Talk:Edinburgh/GA1

GA Review

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GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   The prose is overall readable, but is choppy in places. It could use a good copyedit by someone experienced with the manual of style. The lead section, while it does cover several of the main points included in later sections, seems very fragmented, and not put together very well -- in other words, it looks like it was assembled piecemeal by many different editors, and could use someone to weave it together to provide a good introduction to the article. See WP:LEAD for tips on improving this section.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   The article simply doesn't pass this criterion. While there are good, well-formatted citations used in the article, many sections (e.g. culture, hospitals, religious communities, sports) are under-cited or have no citations whatsoever (which is why it also fails 2c, since it's impossible to determine if there's original research in these sections). There's also several 'citation needed' tags sprinkled throughout the article, which must be addressed before this article becomes a GA.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   I think most of the core information is here, but it's not organized very well. Although there are some significant issues with completeness, such as the fact that the history section more or less stops with the 19th century, and there's nothing about the 20th century, or modern history and development. I would also change the 'nicknames' section to 'etymology', and include more about how Edinburgh received its name in the first place (and you can still keep the nicknames here, too). Combine 'areas' with 'geography and climate' -- change that to 'geography', and have two main subsections (cityscape and areas). The first six main sections in the article (after the lead) should be etymology, history, geography, demography, economy, culture. You could also combine 'religious communities' with 'demography', including it as a 'religion' subsection within there. Overall, I'd review the WikiProject Cities guideline for WP:UKCITIES, which will provide substantial guidance into how to better organize the article. There's also a well-established US city guideline as well, which may help in some areas.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   While there are no critical WP:NPOV violations in the article, the lack of organization makes this difficult to judge whether the article is really neutral or not. Much of the culture section seems to be written more from the point of view of a tourist brochure than an encyclopedia article, and is not backed up by reliable sources, either. The article also seems to have too many little, obscure facts, such as the YouGov poll mentioned in the lead (how important is this really? A poll of only 10,000?); or this uncited sentence: "There are two dedicated gay clubs in Edinburgh, CC Blooms and GHQ; several other club venues have LGBT nights." Also, why does the Edinburgh Zoo have its own main subsection under 'culture'?

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   Can't really see any major stability issues, so the article passes on this criterion. Watch for an overuse of panoramic images -- while these are nice to have, they're also very large, and sometimes can interfere with text display in some browsers. I've also noticed that some of the image captions are somewhat longer than they need to be. Image captions should describe the image itself -- they should also be connected to article text. If an image caption is too long, it might be an indication that information is missing from the article text.

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   The images all appear to be tagged appropriately.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   While I'd really love to be able to put this article on hold while editors fix up the issues, I just think that there are too many issues with organization to be able to do that within the on hold timeframe (I usually reserve on hold for articles that are mostly there in terms of organization and content, and just need a few things fixed up, like a reference or two here, or to clean up the lead section). Rather, I think it would help this article to go back, review the suggested guidelines, revamp the organization, the lead, find additional reference citations as needed, and then renominate at WP:GAN once the article better meets the six GA criteria. Cheers! Dr. Cash (talk) 17:24, 12 October 2009 (UTC)