Or is there more written that could be summarized? I noted the sentence "This is by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive list" and wondered if there could be more to write. The article is not too long, it could be 3 times longer no problem. So if there's more to say I would expand it. Selecting examples of studies is a good way to write in a lot of cases, but in an encyclopedia you're more trying to give a thorough but not overly detailed survey of the topic.
Images: this is a tough one because it's a psychological phenomenon and not a person place or object, but I think if we're creative we could come up with some ideas for images to add. Could we get a picture of any of the major scientists involved in the research for example? Charts or graphs summarizing studies' findings? Check out some good and featured articles on other psychological phenomena to get some ideas of what kinds of images might be good.
The referencing is OK but I want to make sure that for the paragraphs that have just one reference at the end, all of the information in the paragraph is covered in that ref. Is that the case?

As I say, this is just a start, so I don't want to give the impression that I'll promote this the minute these issues get resolved. It will likely be a long process. Thank you for improving and nominating the article! delldot ∇. 00:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yeah, I also wanted to mention, I think the lead section should be expanded so that it summarizes the whole article. Check out WP:LEAD for an idea of how it should end up. delldot ∇. 00:34, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I guess this is not being worked on at the moment. I'll go ahead and remove it from GAN. Feel free to renominate it at any point in the future once these concerns have been addressed. Feel free to leave me a message on my talk page if you need any help or advice. delldot ∇. 03:55, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]