Wikipedia:Peer review/Footpad/archive1

Footpad

I've listed this article for peer review because it could be helpful to improve it. I've worked on it a lot and with effort and dedication trying to make accurate researches about the topic. I've cured and edited all paragraphs exept the introduction and the origin of the word and now I'm trying to understand if expand the page without resulting to get out of topic and deal with concepts that already have their own section on Wikipedia.

Thanks, Im 2u (talk) 18:09, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Comments by Caeciliusinhorto:

The lead says first that the term footpad was used from the 16th to 19th century, and secondly, in a different sentence, that footpads operated between the Elizabethan period and the 19th century. I suspect that fundamentally these two claims amount to the same thing, but the second suggests that the kind of activity that footpads engaged in (i.e. robbing pedestrians) only happened in this time frame. Perhaps, if footpadry is fundamentally distinct from e.g. mugging (other than the fact that one word is outdated and one is recent) you should say how in the article. I don't think they are distinct, though, so I'd just cut the redundancy.

Also in the lead, per WP:Refers, it is probably better to begin "Footpads were a type of criminal who specialised in robbing pedestrian victims..."

I'm not sure to what extent the etymology of "footpad" is relevant to the article, especially as currently the section essentially says "we're not really sure what the etymology is".

In the section on "robbery", the article tells us that it was impossible to buy a horse. This seems to be obviously wrong: clearly some people did own horses, and therefore presumably some were for sale. If horses were never sold, it seems a likely to be challenged claim needing citation (per WP:PROVEIT). If, as more likely, the article means that buying a horse was prohibitively expensive, it should say that! (but it seems to me this still lacks explanatory power. A fundamental component of being a robber is stealing things: why couldn't they just steal horses? There are reasons other than "horses are expensive").

The MoS guidelines for section headings are found at WP:HEAD. Specific violations in this article:

• Headings should be in "sentence case" i.e. only the first letter of the first word (and of proper nouns) should be capitalised.
• Headings should not begin with articles (a, an, or the)
• Headings should be nouns or noun-phrases ("robbing" needs to change)

There are various sentences and phrases throughout the article that don't make much sense to me, or sometimes just aren't very idiomatic English:

• "through which it was possible to gain time and take the lead in case of reaction from the victim" (the meaning of which seems to be later conveyed by "Violence was perpetrated as a means to ensure a rapid escape from the crime scene.": having both is redundant?)
• "Criminals found more safe and advantageous moving in darkness"
• "Not all such criminals were indespensable usual practitioners, but they could have an occupation as assistant or apprentice of some master who testified in favour of their good character." The first part of this sentence doesn't make much sense, the second part needs context.
• "The scripture constitutes a testimony of how street robbery and its actors became the subject of cultural texture." I don't even know what sense this is meant to be conveying...
• "efferate". As far as I know (and Google knows) this simply isn't an English word. The Italian word "efferato" means "brutal", which makes sense in context...
• "perpetrators were generally tried with inflexibility." I know what this means, but it's not exactly idiomatic English. "perpertrators were treated harshly", perhaps?

There seem to be some contradictions in the article: e.g. the section on "robbing" suggests that all footpad attacks were violent, but the section on "Most noted Criminals and Gangs" says that not all attacks were necessarily violent?

The same section mentions Matthew Clarke and his burglary. This isn't really relevant to an article on footpadry: an example of a footpad famous for violence would be much better.

"Criminals convicted were taken to trial at the Old Bailey, the Central criminal Court of Engand and Wales, and if sentenced guilty they were punished.": Certainly in the 16th century this would only have been the case for London criminals. What about footpads elsewhere in England? Other towns (e.g. Norwich and Bristol) existed!

Hope this helps!