Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Josiah Holbrook/1

Josiah Holbrook

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Kept (t · c) buidhe 23:30, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting a reassessment following observations from Yngvadottir. As the original GA assessor I feel very embarrassed and humbled that I missed the items that have been mentioned in the observation - which are very obvious to me when I look at it afresh. simongraham (talk) 11:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The observation identified the following problems:

The section on equipment produced by Holbrook's company contained obvious OCR errors and its phrasing indicated that the source was an advertisement.
Repetition of information (the creation of the company and factory)
Uneven style (the Genealogy section, in particular, did not fit with the rest in style)
Unclear writing including burying the information on when he started his first school and simply puzzling sentences like "There were a hundred lyceums formed in the 1820s for crafts and mechanics of agricultural methods and geological surveys and further advanced the teaching system into other areas."
Clumsy integration of the information from references, such as "He developed a small factory for the manufacture of scientific apparatus" in the "17th Reunion" news source was "made a factory that was specifically designed to manufacture scientific apparatus" in the article.
The "Founder Yale Grad" source is the same text as part of the "17th Reunion" source; obviously some of these news reports have a common origin.

Yngvadottir has undertaken essential editing but I feel that the article needs to be reassessed by someone with more experience than me. The nominee, Doug Coldwell, was always helpful in the review and I feel has made this errors, as I did, in good faith. simongraham (talk) 11:22, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Simongraham: Sorry you have not got much response here. I have had a look at the article and find some of the sentences lack flow and are a bit repetitive. Not sure they are at the level of failing the GA criteria though. For example the first three sentences all say "the United States". There is also some ordering issues. For example it says how he defined a lyceum, then talks about him being ahead of his time and other info, before going back to the lyceums. That whole section reads too much like a collection of facts with no real thought to tying them together. I feel that paragraph could be rewritten to flow much better. Further the third paragraph then says he introduced the first lyceum school after a paragraph saying what was in the lyceum schools. The more I read the more I feel this fails criteria 1a. Aircorn (talk) 03:21, 7 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Aircorn: Thank you. This is very helpful. I have done some edits myself to manage the flow better and extended the topic from its focus on lyceums. Please tell me if you think this rectifies the problem. simongraham (talk) 06:25, 8 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is much better. Aircorn (talk) 19:50, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]