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GA Review

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Reviewer: Tim riley (talk · contribs) 09:25, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Initial comments

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Having contributed to the peer review of this article I have held back from reviewing it for GAN to give other editors the chance to do so, but as the review has been open for three weeks or so I'm happy to do the review. Starting first read-through of the current text now, and will be back with comments shortly. Tim riley talk 09:25, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tim riley:, thank you very much for giving your time to doing this review. I will begin working through your comments tonight. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:11, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Detailed comments

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I could with a clear conscience promote this fine article as it stands, because in my view it meets the GA criteria already. The following few comments are made more with potential FAC in mind than with GA, but I hope they will be useful.

  • Lead
  • "neolithic" – the WP article and the OED both capitalise the word. (The latter adds "Forms: also with lower-case initial" but a capital N seems the safer option).
 Done
  • Seats for theatre, concert hall and stadium: as the numbers of seats are used as attributive adjectives I think the theatre and stadium should follow the hyphen given to the concert hall: "a 1400-seat theatre" and "a 30,500-seat football stadium". I suppose by that logic it should be "a 65,000-capacity open-air concert", though I admit one is in danger of overdosing on hyphens.
 Done For consistency and to avoid inconvenient line breaks, hyphenated all,
  • "However, despite this economic success" – this is the first of five "howevers" in the article, and although "howevers" have their place I don't think any of the five here add anything to the sense (except possibly the one in the Height section) and they rather dilute the prose, in my view.
I agree.  Done You might question my two replacement "in contrast"s but I think that they are appropriate in context.
  • Birth of a "New City
  • "lakes and parkland that are so evident today" – the "so" strikes a slightly editorial note, I think.
 Done An editor in the past was keen on such expressions, I thought I had found them all.
  • "Local Centres in most of the grid squares" – local centres are in lower case later in the article – rightly so, I'd say.
 Done, flagged in the peer review but missed one.
  • History
  • "late Industrial revolution settlements" – our WP article capitalises both the I and the R.
 Done
  • "World War II" in the text but "Second World War" in the caption of the photo of Bletchley Park. Probably better to be consistent one way or the other.
 Done
  • Redways
  • "270 kilometres or 170 miles total length" – this is, I think, the only place in which you give kilometres first and miles second. Perhaps there is good reason for this inconsistency, but it isn't obvious.
 Done.
  • Linear parks
  • As with the km/mi, above, the ha/acres are not in the order adopted elsewhere in the article.
 Done
  • "a third larger than Richmond Park and ten times larger than London's Hyde Park" – I think I see why you have phrased this thus, but it might flow better if you moved the "London's" to before Richmond. It would be clear that the immediately following mention of Hyde Park did not refer to the Hyde Parks in other cities. But you may disagree and I don't press the point.
 Done as ten times larger than London's Hyde Park and a third larger than Richmond Park.
  • Original towns and villages
  • I don't know that I'd italicise Rose and Crown Inn or capitalise Parish Church, but again, I don't press the point.
 Done
  • "cryptographers broke a large number of Axis codes and ciphers, including the German Enigma machine" – they didn't break the machine, but its codes.
 Done which fixed a redirect
  • Music
  • "founded by jazz artists Cleo Laine and John Dankworth" – on the whole you have avoided false titles in the article, and I think it would benefit from a "the" before the "jazz", to take away the slightly tabloidese flavour.
 Done also changed 'artist' to 'musician'.
  • Arts, theatre and museums
  • "The adjacent 1,400 seat" – hyphen, as mentioned above?
 Done Yes, numbers giving a quantity are required to have a hyphen or a {{nbsp}}
  • Education
  • "Like most parts of the UK, the state secondary schools in Milton Keynes are comprehensives" – this would be more precise if you changed "Like" to "As in". At present the sentence says that most parts of the UK are comprehensives. Nobody will mistake your meaning, but it would be as well to have the prose watertight.
 Done. But they might wonder which compo I attended, like?
  • A tale of two cities
  • As you have carried over the capitalisation of "Small and Medium Enterprise" in the header three paras earlier I wonder if you should do similarly here, "A Tale of Two Cities"? Just a thought. As you are quoting, I don't think MoS purists could object.
 Not done I changed it as suggested but have decided that it is just wrong. It is not a book title, it is a quote. (I've put in quotes as it is a quote. MOS:HEAD doesn't object and it might protect against those who object to misuse(!) of the word city.)
I have decapitalised Small and medium enterprise.
  • Closest cities and towns
  • Am I right in supposing the order in which Northampton etc and Coventry etc are listed reflects how far each is from Milton Keynes?
Yes
  • Notable people
  • There is some inconsistency in the amount of detail you give about the various worthies in the list. There is a 36-word para on Christopher B-Lynch, which seems disproportionate by contrast with most of the other people mentioned.
 Done. To avoid wp:OWN, I have generally not interfered with how people are listed here but for GA it definitely needs tightening.
  • Similarly, though I am quite willing to believe that Emily Bergl is a notable person, I doubt that her relevance to Milton Keynes requires the reader to know that her mother was Irish or her father an English architect.
 Done

That's my lot. I'd like to emphasise again that these points are merely advisory, and do not affect the question of promotion to GA: the prose certainly meets the relevant GA standard already. But as the article seems to me to have FAC potential I have been as pernickety as I can, as you no doubt see. – Tim riley talk 10:50, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not at all sure that it passed the scintillating writing test for FA , though, but thank you for the implied compliment.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:05, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Overall summary

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GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

  1. Is it reasonably well written?
    A. Prose quality:
    B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:
  2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
    A. References to sources:
    Well referenced.
    B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:
    Well referenced.
    C. No original research:
  3. Is it broad in its coverage?
    A. Major aspects:
    B. Focused:
  4. Is it neutral?
    Fair representation without bias:
  5. Is it stable?
    No edit wars, etc:
  6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
    A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:
    Well illustrated.
    B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
    Well illustrated.
  7. Overall:
    Pass or Fail:

Promoting to GA. As to FAC I am leaving a note on the nominator's talk page, but here I will just record that I found this a thoroughly satisfying article, and it was a pleasure to read and reread it. – Tim riley talk 08:44, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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