Talk:Victoria and Albert Museum/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Khazar2 (talk · contribs) 21:06, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

I'll be glad to take this review. Initial comments to follow in the next 1-3 days. Thanks in advance for your work on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 21:06, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

The article is good in many ways but horribly badly written. Information is strung together with commas and semi-colons in a manner that suggests that the writer hasn't actually read or reviewed what they have written.

"The V&A has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, with which Henry Cole, the museum's first director, was involved in planning; initially it was known as the Museum of Manufactures,[4] first opening in May 1852 at Marlborough House, but by September had been transferred to Somerset House."

Facts:

1. The V&A has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851
2. Henry Cole was the museum's first director
3. Henry Cole was involved in planning the Great Exhibition.

This is quite enough information for one sentence. But after that, there is a semi-colon, and the reader is given four more facts, each of which is important in its own right. Here's the rest:

1. The V&A was initially it was known as the Museum of Manufactures
2. It opened in May 1852
3. It was first located at Marlborough House
4. By September it had been transferred to Somerset House.

Suggestions:

• Read every sentence from its capital letter to its full-stop and see if it works as a unit.
• Decide which facts are important and don't turn facts into explanations or treat facts as givens. Here is an example:

The exhibition which the museum organised to celebrate the centennial of the 1899 renaming, "A Grand Design", first toured in North America from 1997 (Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), returning to London in 1999.[16].

The fact (the important one) is simple: The museum organised an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of the museum's foundation on its present site and naming as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The statement is that the museum held an exhibition, not that the exhibition, which had been organised, went on tour and did things. We, the reader, don't know there was an exhibition until it is stated that such occurred. This must be done in a clear sentence which tells the essential facts.

Next sentence is easy: The exhibition, named "A Grand Design", toured in North America from 1997 (Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), returning to London in 1999. or better still ....prior to its opening in London in the centennial year of 1999.

• Eliminate semi-colons. They are one of the worst enemies of good writing.

They have a place in lists: The guests at the dinner were Smith, the dentist; Brown, the doctor; Bloggs, the undertaker; Jones, the attorney; etc, etc

Semi-colons also have a place in keeping information together that needs to be together. Jack likes tea; Helen likes coffee.

The two parts go together only if the statement is meant to imply a difference or contrast between Jack and Helen e.g. they are a couple with different tastes. If this is merely an order for a waiter, then the preferences are unrelated to each other and should not be linked by a semi-colon.

They are not for stringing together two or more sentences that are complete in themselves. e.g. The V&A has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, with which Henry Cole, the museum's first director, was involved in planning; initially it was known as the Museum of Manufactures......

They are not a substitute for a conjunction. They ought not replace words like "but", "because", "since", "unless", "although" etc.

Amandajm (talk) 01:33, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Possibly the worst

Rewrite this stuff in sentences with full-stops and capital letters, somebody!

"The style adopted for this part of the museum was Italian Renaissance, much use was made of terracotta, brick and mosaic, this north façade was intended as the main entrance to the museum with its bronze doors designed by James Gamble & Reuben Townroe having six panels depicting: Humphry Davy (chemistry); Isaac Newton (astronomy); James Watt (mechanics); Bramante (architecture); Michelangelo (sculpture); Titian (painting); thus representing the range of the museums collections,[43] Godfrey Sykes also designed the terracotta embellishments and the mosaic in the pediment of the North Façade commemorating the Great Exhibition the profits from which helped to fund the museum, this is flanked by terracotta statue groups by Percival Ball.[44]"

Back on the subject of the semi-colon: in this sentence the name of each representative person is followed by their field, in brackets. Choose the format! Either use "Humphry Davy (chemistry) comma Isaac Newton (astronomy) comma James Watt (mechanics) comma" or else use "Humphry Davy comma chemistry semi-colon Isaac Newton comma astronomy semi-colon James Watt comma mechanics semi-colon", but not both brackets and semi-colons. The brackets link the material they contain directly to the preceding word.

Amandajm (talk) 02:05, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

While I agree that the grammar problems are serious at points, calling this "horribly badly written" is far harsher than I'd put it. It's detailed, interesting, readable, and generally speaking, off to a good start. -- Khazar2 (talk) 16:16, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I disagree! The sentence above is totally monstrous, and is an indication that no-one has read it with any serious thought of grammar and construction. Amandajm (talk) 03:28, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Closing review

This article is impressive in its comprehensiveness and research, and I particularly enjoy its wide range of images. This one was a pleasure to read.

