Wikipedia:Peer review/Physics/archive1

Physics

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I found it quite good... Can anyone suggest ways to improve it before nominating it as a GA or FA?

Thanks, ― A._di_M.^{3rd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 18:28, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Thank you for your interest in such an important topic. Unfortunately, I think it needs quite a bit of workk before it would pass at WP:GAN, let along WP:FAC. With GA and FA in mind, here are some suggestions for improvement.

• The biggest problem with the article is that it needs more references, for example many paragraphs have no refs, and some sections such as History and Core theories also have none at all. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
• Per WP:CITE references generally come AFTER punctuation, and are usually at the end of a sentence or phrase
  • Huh? Most of the refs are immediately after a full stop, and a few are after a comma at a point where they don't disrupt the flow of the sentence. A. di M. (formerly Army1987) (talk) 01:34, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
• Some refs need more information - for example current ref 25 is just a link labeled "Nasa.gov". Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
• The section headers need to follow WP:HEAD - since the article title is Physics, try to avoid repeating that word in headers like "Core theories of physics" could just be "Core theories" (the reader already knows the article is about physics). Things like "Astrophysics" as headers are OK.
• The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. As such, nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself. My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. Please see WP:LEAD
• There are two ways to cite the lead - one is to only have refs for direct quotes and extraoridinary claims, as a summary, the refs will be in the biody of the article when the material is repeated. The other way is to cite the lead just as you would cite anything else (so essentially everything gets a cite). This is somewhere in between.
• The article could use a good copyedit - just in the lead, I have no idea what Physics (no derivation given), but above physical (Latin- Physica, Greek- Physics-nature). really means or why it is in the lead (the etymology is given in the first sentence of the lead)
• The article uses {{cquote}} but according the documentation at Template:Cquote this is for pull quotes only, and this should probably use {{blockquote}} instead.
• The article has many short (one or two sentence) paragraphs - these impede the article's flow for the reader, and should either be combined with other paragraphs or perhaps expanded.
• Watch WP:OVERLINKing - for example quantum mechanics is linked seven times in the article
• In general, the broader the topic, the more difficult it is to write a really good, succinct article on it that is also broad in its coverage (GA criteria) or comprehensive (FA citeria). A model article is useful for ideas and examples to follow - while there is not an article this broad listed there, there are many FAs in Wikipedia:Featured_articles#Physics_and_astronomy which may be good models.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:28, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

I hope I may additional comments:

• The GA criteria includes fixing gaps that are easily spotted. Physics had multiple ancestory: Mesopotamian maths, used for religion; and Egyptian maths, used for land law. The Greeks both the speculations of the pre-Socratic philosophers and learned Mesopotamian and Egyptian maths and physics. The Arabs learned these sciences from the Greeks, and introduced them via southern Spain. As you say, the Chinese develop this indepently. How about India? --Philcha (talk) 02:28, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
• I wouldn't get into the debate about reductionism, but physics can explain a lot of chemistry while chemistry can't explain physics.
  Dictionaries show definitions based on matter and energy. But "excluding Chemistry and Biology" is an oversimplification. The big problem with which I'm wrestling is how to express physics' place in the sciences. For example if an animal does something it can be explained in terms of biology, but the energy used by the animal can be explained in terms of chemistry; but finally its physics that explains all energy and matter. --Philcha (talk) 15:21, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
• Please use or ignore my comments about the relationships between the sciences. If I were done a large upgrade to the article I think that would have the basis - but you're the doing the job, and I should not interfere. --Philcha (talk) 02:28, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
• I think you'll need several citations, for example many paragraphs of section "Theory and experiment" have no citations. --Philcha (talk) 09:35, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

This article is big. You may need to improve/create some articles into which you can move content. I know that's more work, but they can be easier GAs as you've have a lot of the content and citations :-) --Philcha (talk) 09:35, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

24 kB of "readable prose size" (as computed by User:Dr pda/prosesize) isn't quite huge for such a broad topic: it is about the size of the median featured article. A. di M. (formerly Army1987) (talk) 01:47, 24 July 2010 (UTC)