Wikipedia:Featured article review/Irish phonology/archive1

Irish phonology

Irish phonology (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured article candidates/Irish phonology

• Featured article review/Irish phonology/archive1

Notified: Mahagaja, WikiProject Linguistics, WikiProject Languages, WikiProject Ireland, WikiProject Celts, 2020-12-30, 2021-10-26

Review section

I am nominating this featured article for review because there are uncited paragraphs, uncited notes, and inline parenthetical referencing. Z1720 (talk) 22:30, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

What parts of the article are uncited? What exactly do you mean by "inline parenthetical referencing"? After a quick skim I was able to find only a single instance of the type that is now deprecated. Could you give examples please? – Uanfala (talk) 22:41, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

@Uanfala:, answering your questions below:

• To quote, Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing, "Inline parenthetical referencing is a citation system in which in-text citations are made using parentheses." An example can be found with this sentence: "Dissertations examining Irish phonology from a theoretical point of view include Ní Chiosáin (1991), Green (1997) in optimality theory, and Cyran (1997) and Bloch-Rozmej (1998) in government phonology."
• Some sections that are missing citations include the whole notes section (each note should have a citation), the "Hiberno-English" section, in which only the first sentence is cited, the first two paragraphs of "General facts of stress placement", and the final paragraph of "Post-vocalic consonant clusters and epenthesis". There are many others, but at a minimum, a featured article should have one citation at the end of every paragraph (except for the lede and other exceptions). Z1720 (talk) 23:03, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

The notes only point out unusual pronunciations of some of the words, and this information is already present within the text where each note appears (and where it is already cited). Isn't the "Hiberno-English" section cited to Wells 1982 (the ref at the end of the first sentence)? Likewise, the first paragraph of "General facts of stress placement" cites a source and I presume it may also apply to the second paragraph (though yeah, that's not clear). Maybe we could ask the article creator to clarify that? Apart from this one possibly uncited paragraph, what others are there?

As for parenthetical referencing, the type that is deprecated is of the form Some statement (Smith 1989). There was only one such instance that I could spot in the article. What you give examples of are mentions of the sources within the article text. These are used in the overview of the literature and, elsewhere in the article, for the occasional in-text attribution. Should these be removed? Or the mentions unlinked from the bibliography so they look less like refs? I don't believe either of these would be an improvement. – Uanfala (talk) 23:53, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Responses below:

• The notes should also have refs at the end of their sentences. If the information is already present in the prose, the note should be removed. If the notes are using the refs from the prose, a ref should be added to the end of the note, too.
• Refs should appear at the end of the sentences that they are citing. If a ref verifies information that is subsequent to the ref, then the ref should be moved. Please ensure that the ref does, in fact, verify the information before moving the ref.
• Re:"Apart from this one possibly uncited paragraph, what others are there?" There needs to be a citation at the end of every paragraph, minimum (except the lede, see WP:CITELEDE). I was going to mark all instances with a "citation needed" template, but it became very numerous.
• I took another look at the parenthetical referencing. It seems to be used a lot in the "History of the discipline" section to reference researchers who have published research on this topic. However, there doesn't seem to be a secondary reference to verify this information, and I'm concerned that this section is WP:OR, or at the very least relies on WP:PRIMARY sources, a practice which is discouraged on Wikipedia. This section will need a rewrite using secondary sources that talk about the discipline's history. When this rewrite is conducted, the "Some comment (Smith 1989)" statements will be replaced with footnotes, as they will be cited to another, secondary source.

