- A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for March 2009.
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I think it is an important topic for laymen who are interested in astronomy. I wanted to nominate it as a featured/good article, but I'm not sure if it has too many pictures (is it possible to have too many pictures of Saturn?), or whether the writing and polish is up to scratch for a featured article. What do you all think?
Thanks, Bryangv (talk) 21:30, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
A few suggestions:
- Per Wikipedia:Layout#Headings_and_sections, "Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit its flow." There are a number of single-paragraph sections that should be consolidated to improve the flow.
- Please address the multitude of Fact tags.
- There do seem to be too many images, and some may have overly long captions.
- It needs a copy edit for polish, to eliminate ambiguities, reduce subjectiveness, merge 1 or 2 sentence paragraphs, and to make the wording more encyclopedic.
Brianboulton comments: I agree with the above remarks, and have other concerns. Specifically:-
- Images are supposed to illustrate the text, with brief referential captions. In this case, with thirty or so images (some very large), the text is overwhelmed. I would suggest reducing the images by at least half, and incorporating lengthy caption material into the text.
- The "expand" banner from June 2008 may be redundant now but, as stated above, the "citation needed" tags must be dealt with. I am not sure that they indicate all the instances where citation to a source is required.
- The prose isn't bad, but early examples of non-encyclopedic wordings are "the very first person", "a lot of empty space" and "Mystified, Galilieo wondered..." A full copyedit as suggested should deal with these and similar faults.
- The subheads in the History section should be level-3 (===) headings, not simply bolded characters. There is further misuse of bolding further down, where it is used for emphasis contrary to MOS.
- Metric distances should be converted, and should be written as (e.g.) 4,800 not 4800. Using the WP convert template will do these things for you automatically.
- Some online references are not formatted properly. All require retrieval dates. In the references I also saw "Londin" (?"London"). Is "Harland" a book, a magazine article, or a news report?
Attention to these issues over a period of time will bring the article to the standard you require. It's an interesting subject and well worth the effort. Brianboulton (talk) 09:57, 1 April 2009 (UTC)