Talk:Jeep problem/GA1

GA Review

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Protonk's review

Images

• No serious problem with either but I feel they would be much more informative were they to scale. Meaning only that 1/6th should be 1/3rd the size of 1/2 and 1/2 should be twice the size of 1/4. This is more noticeable on the second image, File:Jeep problem 2.png.
  • File:jeep_problem.svg has been redrawn to scale. cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 23:26, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
• Our image use policies used to suggest that images alternate right-left-right. It appears that is no longer the case, though it might be nice to have the images alternate here.
• Wikipedia:ACCESS#Images says that the latex equations bounded by <math> need alt text. Wikipedia:Alternative text for images also states that alt text should be provided for images that doesn't duplicate the caption.
• Robert McNamara has a bunch of PD pictures of him should you desire to add them.

Major issues

• The lede is too short. See WP:LEDE for some suggestions on length. An article like this can have a relatively short lede, but it must summarize all major content points in the article.
• The McNamara section is tricky. The basic point in the quote is valuable--McNamara is obviously describing a problem identical to the Jeep Problem. However the annotations we provide aren't necessarily accurate. Island Hopping in WWII came about as a response to Japanese fortification of specific islands in Oceania. The Allies responded by bypassing some of those islands and seizing other, strategically important ones. The seizure of saipan and tinian allowed the use of those planes, but was not necessarily prompted solely or largely by the concerns over fuel. Nor were concerns about the flights to China motivated entirely by fuel consumption. Had the Marshall Islands never been siezed the AAF would have probably flown tanker aircraft after tanker aircraft to supply bases in china in order to bomb Japan. Moreover, the devastation to Japan (As Fog of War details) was wrought mostly through conventional arms, not the two nuclear weapons used. Operation Matterhorn describes some of the ideas behind the campaign. I think that the section can and should remain, but it has to be rewritten in order to get closer to the facts. Tantalizingly, Fine's paper hints at an unpublished solution by Leonidas Alaoglu which specifically references flights over the Hump.
• The article itself is arguably incomplete. David Gale's article on variations on the jeep problem is not mentioned, nor is Joel Franklin's generalized solution noted, nor are other flavors. The mathword article also presents a solution (though they punt the proof off to a cited book) relating the gamma function to the jeep problem (though arguably this is kinda covered in the article by mentioning harmonic numbers). It doesn't describe the thought process by which Fine came to the solution he did or the process behind possible alternative solutions. The same article of the AMM which published fine also published a commentary on his paper where a more general solution was forwarded (see here). Also, the solutions portion is more of a set of illustrations. I don't think that we necessarily have to present proofs, but for a problem like this it might be helpful.

Overall

I'm not going to list specific line-by-line suggestions for the article itself because I feel that it requires a substantial rewrite before it becomes a good article. I will, however place the article on hold rather than failing it because I think such a rewrite could be undertaken in a few weeks with relative ease. Thanks for letting me dig into a fun corner of mathematics with this article and good luck getting it to GA! Protonk (talk) 20:49, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

• I'm failing this article as the issues haven't been resolved in a timely manner (and there doesn't appear to be much change to the article itself). Protonk (talk) 05:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to do such a detailed review. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:12, 7 September 2009 (UTC)