Talk:James Naismith/GA1

GA Review

Rather than the usual "tick-a-box" approach, I thought I'd do something a tad more informal for the review. First off, this was an excellent article to read - I enjoyed it, learned a lot, and had no difficulties with the prose. This was particularly enjoyable, as many articles have a more stilted style that is harder to read. I was a tad concerned about four issues, though:

While not essential for a GA, I'd have liked to have seen citation templates used. There are two reasons for this. On is that they tend to format the citations in a Harvard style, which may not be the only standard, but is one of the better ones. The second is that they help to make sure that all available information is provided. For example, the first reference, "James Naismith Biography", is part of the Encyclopedia of World Biography, but this isn't mentioned in the citation (and there are similar problems with a couple of the others).

Some of the references are not exactly ideal, although it is clear that it is very well referenced overall. For an article like this I would have looked to offline sources as well, and there are both books and academic papers which could have been excellent sources.

The "13 original rules" seem a tad out of place. If I was writing this as a paper, I might have added them as an appendix, but in Wikipedia this isn't possible. Thus they appear as part of the main article, even though there are peripheral to the topic. While I wouldn't say that they have to be removed, I'd suggest considering moving them to Rules of basketball, which seems an appropriate place, and could probably do with them. You are, of course, welcome to disagree. :)

There's some repetition in "Personal life" with what is in "early life" - probably doesn't mean much, but it is worth considering if it can be streamlined (noting that this may not be possible).

Anyway, I'll put it on hold for now. I don't think that all of these issues need to be addressed completely, but I think it is worth discussing some of them before passing the article. Overall, though, I still feel that this article is very good - it says a lot, I think, when you genuinely enjoy reading a biography. - Bilby (talk) 13:03, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there, thanks for the precise and detailed review. Here my comments:

Cites now all use citation templates.
I would like to incorporate some books but I do not have any ATM. I'll try to look around though.
The 13 original rules are not outsourced at Rules_of_basketball#13_original_rules
I rewrote the "early life" section to avoid reduncancy with "personal life".

-Onomatopoeia (talk) 22:03, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

All good. :) I've found some additional refs that will help - I have a couple of good journal articles, and some other odds and ends that will remove any doubt with a couple of the sources. I'll add them later. One ref has a broken link as well, but that one should be easy to fix or replace, and using AGF it seems clear that it was probably good before. At the moment, though, it passes GA, and any changes are simply to keep improving it beyond that. Well done! - Bilby (talk) 12:46, 30 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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My teacher is makig us write a report. Any useful info appreciated —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kirby2845 (talk • contribs) 16:20, 18 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]