Talk:Josiah Holbrook

Josiah Holbrook was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. 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
July 7, 2021	Good article nominee	Listed
October 25, 2021	Good article reassessment	Kept
February 26, 2023	Good article reassessment	Delisted
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on August 9, 2016. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Josiah Holbrook* organized the first industrial school in the United States?*
Current status: Delisted good article

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Good article reassessment

I came to this article from a Wikipedia criticism site, where it was pointed out that the section on equipment produced by Holbrook's company contained obvious OCR errors and its phrasing indicated that the source was an advertisement. This is inappropriate both as encyclopedic, neutral prose and as a serious copyediting failure. I was alarmed to see that Simongraham had passed the article in substantially the same form I was looking at, without flagging even the copying failures.

I therefore looked further, and saw repetition of information (the creation of the company and factory), uneven style (the Genealogy section, in particular, did not fit with the rest in style), and unclear writing including burying the information on when he started his first school and simply puzzling sentences like "There were a hundred lyceums formed in the 1820s for crafts and mechanics of agricultural methods and geological surveys and further advanced the teaching system into other areas." I looked at a couple of references to see whether over-close paraphrasing was a problem, and found not so much that as clumsy integration of the information: "He developed a small factory for the manufacture of scientific apparatus" in the "17th Reunion" news source was "made a factory that was specifically designed to manufacture scientific apparatus" in the article. I also stumbled on the fact that the "Founder Yale Grad" source is the same text as part of the "17th Reunion" source; obviously some of these news reports have a common origin. I appreciate the work that has gone into scouring newspapers.com, but these sources needed to be used to reference a short, coherent account of Holbrook's life and work, and where there were duplicates, only the one with the fuller text should have been used. These issues should have been caught at the GA review.

I've tightened the text quite a lot, including removing the numbered list of objectives of the organization, which is not the subject of the article, but I still see unclear exposition and I suspect more about the lyceum movement and its extent could be cut; we have an article on it.

I don't participate in the GA process, so I do not feel comfortable formally delisting the article. But I think it should be reassessed. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:21, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir: Thank you for highlighting this. I feel very embarrassed that I missed these in the assessment and so have requested community involvement so that I learn how to do this better in the future. simongraham (talk) 11:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Josiah Holbrook

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Kept (t · c) buidhe 23:30, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting a reassessment following observations from Yngvadottir. As the original GA assessor I feel very embarrassed and humbled that I missed the items that have been mentioned in the observation - which are very obvious to me when I look at it afresh. simongraham (talk) 11:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The observation identified the following problems:

The section on equipment produced by Holbrook's company contained obvious OCR errors and its phrasing indicated that the source was an advertisement.
Repetition of information (the creation of the company and factory)
Uneven style (the Genealogy section, in particular, did not fit with the rest in style)
Unclear writing including burying the information on when he started his first school and simply puzzling sentences like "There were a hundred lyceums formed in the 1820s for crafts and mechanics of agricultural methods and geological surveys and further advanced the teaching system into other areas."
Clumsy integration of the information from references, such as "He developed a small factory for the manufacture of scientific apparatus" in the "17th Reunion" news source was "made a factory that was specifically designed to manufacture scientific apparatus" in the article.
The "Founder Yale Grad" source is the same text as part of the "17th Reunion" source; obviously some of these news reports have a common origin.

Yngvadottir has undertaken essential editing but I feel that the article needs to be reassessed by someone with more experience than me. The nominee, Doug Coldwell, was always helpful in the review and I feel has made this errors, as I did, in good faith. simongraham (talk) 11:22, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Simongraham: Sorry you have not got much response here. I have had a look at the article and find some of the sentences lack flow and are a bit repetitive. Not sure they are at the level of failing the GA criteria though. For example the first three sentences all say "the United States". There is also some ordering issues. For example it says how he defined a lyceum, then talks about him being ahead of his time and other info, before going back to the lyceums. That whole section reads too much like a collection of facts with no real thought to tying them together. I feel that paragraph could be rewritten to flow much better. Further the third paragraph then says he introduced the first lyceum school after a paragraph saying what was in the lyceum schools. The more I read the more I feel this fails criteria 1a. Aircorn (talk) 03:21, 7 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Aircorn: Thank you. This is very helpful. I have done some edits myself to manage the flow better and extended the topic from its focus on lyceums. Please tell me if you think this rectifies the problem. simongraham (talk) 06:25, 8 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is much better. Aircorn (talk) 19:50, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright contributor investigation and Good article reassessment

This article is part of Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210315 and the Good article (GA) drive to reassess and potentially delist over 200 GAs that might contain copyright and other problems. An AN discussion closed with consensus to delist this group of articles en masse, unless a reviewer opens an independent review and can vouch for/verify content of all sources. Please review Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023 for further information about the GA status of this article, the timeline and process for delisting, and suggestions for improvements. Questions or comments can be made at the project talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]