Talk:Equatorial sextant
 | Equatorial sextant was a Engineering and technology good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||
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 | A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 19, 2010. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that William Austin Burt was the first to invent a workable typewriter in America, as well as a workable solar compass (pictured), a solar use surveying instrument, and an equatorial sextant, a precision navigational aid to determine with one observation the location of a ship at sea? | |||||||||
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GA Review[edit]
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- This review is transcluded from Talk:Equatorial sextant/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 23:12, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
This appears to be a quick fail, more or less for the same reasons as Talk:Burt's solar compass/GA1 (very far from WP:GACR #3): it discusses equatorial sextants as if Burt's was the first thing to be called an equatorial sextant, failing to discuss the much longer history of these devices (for instance Flamsteed's equatorial sextant of 1676), failing to use an article title that distinguishes Burt's sextant from other sextants, and failing to put Burt's sextant into context with other sextants and discuss how it differs from them. A big part of the problem is heavy reliance on primary sources such as Burt's patent in describing what this sextant is and how it is novel; a patent is inherently a promotional text (designed to convince people that an invention is new and patentable) and the problems of this article illustrate why that is problematic and why we prefer secondary sources. So as well as having problems with GACR #3 I think there are also issues with GACR #2. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:12, 1 August 2020 (UTC)