Wikipedia:Peer review/Forbidden City/archive1

Forbidden City

I have been working on Forbidden City for a while, with the aim of getting it to featured article status. I feel that it is meeting or close to meeting the criteria, so I would appreciate any comments or suggestions in that regard. Some things which I would like a "fresh eye" to comment on include style and quality of prose, formatting of references, and image quantity/placement. Thanks in advance, --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 04:14, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments by SpecialWindler

It's a good well constructed article, few pointers

•  DoneYour table of contents is a little too long, consider removing the === headings
  • To make a heading without putting it as table of contents simply add ; before the heading. for example

this heading has ; placed before it.

•  DoneThe lead is too short for a 64KB page. Consider 3 paragraphs
  • Also see WP:LEAD

There a few comments, not a good review though. SpecialWindler talk 06:59, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments.

1. I've hidden the subheadings under "Collections". --PalaceGuard008
2. I've started expanding the lead a little to better summarise the content of the article. There are now three (substantial) paragraphs. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 07:49, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments by mcginnly

Lazy review by mcginnly The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

•  DonePer Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.^[?]
•  DonePer Wikipedia:What is a featured article?, Images should have concise captions.^[?]
•  DonePer Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 7 metres, use 7 metres, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 7 metres.^[?]
•  DonePer Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), when doing conversions, please use standard abbreviations: for example, miles -> mi, kilometers squared -> km², and pounds -> lb.^[?]
•  DonePer Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), please spell out source units of measurements in text; for example, the Moon is 380,000 kilometres (240,000 mi) from Earth.^[?] Specifically, an example is 0.72 km².
•  DoneWhen writing standard abbreviations, the abbreviations should not have a 's' to demark plurality (for example, change kms to km and lbs to lb).
•  DonePer Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Build the web, years with full dates should be linked; for example, link January 15, 2006.^[?]
•  DonePer Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), headings generally should not repeat the title of the article. For example, if the article was Ferdinand Magellan, instead of using the heading ==Magellan's journey==, use ==Journey==.^[?]
•  DonePlease reorder/rename the last few sections to follow guidelines at Wikipedia:Guide to layout.^[?]
•  DonePer WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long- consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Wikipedia:Summary style.^[?]
•  DoneThis article may need to undergo summary style, where a series of appropriate subpages are used. For example, if the article is United States, than an appropriate subpage would be History of the United States, such that a summary of the subpage exists on the mother article, while the subpage goes into more detail.^[?]
•  DoneThere are a few occurrences of weasel words in this article- please observe WP:AWT. Certain phrases should specify exactly who supports, considers, believes, etc., such a view.
  • it has been
  • might be weasel words, and should be provided with proper citations (if they already do, or are not weasel terms, please strike this comment).^[?]
• Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
  • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
•  DoneAs done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]^[?]
• Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Mcginnly | Natter 08:46, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Mcginnly! That's a lot of excellent suggestions. It'll take me a little time to work through them - but thanks! --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:52, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I am progressively making the stylistic changes suggested, but I think one big issue is that I need to start a couple of sub-pages to make this summary style. I probably should have done that as the page was growing. Thanks! --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I have created a number of daughter articles, including a large subpage at History of the Forbidden City. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 03:24, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments by John Smith's

mcginnly has made a lot of good points, so I won't repeat them. My only real bug is that a lot of citations come from the same source - "Yu". Would it be possible to have some of them replaced to vary the sources used?

 DoneAlso, I don't see the original references for "Yu" and "Yang" - you need to have full citations for the first time they're used. John Smith's 13:15, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that!

1. Yu is probably the most authoritative source on the architecture of the Forbidden City out there. An alternative would be the Palace Museum website - but I've used Yu mostly because of two reasons: 1) the Palace Museum website is almost impossible to cite, becuase they disable right clicking and you can't see the URL of the framed page, and 2) Yu is an English language source, whereas the Palace Museum website has very little information in English - most of the information is in Chinese. Still, I'll see if I can replace some of the Yu refs with other sources.
2. The full citations for Yu and Yang are in the Bibliography - I guess I haven't fully grasped how the footnote/bibliography thing correlates with the paper version. Good suggestion - I will change that. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:23, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments by D. Recorder

This article looks very good. One minor comment is that there are a lot of paragraphs with only a few sentences in them. Very often there are only two or three sentences per paragraph. I would either merge or expand them so that the text flows more and isn't as broken by spaces. Secondly, it would be advantageous to have a labeled plan, diagram, or axonometric drawing that shows the locations of the individual buildings such as the gates and halls that are discussed. Furthermore, you can add a few more references, such as [1] if you have access, and you can also work from some surveys such as [2]. It is smart that you are using plenty of Chinese sources but the article may benefit from a few more in English. Where you are at now looks very close to featured article status. Well done so far and good luck. D. Recorder 01:56, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for that.

The one/two-sentence paragraph is a result of my attempt at Summary Style cull-and-move to daughter pages in the last couple of days - I will fix them up as suggested.

I'll work towards a labelled plan - still trying to decide how to go about labelling Image:Forbidden city map wp.png.

Thanks again for the comments. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 02:08, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Have added a labelled plan. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 01:16, 23 August 2007 (UTC)