Wikipedia:Peer review/Old Church of St Nidan, Llanidan/archive1

Old Church of St Nidan, Llanidan

This peer review discussion has been closed.
This article is about a closed church in Anglesey, Wales, that was largely demolished over a century ago. Despite that - or perhaps because of it - there's rather a lot to say about it. It's been a GA for 18 months; Eric Corbett has recently given it an extensive copy-edit (for which I am very grateful) but before I take it to FAC, I thought I would see what other people thought could be improved in this article. Thanks in anticipation, Bencherlite^Talk 14:32, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments from Tim riley

This is a delightful article, and I can find practically nothing to quibble at, but I'm doing my pernickety best:

• Foundation and construction
  • Perhaps someone determined to find ambiguities might ask why Messrs Downam and Ashton passed by sale, though no sane reader would actually misunderstand.
  • Opening sentence of third para: I'd either replace the semicolon with a comma or change "pointing" to "point". As it is, you're short of a main verb.
• Replacement and demolition
  • "the old church required significant repair" – I try to follow the advice of Fowler and Gowers to avoid the adjective "significant" unless something is actually signified. You want "considerable" or some such here, I think.
  • "In his view the only part of the church…" – a long sentence that could perhaps do with breaking up.
• Structure
  • "whilst the east window…" – I agree with Gowers: "whilst is an unnecessary word, and many people, including all Americans, pass blamelessly from cradle to grave without using it." A semicolon would do the job more concisely.
• Infobox: you use "ft" here but "feet" in the text. Is this deliberate? Wholly unobjectionable, but I just mention it.

It was, I may say, exceedingly difficult to find this handful of utterly unimportant quibbles. I enjoyed the article extravagantly, and chuckled at Jones's elegant crack about the east window, a line I intend to steal and recycle. – Tim riley (talk) 12:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Later – I so enjoyed the article that I have revisited it as an after-dinner treat. Forgive a single quibblette more:

• Foundation and construction
  • "earlier records have been lost, therefore the date…" – "therefore" is not a conjunction, and you either need "and" before it or a semicolon.

I promise to shup up now. Please let me know when you take the page to FAC. – Tim riley (talk) 22:29, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

No need to shut up. All suggested tweaks adopted, with the exception of the ft/feet infobox thing: {{infobox church}} suggests using the abbreviated form in the infobox, presumably as a charitable attempt to keep the number of characters in the infobox to the bare minimum.... If you are of a nervous disposition, I suggest that you don't look at all the bloated parameters that has... Brianboulton would love it (not)! Thank you very much. Bencherlite^Talk 20:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)