Talk:History of private equity and venture capital/GA1

GA Review

Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Images there sure are a lot of them. Before I look at tags, I want to suggest the use of the |px| argument to standardize the size of the images across the article. Also, there are 15 images in this article. I submit that 5-8 of these aren't necessary for the article itself and don't add much for the reader. That isn't a GA criteria, so I won't press the point.

The Image:Vax780 small.jpeg fair use rationale justifies the use of that image in the VAX article. How does the inclusion of this image in this article help the reader to better understand the subject?
Both Image:Wall Street film.jpg and Image:OtherPeoplesMoney.jpg seem superfluous to the article and NFCC 8 would provide some caution against their use in this particular article.
Other than those two issues, the images check out.

Sources Largely good. citation format is consistent. Some citations occur at odd points in the text. For example, the citation for the characterization of the continental airline buyers vis Carl Icahn doesn't really need to be there. The contentious claim is not that Icahn was viewed negatively (this was already shown in the previous citation of that reference). The contentious claim is that the saviors of Continental were viewed as such. I don't see that claim supported by in text citations in this article or the main article for the section. Perhaps it is in a broader reference, but it would do to be cited inline. Claims like this crop up throughout the article. For example, this citation serves only to verify the factual claim made in the previous sentence (specifically, "The NVCA was to serve as the industry trade group for the venture capital industry"). It is the only citation in the sand hill rd. section. A look at the main article shows the exact same paragraph but with a variously cited list of companies afterwards. I realize that a considerable amount of the information stems from Ante, Burrough and Bruck. However the practice of interspersing large blocks of otherwise unadorned text with what seems to be a non-sequitor citation is odd. That being said, no irregularities about the sourcing rise to the level of what I would fail or hold a GA for.

Format This article is too long. Since there are more than a few related articles whose text is similar if not identical to this one, it would be better to convert certain sections into a summary form so that content is not duplicated and readers have a reason to travel from one article to another. Barring that change, multiple 'main' links are distracting. One section should be picked for the 'main' link and all sections related to that main article should be subordinated to the first section. Specific suggestions:

Merge the "responses to private equity" to the related sections. As it stands it is a poor way to end the article. IF the content can't be merged properly (most of it should be able to), then there isn't much lost in removing it.
Merge the LBO bust subsections together.
The lead is good.

I can't stress enough the importance of converting the sections as they are now to a more proper summary format. With the articles interlinked, it adds little to have whole sections of text be identical between articles. We can sacrifice some detail for scope in this article.

Style There are some style problems in this article. I suspect these problems arise from the failure to use inline citations scrupulously, but they may not all be. Weasel words exist throughout: "it was thought...", "...these practices are increasingly discredited", "Bonderman and Texas Pacific Group were widely hailed..." etc. Some of these (arguments that poison pills and the like are increasingly discredited as management practices) could be couched as statements of fact and so that might just be a case where the citation isn't directly supporting that claim. Others need to be reworded.

Some content is duplicative within the article. The greenmail section mentions poison pills and they are again mentioned (in the same sense and using wikilinks) in the LBO bust section. While it may be appropriate to mention the term again, it should be clear to the reader that this is a revisitation.
I haven't checked thoroughly, but I'm guessing that wikilinked terms are overlinked in this article. While this article does a good job linking important terminology, names and events, the MOS for links should be followed more closely.
The article generally does not contextualize the subject in a larger sense. This isn't entirely fair criticism as it is only partially true. Some portions (pre-history, venture capital in the 80s, The third private equity boom and the Golden Age of Private Equity, Origins of modern private equity) do this well. Some do it fairly well (Regulatory and tax changes impact the boom, Early venture capital and the growth of Silicon Valley (1959 - 1981)). Others are very much focused on the exact details and don't comment on the impact on the larger context. Admittedly, I don't feel this is a failure of the editors. The sourcing is largely parochial and temporocentric. In lots of cases, there aren't broader impacts to private equity actions that are easy to decompose. But it bears mentioning all the same.

Overall. This is a detailed, interesting and helpful article. It greatly increases the readers understanding of the subject at hand and it is (with some work) approachable by a relative novice. I am going to promote this article with some reservations:

the article needs to be shortened, summarized and contextualized.
Citations, even to works used 'on background' need to be consistent, appropriate and correct.
Wording and formatting need to be worked on. I won't hold an article back from GA because the prose appears to be written by multiple voices (see some of the examples above), but it will fail FA.

All in all a good article and a good read. Protonk (talk) 03:55, 31 July 2008 (UTC)Reply