Talk:Regular number/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Shushugah (talk · contribs) 21:51, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	Per discussion below, it's properly cited
	2c. it contains no original research.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	I believe so. There hasn't been any edit warring and an active talk page is a good thing. There's been recent edits, but that's Wikipedia for you.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
	7. Overall assessment.	This article was a delight to read. It's neither too technical, nor too bare bones. Its diverse applications without resorting to trivia/hat collecting makes this a win for me. I mentioned the inline reference as main thing to change and would gladly do it myself if need be.

@Shushugah: This does NOT use a deprecated style for referencing. It uses footnotes for referencing. The use of parenthetical author (year) short references in footnotes, pointing to more complete references in a later section, is not deprecated, neither is the use of parenthetical author (year) forms in the text of the article, as part of sentences of the article rather than as references. The only thing that was deprecated was extra-textual references formatted parenthetically in article text rather than in other ways. There used to be some of these in the article; I removed what was I believe the last one in preparing for this nomination, in Special:Diff/1059406410. The only remaining parenthetically-formatted reference, to Stormer 1897, occurs within another footnote, so is not covered by that deprecation. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:18, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

David Eppstein the deprecated source reads plainly to me to discontinue using Harvard style (name, year) inline i.e with This discussion supports the deprecation only of parenthetical style citations directly inlined into articles. Within a footnote itself is completely fine of course, but the way Gingerich (1965) was linked, I'd have expected to open Wikipedia article Gingerich (1965). Leaving this aside, the double usage of inline parenthesis reference AND footnote at Heninger, Rains & Sloane (2006)..... If someone wants to change a reference, they need to change a reference link twice, and in a very non consistent way from other reference styles in this article. Admittedly I personally don't care so much about the citation style including the deprecation, but in this case, I found 3 different inline styles, and that was confusing regardless. The article is so close to a GAN, I hope this is something we can resolve together. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:40, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

The deprecation discussion was entirely about references, and not about article text. The linked guideline you point to is entirely about references and anything it says about how to write the text of an article would be entirely out of scope and off-topic. The text in article sentences like "...after Richard Hamming, who proposed..." "...sequences at the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences..." "...given by Srinivasa Ramanujan in his first letter to G. H. Hardy" "...interpreted by Neugebauer..." "Honingh & Bod (2005) list ..." "...were popularized by Edsger Dijkstra. Dijkstra (1976, 1981) attributes..." is text, not a reference. You can tell because it forms a grammatical part of the sentence it is contained in, rather than sitting there as an extra-textual lump like a footnote marker pointing to something else. The fact that the text happens to use parentheses in some instances, or that it happens to use publication years in some instances, does not make it any less text, and therefore not subject to any deprecation rules about referencing style. If I wrote "In 2005, Honingh & Bod" instead of "Honingh & Bod (2005)", it would have the same meaning as text, merely being unnecessarily un-concise. I argued strenuously at the deprecation RFC that this deprecation would lead to exactly this misunderstanding, and it appears that in doing so I was correct. If we're going to get pissy about referencing style, I might further point out that the WP:GACR do not even require references to have a consistent style, only that they have an appropriate layout into sections. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:02, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I am not being pissy and would like for you to WP:AGF. I referenced 1b earlier, when I meant to reference 2b which refers to citation styles specifically, not the layout. I have corrected the criteria checklist and apologise for the confusion. I'll make a follow up edit for clarity.

I am sympathetic to the fact that [inevitable] confusion was created with that RFC, but that's how consensus works. I still don't understand in this example 5-limit musical scales other than the familiar diatonic scale of Western music have also been used, both in traditional musics of other cultures and in modern experimental music: Honingh & Bod (2005) list 31 different 5-limit scales, drawn from a larger database of musical scales. is either an unreferenced statement completely, or does Honingh & Bod (2005) function as both text and a reference? In other cases you've made a footnote at end of the sentence, so could you do that for all these examples? I don't mind the text style that references the year, but once it's hyperlinked, it's not pure text for me, but is a reference/external link, and an inconsistent one at that. I'm new to GAN, so am happy to seek a 2nd opinion/review from an experienced GAN reviewer. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 01:36, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

There already were a couple of footnotes like that (in-text callout to author followed by the same callout in a footnote). I added more, I think catching all of them. It may seem silly to do it that way, but it has the advantage that the footnote marks the end of the text that is being referenced by that author. For instance, the footnote to Knuth is somewhat further down than the end of the sentence with the in-text callout. If you think of a footnote as something used to verify the content of an article, and the in-text callouts as intended to tell readers the history of who did what when rather than where to go to find out more, it might make the intent clearer. As another example, the in-text callout to Bruins (1970) is not used in a footnote (instead, the footnote goes to Knuth, who cited Bruins). —David Eppstein (talk) 08:50, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Shushugah: {{harvtxt}} here is used as an in-text attribution as opposed to a citation, which appears to be allowed. This also makes sense because the original reason for deprecating parenthetical citations was because of added clutter, but in the case of an in-text attribution the author would already have to be in the text anyway. So, in my view, that deprecation does not apply to this use of {{harvtxt}}, but I do think it is valuable to see what others think. (For the record, there are 150 GAs that use {{harvtxt}} in a prose context (but many of these uses are in footnotes themselves.)) eviolite (talk) 04:07, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy to accept this GAN as successful! It's remarkable that 15 years ago this article was successfully deleted and today is of GA status. Thank you both for bearing with me regarding citation styles. I also found Wikipedia:What the Good article criteria are not which explicitly specifies that consistent citation is not required, so my apologies for insisting on that! Happy holidays everyone! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:53, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

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