Wikipedia:Peer review/Sentence spacing/archive1

Sentence spacing

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because the article is well sourced and detailed so far. Also, as it addresses a topic of some controversy on the Internet, it could become a more-frequented page in the future—especially if some of the 70+ Websites devoted to this topic start linking to this site as a well-researched resource (some already have). Thus, would like to make sure it receives input from more than one major source - myself.

Would welcome comments on its length/size. I think it is acceptable, as I have summarized a lot in most sections (believe it or not, I have a lot more relevant material). WP:Article Size states: "Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 30 to 50 KB, which roughly corresponds to 6,000 to 10,000 words of readable prose." The article is at 41 kb and 6,149 words of readable prose. So, although I welcome comments on the size, I would caution against using the current "total size" as the sole indicator of length.

Other areas I would welcome comments in:

1. Should the "Style guides" section be split into a separate article? I separated the "history" section and summarized, but not sure if the "Style guide" section is notable enough to merit its own article. If it could meet WP:N, what would the article be called? Also, it might be better left in this article since people going to an article on "sentence spacing" may well want to determine what their particular style guide says on the topic. As an encyclopedia, that's reasonable. The question is if it should be in this article, or a separate one.

2. Controversy. I summarized this, as it could be a separate article as well. I'm just not sure that this topic would be better off split into multiple article.

3. History. I moved the history to near the end at the beginning of this project (my involvement anyway). From experience, most people don't visit this page for the history, they want to find out whether to hit the space bar once or twice at the end of a sentence. In that sense, I wrote the article with the intent to "get down to business" and put the bottom line up front. Also, the history flows better immediately in front of the "digital age" section, which definitely doesn't belong near the front. Was that the right decision?

4. POV issues? In some cases, the article uses strong language - such as calling the double-space "obsolete" for most uses. It may seem strong, but many of the sources used even stronger language, stating that it was "absolutely incorrect" or wrong in all cases. These were reliable typographic sources, which are the most relevant to this topic. Since some grammar guide and other sources stated that the double space might be used on a typewriter (which almost no one uses anymore), or, in a very few cases, with a monospaced font (although many sources stated that single spacing is best even with a monospaced font today), I decided to settle on "obsolete" instead of "wrong" or "incorrect." "Obsolete" might seem POV to people though. The only way I see out of that is to try to directly quote sources. Since I have a ton of sources, and there are many wording variations, that could be problematic - and long. Anyway, I tried to stay NPOV, but in some cases it might seem POV. In many cases, it's just what the sources are stating (and I didn't cherry pick). However, I'm still interested in comments on POV here, since it will have to withstand accusations of POV in the future.

5. Images? This is a tough one. I could create some more images (like the one included), but not sure what would be useful here. Pictures of style guides and early printing machines are probably better on those specific Wikipedia pages. I'd like some ideas though, since the page is light on images (although the total size might indicate this is better left alone so mobile devices don't short-circuit when hitting this page).

Thanks, Airborne84 (talk) 07:07, 10 April 2010 (UTC)