However, it does have some serious issues that will need to be addressed before it can meet the Good Article criterion. A few that I particularly noticed:

• As noted above, grammar is a persistent issue in the article. The most common problems I saw were run-on sentences/comma splices, and using colons where they weren't needed (the rule for formal writing is that a complete sentence should precede a colon). These will need to be cleaned up. If you're not sure you can do this on your own, Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors is an excellent resource.
• The article has a citation needed tag dating to 2009.
• While well sourced in many sections, a few sections and subsections (the Islamic database, the garden) appeared to be without citation entirely.
• The article contains a good deal of promotional language lacking either sourcing or secondary sourcing, such as "The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewellery, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest, most important and most comprehensive in the world", "This is the largest and most comprehensive ceramics and glass collection in the world," "The important 13th-century glass beaker", "in 2008 an important but heavily soiled, distorted and water-damaged 1954 Dior outfit called Zemire was restored to displayable condition for the Golden Age of Couture exhibition", "making it one of the largest collections of the sculptor's work outside France", etc. Per WP:POV, these opinions and claims should be clearly attributed. Per WP:PEA, I'd also suggest cutting the descriptors of various works as "important", "notable", etc., unless you're attributing it to a source in-text.
• Interpretative statements, even minor ones such as "The design is a subtle blend of the traditional and modern", should be attributed to a source.
• The figures for the number of items in each collection appear to need citation.
• This paragraph needs a post-2011 update: "In 2001, "FuturePlan" was launched, which involves redesigning all the galleries and public facilities in the museum that have yet to be remodelled. This is to ensure that the exhibits are better displayed, more information is available and the museum meets modern expectations for museum facilities; it should take about ten years to complete the work."
• The article could use some cutting to meet criterion 3b (focus). Right now, the article contains 71kb of prose; per WP:PAGESIZE, it's okay for an article to exceed 50kb if a topic is massive in scope, but this is a topic that could be easily summarized by reducing the lengthy list of works and artists in each collection, the species of plants in the garden, etc. (Reducing the length of the lists of artists would also help with the "wall of blue" effect in those paragraphs.) Personally, I'd suggest trying to cut the total length of this article by as much as one-third.
• This isn't a GA criterion, but as a side issue, I wanted to note the serious overlinking of the article (see WP:OVERLINK); there's no need to repeat links, and no need to link such basic words as "bronze" or "tomb", especially in an article already this dense with links.

For these reasons, I'm not listing this one for Good Article status at this time. I note from the article's history that you don't seem to have worked on this yourself yet; while "drive-by nominations" are fine, I'd encourage you to check for issues like these in the future before nominating more. (You can see the criteria here.) Hopefully these comments will give you a good start to revising this one, and I hope you'll renominate once they've been addressed. Good luck! -- Khazar2 (talk) 16:16, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

It's the use of semi-colons (;) that is the problem, not the use of colons (:). Having a complete sentence before the semi-colon is only one issue with regards to their employment. This is usually maintained. It is what writers place after the semi-colon that is usually problematic, as is the case here. Amandajm (talk) 03:28, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, the use of colons in sentences like "The collection includes pieces by: X, Y, and Z" is also incorrect and unnecessary, and repeated many times in the article. If you find semicolons to be a bigger issue, that's fine, but I hope you won't object to my pointing out another category of problem. In any case, thanks for your work on this one. -- Khazar2 (talk) 03:45, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

You are right about the colons.

I have just reconstructed the intro.

The worst problem was the statement that the museum was named after "Prince Albert and Queen Victoria" in that order. So the Victoria and Albert was named after Albert and Victoria? And the queen regnant's name was stated after that of the prince consort. There might be contexts in which that was appropriate, but this is not one of them.

Amandajm (talk) 04:40, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, good catch! -- Khazar2 (talk) 05:22, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Sentences that are seriously bad

If you are the person who wrote them, or the person who read them, and then put the article up for GA, please read the comments carefully. Most of the problems are to do with punctuation. Someone who has written these sentences plainly knows how to speak good English, but does not have a clear understanding of what constitutes a sentence, in written English.

I could fix the problem easily. I have fixed a few not-so-obvious problems. The reason that I am going to the trouble of putting these sentences here, is so that the editor who wrote them and the editor who read it and proposed a GA can learn from the problems here, and not fall into the same pattern in writing other articles.

Example 13. is analysed, broken into its component parts and has an explanation of why each part is a separate sentence.

