Talk:Calutron Girls/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Caeciliusinhorto (talk · contribs) 09:16, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

I'll review this article. Comment shortly. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 09:16, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay, initial comments:

• Prose is basically fine. I noticed a few clunky places:
  • "trained professional physicists" is repeated three times in a single paragraph – possibly the second, and certainly the third, use could just be "physicists".
  • It felt like "Calutron Girl"/"Calutron Girls" was used excessively – I count fourteen in only a 1000-word article! Given how unusual a phrase it is, it is very noticeable.
  • "a Product" is not a proper noun and doesn't need random capitalisation in the middle of a sentence
• Neutrality is fine
• Stability is fine
• Illustrations are all fine

The two main parts of a GA review are always verifiability and broadness of coverage.

Regarding verifiability: the article is comprehensively cited. Spot-checks show that the sources do support the claims being made. I would have liked to see more academic sources, but google scholar is turning up remarkably little, and the sources used don't seem to be unreliable.

And finally, broadness of coverage: there's nothing obviously missing. Perhaps there's more to say about the longer-term legacy of the Calutron girls, but I'm not turning much up on a cursory search.

On the whole, this is pretty much good when it comes to the GA criteria. I'll give it a few days for you to deal with the few outstanding prose points, and have another look over the article, but you're nearly there! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:00, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the review! I've fixed up the prose concerns (thank you for pointing those out!) and added a very brief paragraph on their legacy. One note: I had capitalized "Product" originally because it is capitalized intentionally in the source. I added quotes around it to clarify this- does that work? Aerin17 (t • c) 00:22, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Ehhh, I'm still not convinced that it's necessary, but I guess if we're directly quoting the source it's okay.

One final thing I spotted: the article says While they did not know the significance of the set points they controlled the instrumentation for, they knew from their training that readings in the "R" range were good, a reading of "E" was that the system was collecting the desired product but this is not what the source says. The source says that a high R-reading was good. It also doesn't say anything about a reading of "E" – it says "E" was the box where the product was collected. (It would be good if we could explain what these cryptic initials all stood for, if that is known, too!) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:50, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out! I replaced that sentence with a quote directly from The Girls of Atomic City, which is where the book review was getting its information anyway. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to explain anywhere what the initials stood for, at least not where I can see in the Google Books preview. Aerin17 (t • c) 06:06, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Good stuff – that quote is great! I'm going to pass the article now. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:56, 1 March 2022 (UTC)