Talk:History of education in Wales/GA1

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Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 09:17, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Good to see this article nominated - a subject dear to my heart as a teacher and a Welsh exile. I've given it a read and there are a few matters that stick out across the article: let me know how you get on with these, and feel free to ask if I can clarify or help with anything.

• MoS: the article generally needs a good copyedit. There are quite a lot of breaks with the MoS, particularly
  MOS:CAPS
  , and generally non-standard punctuation and capitalisation throughout. Some specific, recurring examples:
  • Check a vs an: an especially heavy emphasis-  Done I think all of these mistakes are dealt with.
  • Decap century: the nineteeth century or the 20th century.  Done This was due to a confusion on my part. I think I've caught all instances of this now but tell me if I have missed any.
  • Subheadings should be in sentence case: Language usage  Done Thank you Treetoes023 for sorting this out for me.
  • Important buildings like cathedrals and universities are in lowercase unless you mean a specific one (e.g. the University of Aberystwyth
  • Titles of books should generally be in title case: Dictionary of Welsh Biography
  • Ranges of dates or pages take an endash (use the symbols in the editor): 1750–1914.
  • Initials of people are generally dotted and spaced (W. B. Stephens, but acronyms that you pronounce as a word are written together SPICK. The institution that gives that acronym should however be capitalised Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge
  • Check
    MOS:HYPHEN
    : e.g. five and fifteen years old
• The early sections need a lot more citation: I am concerned that we really only have one source (Jones and Roderick) for 850 words or so covering Wales' entire history down to about 1670. There's no hard-and-fast rule, but we do need to show that we've covered the key areas of the topic: from a
  copyright and close paraphrasing perspective, it's extremely difficult to strike the right balance without writing things unsupported by the sources unless you can weave in several. -
   Doing... Based on my research there doesn't seem to be many sources on this subject and those that do exist usually focus on the period after 1800. I have ordered another book on the period 1500 to 1900 which should be arriving in a few days time. I'm back at university now so I'm not sure exactly when I'll have time to work on it. Possibly next weekend. (I am writing this on Monday the 23rd)
• The paragraphs and sections are, in general, extremely long, which makes reading difficult. The sections also cover a long chronological range. One way to solve this would be to break some of the sections down, perhaps into subsections (for example, the long section on the "Early to mid 19th century" could be broken up at 1833, when government funding comes in, and again at the Newcastle Commission). Done I have added subtitles to most of the sections, tell me if you think any of them are not suitable.

I think this one is going to be a big job: I'll put the hold on in good faith, but recognise that seven days is a very short period in which to do everything here, and that more jobs are likely to come up once we get into the weeds of CLOP. Perhaps the Guild of Copy Editors would be able to help get the prose up to scratch? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:17, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

UndercoverClassicist, I've been steadily improving this article though it remains a work in progress. I would appreciate some more time to work through the changes needed. I probably won't be able to do any more editing for at least a few days as I have an assignment due soon.--Llewee (talk) 01:25, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can see that - thank you and well done for your work so far. To put my cards on the table, I can still see quite a way to go with copyediting, and I still have concerns about sourcing/CLOP in the early history sections: I don't want to give you false hope that this will be an easy process, or that it will necessarily result in a GA pass once you've put that work in. If you're happy to proceed on that basis, I'm happy to keep the review open; equally, I'm happy to close it without prejudice so that you can work on the article in your own time and re-nominate when it's fully ready. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:00, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Llewee: I see you've made some edits here: where do you think we are in terms of readiness for a review? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:31, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@UndercoverClassicist: I think the bulk of the grammar issues have now been dealt with. I have also tried to make the article more readable. Please tell me if you would like me to change any of the subheadings. I added an additional book and article to the sources in the early sections. As mentioned previously their aren't many books on the subject I can find.--Llewee (talk) 00:23, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's certainly getting there; it's not there yet, grammar-wise, though the standards for GA here are pretty low. There's also quite a lot of close paraphrase of A History of Education in Wales: I only have access to it on Google Books, but searching terms from our article often pulls up snippets that have the same distinctive phrasing or structure, which is

also making sure that the article does not deviate from the facts of the source. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:35, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

UndercoverClassicist, I've made some further improvements and tried to deal with the issues with close phrases. Llewee (talk) 12:06, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can see a lot of work has been done here - will give it a proper look when I can. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 22:27, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello UndercoverClassicist, will you be able to have another look at the article soon? Llewee (talk) 19:41, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Of course - I've been holding off as I can see you've been working hard at it. Given the way in which this article has progressed, I think it would be most fair to give it a clean slate and start the review afresh. Real life is likely to get in the way until next week, but I'll get to it as soon as I can. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:48, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK thank you, I will give it another check over before then Llewee (talk) 21:19, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK - we're still getting closer, but still not there. It's a big article and I do sympathise.

The main stumbling block for GA is the quality of the prose -- this is now pretty good in the early part of the article, but drops off significantly later on and in the notes. The old issues with the number, quality and breadth of sources recur (one citation for the gigantic second paragraph on universities) and there are grammatical and spelling errors. Look in particular at long sentences: where a sentence is divided between a main clause and a subordinate one, there should be a comma (e.g. The most well-known example in Wales was the Presbyterian Academy in Brynllywarch, which later moved to Carmarthen. -- there are at the moment a lot of long, unpunctuated sentences, which detract from readability considerably. On the other hand, make sure that every sentence is complete -- that is, it contains a main verb. These are not:

• For instance Edward Carne from Ewenny in the Vale of Glamorgan who had a celebrated legal career and eventually became an ambassador
• Of those that did so it typically took four years to gain a bachelor's degree and another three to become a Master of Arts
• Particularly competing as businesses, particularly controlled by the state.

One erratum which comes up repeatedly: be consistent on the spelling of e.g. medieval. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:16, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

UndercoverClassicist, I have attempted to improve the quality of writing in the later sections as much as I can. Llewee (talk) 00:05, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's still making progress, but we're still working incrementally. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm the right person for this one any more: it's been such a long review and the article has changed so much (for the better!) that it would be better to have a second pair of eyes, unencumbered by all the intermediate steps we've been through, to help it go through the next set of improvements that it will need to meet the criteria. I've put in that request through the GA system. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:25, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]