1. The V&A has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, with which Henry Cole, the museum's first director, was involved in planning; initially it was known as the Museum of Manufactures,[4] first opening in May 1852 at Marlborough House, but by September had been transferred to Somerset House. (Mish-mash of ideas and facts)
2. By February 1854 discussions were underway to transfer the museum to the current site[7] and it was renamed as the South Kensington Museum. (The two bits don't fit together)
3. The site was occupied by Brompton Park House; this was extended including the first refreshment rooms opened in 1857, the museum being the first in the world to provide such a facility. (UM! OK.... the site had a house on it. But the reader hasn't been told that the house was then used for the museum. Why are the extensions tacked on with a semi-colon? were the extensions only for a tea room?)
4. This was to enable in the words of Cole "to ascertain practically what hours are most convenient to the working classes"[11] — this was linked to the use of the collections of both applied art and science as educational resources to help boost productive industry.[5] (All true, but very clumsily joined with a dash. The important point about the purpose should not be tagged on the end of the fact that the lights were left on. The purpose is a really important fact that introduces following sentences. )
5. This led to the transfer to the museum of the School of Design that had been founded in 1837 at Somerset House, after the transfer it was referred to as the Art School or Art Training School, later to become the Royal College of Art which finally achieved full independence in 1949. (Two sentences with nothing but a comma between them)
6. From the 1860s to the 1880s the scientific collections had been moved from the main museum site to various improvised galleries to the west of Exhibition Road.[5 (Wrong verb. "were moved", not "had been moved")
7. In 2001, "FuturePlan" was launched, which involves redesigning all the galleries and public facilities in the museum that have yet to be remodelled. This is to ensure that the exhibits are better displayed, more information is available and the museum meets modern expectations for museum facilities; it should take about ten years to complete the work. (That statement which is tacked on the end with a semi-colon is not related to "purpose" [the subject of the sentence]. It is related to the first sentence. The words "ten-year" could be inserted before "Future plane" or else it could stand alone. But either way, it can't be tacked onto a sentence about an entirely different aspect of the subject, with a semi-colon.)
8. To the east of this were additional galleries, the decoration of which was the work of another designer Owen Jones, these were the Oriental Courts (covering India, China and Japan) completed in 1863, none of this decoration survives,[41] part of these galleries became the new galleries covering the 19th century, opened in December 2006. (These are no less than four complete sentences here. Why are they strung together with commas? )
9. The last work by Fowke was the design for the range of buildings on the north and west sides of the garden, this includes the refreshment rooms, reinstated as the Museum Café in 2006, with the silver gallery above, (at the time the ceramics gallery), the top floor has a splendid lecture theatre although this is seldom open to the general public.(Sentences running into each other without punctuation)
10. The style adopted for this part of the museum was Italian Renaissance, much use was made of terracotta, brick and mosaic, this north façade was intended as the main entrance to the museum with its bronze doors designed by James Gamble & Reuben Townroe having six panels depicting: Humphry Davy (chemistry); Isaac Newton (astronomy); James Watt (mechanics); Bramante (architecture); Michelangelo (sculpture); Titian (painting); thus representing the range of the museums collections,[43] Godfrey Sykes also designed the terracotta embellishments and the mosaic in the pediment of the North Façade commemorating the Great Exhibition the profits from which helped to fund the museum, this is flanked by terracotta statue groups by Percival Ball.[44] (This is possibly the worst example of poor punctuation in the entire article.)
11. The Green Dining Room 1866–68 was the work of Philip Webb and William Morris,[45] displays Elizabethan influences, the lower part of the walls are panelled in wood with a band of paintings depicting fruit and the occasional figure, with moulded plaster foliage on the main part of the wall and a plaster frieze around the decorated ceiling and stained-glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones.[ (Needs breaking into sentences. Better still, use words that link ideas: "which has....." is a useful expression)
12. The Centre Refreshment Room 1865–77 was designed in a Renaissance style by James Gamble,[47] the walls and even the Ionic columns are covered in decorative and moulded ceramic tile, the ceiling consists of elaborate designs on enamelled metal sheets and matching stained-glass windows, the marble fireplace[48] was designed and sculpted by Alfred Stevens and was removed from Dorchester House prior to that building's demolition in 1929. (This is three or four sentences. There are ways of joining them, but it requires careful use of simple words).
