Talk:Experiments and Observations on Electricity/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Spinningspark (talk · contribs) 17:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

The main issue that I have with this article is that there is no detailed summary of the book's contents. There is even a teaser in the article that it contained "additional scientific material not associated with electricity" which is just going to beg the question for readers, what was that material about?

Some other detailed comments;

• The lead says it is "a book authored by Benjamin Franklin, from letters sent to Peter Collinson". This is slightly confusing. I think you need to be clearer that Collinson produced the book from letters sent to him. Remember, WP:LEAD requires that the lead stands by itself. It should be understood without the need for the user to read the rest of the article.
• Wikilink "half a crown" to Half crown (British coin)
• "This was the prelude to his famous lightning rod". The word "famous" is explicitly deprecated in WP:WTW. It would be better to say something factual instead. Did Franklin invent the lightning rod? Did he make one, or only suggest it and leave it to others to make?
• "electricity principle theories" is ungrammatical. I am also not sure what that is trying to say. Did Franklin discover any important physical laws or put forward new theories of the nature of electricity? If so, some idea of what these were would benefit the article.
• "All editions of the book were yet being printed in Europe" the words "yet being" is a strange construction to my ear and appears to be superfluous. Would it change the meaning to remove those words?
• The external link should say were it is going to take the reader, ie to gbooks.
• There are other editions of the book available online which could be added to the external links. Internet archive has the original 1751 edition. Project Gutenberg has the 1756 French edition. I have not done a thorough search, you might find it worthwile to search both those sites for other editions.
• I note that the French edition contains material written to recipients other than Collinson. For instance letter XVI is to D'Alibard and letter IX is to Kinnersley. I assume that this applies also to English editions, but the Wikipedia article would lead the reader to believe that it was all material sent to Collinson. SpinningSpark 17:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

One more suggestion, which is not a GA requirement. You could add the OCLC numbers from Worldcat to the various editions. The template {{OCLC}} can be used for this. The OCLC catalogue numbers perform the same function as ISBN for old publications that predate ISBN: they help the reader locate copies in libraries. SpinningSpark 18:36, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

You might find it instructive to look at a few Featured Article book articles. Here's some examples,

• Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
• Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
• Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties
• Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

Featured articles are considered Wikipedia's finest works and are the best place to look for inspiration when improving articles. You will see that they generally include extensive sections for contents, themes, reception, and for a historical book, legacy. I'm not saying you should bring the article to FA standard at this stage, but the article should be aiming to get that sort of structure established at least. GA criterion 3a requires that the article "addresses the main aspects of the topic" and having the general headings expected of a FA goes a long way to showing that. SpinningSpark 19:35, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for review and pointers. I have some real world problems I have to attend to, so it may take me a few weeks before I can make these improvements. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 12:23, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I'll put it on hold. But bear in mind that reviews cannot be held open indefinitely. I'm happy for the process to take a long time as long as there is active progress. So let's say we're looking for some activity to resume by Monday 6 March. SpinningSpark 17:00, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough! --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Several improvements made per GA nomination review suggestions. Ready for re-review.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 15:22, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I cannot easily tell what has been changed in the article from the diffs, so I think a completely new review will have to be done on the entire article. I don't have time to do that today, but here are my initial impressions. I am confused by the new layout; there is now a contents section, but it mostly seems to have incorporated the previous editions section. Why is this not two separate sections? I'm still not getting a clear idea of the technical contents of the book. Besides the lightning rod, there does not seem to be any description of the nature of the experiments or their purpose. The image galleries are a bit of a mess. I wouldn't fail a GA article because of this issue, but it doesn't look good. I'm not sure that putting the gallery in the middle of the section really works. The images are too large, interrupting the flow of the article, and on a narrow screen or window they wrap badly, leaving a large white space in the centre. Also, resizing images by number of pixels is deprecated. Consider how bad that is going to be on a mobile phone or tablet. It also overrides the image size preference users might have set. The recommended way to resize an image is via the "upright" parameter which will resize relative to the default or user set preference. SpinningSpark 20:43, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Several improvements made per GA nomination review suggestions. Ready for re-review.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:27, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: I have all the books on my desk now that were used for upgrading the article to Good Article status. These are the March 2017 Mel books as shown in the Michigan eLibrary article. All the pictures in the article on MeL are mine of books I used for various articles over time (DYKs & GAs). I'm used to having others use The six good article criteria for reviewing my articles I had submitted for GA nomination. If you can follow this format, I will be glad to respond to any issues - as I have all the ILL books on hand now. Thanks.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Here is reference #12 of Cohen 1956 page 478. Let me know if you need any others.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 22:48, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

This undoubtedly has the potential to be a GA and you have clearly put a great deal of work into this, but it is still not really moving in the direction that I think it needs to go. A book article should have an extensive description of the contents of the book. Although you now have a contents section, I am still getting very little idea of what is in the book other than the work on lightning and lightning protection. If that is all that is in there of significance, the article should explicitly say that, but I don't think that that is actually true. For instance, the capacitor article tells me that Franklin proposed that the electric charge stored in the Leyden jar exists on the glass of the jar rather than in the water inside the jar. This is an important discovery in the development of capacitors and I presume that this can be found in Franklin's book as this was Franklin's only publication. The same article (and the battery (electricity) article) claims that Franklin was the first to use the term battery in this context. That is also worthy of note if the origin is in this book. This is an unusual case, book articles usually have the opposite problem being top-heavy with contents (plot summary) and little on the importance of the book to the world at large. The same comment goes for the editions section. We are told that additional material has been added to each edition, but very little on what the contents of this material is (other than issues around the lightning rod).

Much of the material in the contents and editions sections is not actually about the contents, but rather about the later importance of the material. This would be better moved to a separate legacy section making the article clearer. The Awards section, which is very short, could also be incorporated into it.

For the reasons above, I still don't feel this is ready for a detailed review. There are number of details I could comment on after a quick pass, but really the basic structure and contents needs to be sorted before it is worth doing that kind of detailed review. In any case, I won't be organising my review under the GA criteria headings. I know some reviewers do this, but I find it more beneficial to review the article sentence by sentence against all the criteria at once.

All in all, I think it would be best to fail this now (fails criteria 3a "addresses the main aspects of the topic") and allow the article to be improved at your own pace. I am very willing to review the article again when you resubmit it. I will do this straight away so you don't have to wait in the queue again. Just drop a note on my talk page when you want this. Or you may prefer to wait for another reviewer. SpinningSpark 22:29, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.