Please ping when the above have been resolved. Thanks for adopting this article, Uanfala Z1720 (talk) 18:43, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

I have not adopted this article (I don't know anything about the subject), I was only responding to what seemed – and continue to seem – like bizarre reasons for requesting a review. If an explanatory note is based on the same sourced information as the text, it would be silly to repeat the reference from the text. Similarly, if you start a section with the explanation that it's going to be based on so-and-so's analysis, you don't need to cite this person at the end of every paragraph in that section. As for the "History of the discipline" section, is there any particular statement there that will need a specific in-line secondary source? If e.g. de Búrca (1958) is a study of the dialect of Donegal, do we really need a secondary source confirming that it is indeed a study of the dialect in Donegal? – Uanfala (talk) 19:15, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

The concern about the notes is that it is currently unclear what is verifying the information in the note, that why it needs a reference after it. A reference in the article body doesn't verify a note's information because the notes are presented at the end of the article, so it is unclear which source is used to verify the note. Also, it was stated "if you start a section with the explanation that it's going to be based on so-and-so's analysis, you don't need to cite this person at the end of every paragraph in that section." The reference is not just about who is saying the information, but where the information was said, which includes the source (the book/article the information comes from) and the page number. This information cannot be presented as, to give an example from the article, "This was followed by Quiggin (1906)..." because that is a parenthetical reference, which was deprecated in 2020, and also does not include a page number. The citation, including author, source, and page number if applicable, should be placed in an inline citation at the end of the last sentence that the source is verifying, as stated in the Wikipedia policy about verifiability. Z1720 (talk) 04:14, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm finding this a bit frustrating. In-text attribution (with in the prose of the article) had not been deprecated, and because it comes with a link to the full bibliographic entry at the end it's more than enough to satisfy the verifiability policy. You don't always have to give page numbers, and to do so would be silly if you're referring to the whole of the work. I'd be happy to discuss actual problems with the article (so far in this subthread there's been one: the unclear souring for a single paragraph), rather than its apparent failure to meet one set of inexplicably narrow expectations of how sourcing should be formatted. – Uanfala (talk) 13:06, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

On a more substantial level, I notice that the article's content was largely complete by 2008 (with subsequent changes mostly confined to style and presentation). The most recent sources in the bibliography are Stifter 2006 and Carnie 2002. Now, I don't think Irish phonology is a particularly trendy field, but some relevant research will certainly have been done in the last decade and a half. I can see for example Hickey's 2014 The Sound Structure of Modern Irish doi:10.1515/9783110226607, or McCullough's 2020 Escaping siloed phonology: Framing Irish lenition in Emergent Grammar hdl:10150/641487, or the 2017 From phonology to syntax — and back again: Hierarchical structure in Irish and Blackfoot hdl:11023/4161, or.... Of course, not all of this will be relevant, but still, some new developments will have taken place, new analyses brought forward, or new descriptive data presented. A wikiedia article can't be at the cutting edge, but it will still ideally keep abreast with what's going on in the field. 15 years probably isn't a lot here, but at some point in the future this will need to start getting up to date to meet the expectations of a featured article. When is that point? – Uanfala (talk) 20:04, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

• I also noted on the talk page that there is a big gap in covering the phonology of second-language speakers and the effect of language attrition and bilingualism. As these phenomena affect virtually all Irish speakers these days it seems like a major omission. (t · c) buidhe 00:15, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @Uanfala: It's subjective of how much current research should be included in the article. If there has been academic literature on this subject in the past 15 years, at least some of that should be included, especially if it brings new ideas to the topic; its omission would cause this article to fail WP:FA? 1c. If there has only been one or two high-quality sources in the past 15 years, then they should be included. If there has been dozens of sources on the topic, we would have to figure out which sources are the most notable. Z1720 (talk) 03:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
• Move to FARC little or no movement in favor of addressing the issues discussed above (t · c) buidhe 03:45, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

FARC section

Issues raised in the review section include sourcing and comprehensiveness. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:14, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

• Delist per above. No edits in December (t · c) buidhe 22:20, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
• Delist concerns about uncited statements has not been addressed. Z1720 (talk) 23:52, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Delist, no improvements since initiation of FAR. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:17, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Delist needed referencing improvements have not occurred. Hog Farm _Talk 20:26, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Closing note: This removal candidate has been delisted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please leave the {{featured article review}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:42, 24 December 2021 (UTC)