13. The Grill Room 1876–81 was designed by Sir Edward Poynter,[49] the lower part of the walls consist of blue and white tiles with various figures and foliage enclosed by wood panelling, above there are large tiled scenes with figures depicting the four seasons and the twelve months these were painted by ladies from the Art School then based in the museum, the windows are also stained glass, there is an elaborate cast-iron grill still in place. .....(Here is exactly the same problem. The Grill Room 1876–81 was designed by Sir Edward Poynter is a sentence. It has a subject "the grill room" and a whole verb "was designed". It has an object of the verb "Sir Edward Poynter" who did the doing in the verb "was designed". Then, after a comma we have another whole sentence: the lower part of the walls consist of blue and white tiles with various figures and foliage enclosed by wood panelling. THis is a "stand-alone sentence, just like the first one. Why? It has a subject: "the lower part of the walls". It has a verb "consist". Then it has an object of the verb "of blue and white tiles with various figures and foliage enclosed by wood panelling". Then there is another complete sentence: Above there are large tiled scenes with figures depicting the four seasons and the twelve months. The subject is "large tiled scenes" and the verb is "are". It is only a little verb, but it is sufficient for a sentence. CHECK: You can turn it round and get: "Large tiled scenes.... are above (the lower part of the walls)." Next whole sentence: these were painted by ladies from the Art School then based in the museum. This is a complete sentence too! It follows all the same rules, subject and verb. But how easy to fix it! Take away the "These were..." (the subject and verb) and tack it straight onto the end of the previous: .....four seasons and twelve months painted by the ladies...... Next whole sentence: the windows are also stained glass,. Next whole sentence: there is an elaborate cast-iron grill still in place. I make that six complete sentences, between one capital letter and the following full-stop. And it's not even a very long sentence. )
14. Continuing the style of the earlier buildings, various designers were responsible for the decoration, the terracotta embellishments were again the work of Godfrey Sykes, although sgraffito was used to decorate the east side of the building designed by F. W. Moody,[54] a final embellishment were the wrought iron gates made as late as 1885 designed by Starkie Gardner,[55] these lead to a passage through the building.(four sentences)
15. Scott also designed the two Cast Courts 1870–73[56] to the southeast of the garden (the site of the "Brompton Boilers"), these vast spaces have ceilings 70 feet (21 m) in height to accommodate the plaster casts of parts of famous buildings, including Trajan's Column (in two separate pieces). (Two sentences)
16. The final part of the museum designed by Scott was the Art Library and what is now the sculpture gallery on the south side of the garden, built 1877–83,[57] the exterior mosaic panels in the parapet were designed by Reuben Townroe who also designed the plaster work in the library,[58] Sir John Taylor designed the book shelves and cases,[58] also this was the first part of the museum to have electric lighting. (Four sentences)
17. In 1890 the government launched a competition to design new buildings for the museum, with architect Alfred Waterhouse as one of the judges;[60] this would give the museum a new imposing front entrance. (bad use of semi-colon. Make the bit of information part of the content, not a tag on the end)
18. Stylistically it is a strange hybrid, although much of the detail belongs to the Renaissance there are medieval influences at work. (Two completely separate sentences which could be turned into one effective sentence by using a joining word like "because". )
19. Prince Albert appears within the main arch above the twin entrances, Queen Victoria above the frame around the arches and entrance, sculpted by Alfred Drury. (Is this the ghost of Prince Albert? If it is a statue, that needs to be stated. Put Victoria, the REIGNING MONARCH, before here consort. It is the "Victoria and Albert Museum" not the "Albert and Victoria". What ignorant chauvinistic person has been so insistent on putting the male first in this entire article? The statue of Victoria occupies the upper position and should be described before that of her consort.)
20. The interior makes much use of marble in the entrance hall and flanking staircases, although the galleries as originally designed were white with restrained classical detail and mouldings, very much in contrast to the elaborate decoration of the Victorian galleries, although much of this decoration was removed in the early 20th century.[63] (meesy! Needs some restating to make it clear which galleries the decoration was moved from)
21. The plan is expected to take about ten years and was started in 2002. To date several galleries have been redesigned, notably, in 2002: the main Silver Gallery, Contemporary; in 2003: Photography, the main entrance, The Painting Galleries; in 2004: the tunnel to the subway leading to South Kensington tube station, New signage throughout the museum, architecture, V&A and RIBA reading rooms and stores, metalware, Members' Room, contemporary glass, the Gilbert Bayes sculpture gallery; in 2005: portrait miniatures, prints and drawings, displays in Room 117, the garden, sacred silver and stained glass; in 2006: Central Hall Shop, Islamic Middle East, the new café, sculpture galleries. (All the colons are unnecessary. They all need replacing with commas. The semi-colons are correct in this because it is a complex list.)
22. The design is a subtle blend of the traditional and modern, the layout is formal; there is an elliptical water feature lined in stone with steps around the edge which may be drained to use the area for receptions, gatherings or exhibition purposes. This is in front of the bronze doors leading to the refreshment rooms, a central path flanked by lawns leads to the sculpture gallery; the north, east and west sides have herbaceous borders along the museum walls with paths in front which continues along the south façade; in the two corners by the north façade there is planted an American Sweetgum tree; the southern, eastern and western edges of the lawns have glass planters which contain orange and lemon trees in summer, these are replaced by bay trees in winter. (These two sentences are in fact nine separate sentences.)

I've got down as far as the head Collections. This is an indication of the work that needs doing before this goes up for GA again. The subject is well covered. The chief problem is very, very poor sentence construction. Amandajm (talk) 06:38, 6 March 2013 (UTC)