Talk:One Laptop per Child/GA1

GA Review

I'll be reviewing the OLPC article. I have some interest in the project and have run the software on my own laptop. The review should be finished in a day or so. Wronkiew (talk) 17:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Overview

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Writing/prose

• "OLPC has generated a great deal of interest in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and One to one computing fields of research." Imprecise and verbose.
• "OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat." No reason to use three words when "several" will do. Fix all cases.
• "To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities." Verbose, just "outside" will do.
• "Ivan Krstić (former OLPC Director of Security Architecture) resigned in late February, 2008 because, he said, learning wasn’t what the OLPC was about even for Nicholas Negroponte (see quote below)." Eliminate contractions from the article. Also, Month, Year, should always be followed by a comma. Rewrite to eliminate the parenthesized "see below".
• "The laptops will be loaned to students, similar to textbooks, and ultimately remain the property of the issuing local government." Lent.
• "The laptops include an anti-theft system which requires laptops to make contact with a country specific server over a network or to a school-level server that was manually loaded with 21 day long cryptographically secured 'leases' from a USB key for un-networked schools, or the laptops will be locked until a 'lease' is provided to it." Just "contact" will do.
• "Approximately 500 developer boards (Alpha-1) were distributed in mid-2006; 875 working prototypes (Beta 1) were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007;[42] full-scale production started November 6, 2007." "Approximately" is a mouthful and not needed here. Just say "about".
• "They indicated they could ship 5 million to 10 million units in 2007 because seven nations had committed to buy the XO-1 for their schoolchildren: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay." Replace "indicated" with "showed" or "said". Spell out numbers less than 10. Fix all cases.
• "First real (non-pilot) deployment of the OLPC technology happened in Uruguay in December 2007." Should start with "the first", and needs to be rewritten to eliminate "happened".
• "The amount of damages is based upon an order by the Nigerian government for one million of the laptops." Just say "on" here.
• "In 2007, XO laptops in Nigeria were reported to contain pornographic material belonging to children partaking in the OLPC Program." I don't think this word means what you think it means.
• "In Nepal, things are moving swiftly at the Bishwamitra and Bashuki pilots. Open Learning Exchange Nepal is the lead implementer for the OLPC pilots in Nepal, working together with Nepal's Department of Education." Rewrite to eliminate "things".
• "See Other viewpoints for additional statements from Negroponte and Kane on this topic." Don't try to reference an article section in prose. Statements should be adequately backed up by the contents of that section or by references. If there's other information of interest that isn't nearby, then some restructuring needs to be done.
• "The most immediate outcome of that conference was the establishment of the Nation1 project and the Junior Summit, held the following year, although many of the sessions at 2B1 helped inform OLPC." Marketing language. Rewrite to explain what OLPC learned from these sessions. Also, the conference should be referred to as "the 2B1 conference", and not shortened to "2B1".
• There are several redundant discussions about Windows XP running on the XO-1. Merge them.
• The "Ivan Krstić" section needs to be converted to prose.
• "Non working physical model" needs a hyphen between "non" and "working". Double adjectives should be hyphenated.
• Clarity can be improved by splitting up the longest sentences containing multiple concepts.
  • "The OLPC has asserted that it is aiming to use as many environmentally friendly materials as it can; that the laptop and all OLPC-supplied accessories will be fully compliant with the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS); and that the laptop will use an order of magnitude less power than the typical consumer notebooks available as of 2007, minimizing the environmental burden of power generation."
  • "At the United Nations conference in Tunisia, several African officials, most notably Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon and Mohammed Diop of Mali, voiced suspicions towards the motives of the OLPC project and claimed that the project was using an overly American mindset that presented solutions not applicable to specifically African problems."
  • "While in favor of the One Laptop per Child initiative for providing education to children in the developing world at a cheaper rate, he has pointed out that a $2,000 library can serve 400 children, costing just $5 a child to bring access to a wide range of books in the local languages (such as Khmer or Nepali) and English; also, a $10,000 school can serve 400–500 children ($20–$25 a child)."
  • "The laptops include an anti-theft system which requires laptops to make contact with a country specific server over a network or to a school-level server that was manually loaded with 21 day long cryptographically secured "leases" from a USB key for un-networked schools, or the laptops will be locked until a "lease" is provided to it." Also the section in brown needs to be simplified.
  • "The XO-1, previously known as the '$100 Laptop' or 'Children's Machine', is an inexpensive laptop computer designed to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves" (constructionist learning)."

Writing/MoS

• Lead section
  • Lead says "American non-profit", but this is not mentioned in the rest of the article.
  • ICT4D is mentioned in the lead but not elsewhere. Also "one to one". And "501(c)(3)", "Delaware", the list of sponsors, the donation amount, and the profit take. There may be other details in the lead that are not explained later in the article, and this is a requirement.
  • The lead section does not adequately summarize the article. It looks like what is now the lead should be turned into a new section about the company, and a new lead should be written.
  • Industry-specific concepts like ICT4D and 1-1 computing are inapproprate for the lead section.
• Layout
  • Text should not be sandwiched between two images, as they are at the beginning of the "Technology" section.
  • Replace "&" with "and" in section headers.
  • "Lee Felsenstein criticized the centralized, top-down, design and distribution of the OLPC, calling it 'imperialistic'." Merge one-sentence paragraphs with another paragraph in the section. Minimize and try to eliminate all single sentence paragraphs.
  • Short paragraphs, especially single sentence ones, should not have their own subheadings. For example, G1G1v2, Uruguay, Papua New Guinea, several other countries, and Future.
  • Eliminate see also links that are also linked earlier in the article, for example "Classmate PC".
  • Move the "Photo gallery" section to the Commons page.
• Jargon
  • "It resigned its membership on 3 January 2008, citing disagreements with requests from OLPC's founder, Nicholas Negroponte, for Intel to stop dumping their Classmate PCs." The use of the word "dumping" here is not clear from the context.
  • "Mobile ad-hoc networking based on the 802.11s wireless mesh network protocol allows students to collaborate on Activities and to share Internet access from one connection." "Activities" is not linked or explained adequately here. Also, I don't think "Internet" needs to be capitalized.
  • "G1G1v2" is not an approprate section name.
  • "First trials include Satellite base station (RICS) in Ku Band sponsored by the SPC Secretariat of the Pacific Community." "Ku Band" is does not have enough context.
• Words to avoid
  • "Microsoft's Windows XP, however, is not seen by some as a sustainable operating system." Weasel words.
  • "Similar responses have led some to suggest the OLPC takes an indifferent stance concerning this issue."
  • "At the United Nations conference in Tunisia, several African officials, most notably Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon and Mohammed Diop of Mali, voiced suspicions towards the motives of the OLPC project and claimed that the project was using an overly American mindset that presented solutions not applicable to specifically African problems." Using "claimed" here infers an opinion against his suspicions.
• Other issues
  • Eliminate external links in the article prose, like "Sugar Labs" and "Google map of OLPC pilot projects".

References

• Eliminate pointless redlinks from the references section.
• " - " and " -- " are typewriter stand-ins for either the en dash or the em dash. Replace them with "–" or "—" or the UTF-8 character equivalents.
• Fix broken citation templates like "Ivan Kristic - OLPC People".
• Standardize citation format. For example, "57. ^ OLPC in Colombia [1]".

Attribution

• OLPC wiki is not a reliable source.
• I did not verify that every controversial or counterintuitive statement, and that every quote and statistic is attributed to a source.

Neutrality

• The "Mission" section needs to be rewritten. It essentially sets the tone of the article with a blockquote from the company, which raises COI issues. The tag on the controversy section is correctly applied and the issues need to be addressed.
• "Lee Felsenstein criticized the centralized, top-down, design and distribution of the OLPC, calling it 'imperialistic'." Some things can be non-controversial, like the design and construction of a laptop. Merge this statement with another section where it would make sense.

Stability

• There seems to be some unresolved controversy concerning several issues. This has resulted in some sections being tagged and flow and redundancy problems. The biggest issue is the company mission. Another is Windows XP dual booting. Also the Give 1 Get 1 program. The "Other viewpoints" section reads like a dumping ground for controversial content that didn't fit elsewhere. Another indication that this section was tacked on without concern for article flow is the presence of "see also" statements throughout the article. While there does not appear to be any edit-warring going on over this, these are unresolved content disputes that are detracting from the quality of the article.

Image captions

• It needs to be clear that the image in the infobox is the logo of the company, if that is what it is.
• An image caption references the "Active Antenna" but this is not explained in the technology section.
• "Thailand pilot children doing field research in Ban Samkha." "Pilot children" is not clear.

The article is generally well written but has some problems with the guidelines specific to the GA criteria. Because of the complexity of the issues discussed, and the presence of a correctly applied cleanup tag, I am declining to promote this article. Once the issues have been resolved, please re-nominate the article for another review. You are welcome to ask for a second opinion if you think my assessment is too critical. Wronkiew (talk) 08:27, 29 September 2008 (UTC)