Talk:1940 to 1944 English cricket seasons

Sub-standard editing
Considering the comments made by "Dr T M Asquith" elsewhere about his own knowledge and expertise as the editor, for what that may be worth, of the "ACS journal", one may have anticipated an outstanding contribution of scholarly standards to this article. Sadly, he fails miserably to reach the very high standards maintained by the WP:CRIC project in general and one has felt obliged to intevene and try to restore the article's former readability.

I do not wish to waste much time on this but, if Asquith is open to receipt of constructive criticism in addition to his destructive carping about other people who can actually write readable and correct English, he may find instruction in the following brief notes:


 * Readability: dire due to complete lack of structure and direction; a jumble of "facts"
 * Paragraphing and general syntax poor
 * Total disregard for referencing standards
 * Spelling errors: Metroplolitan, Morris Leyland, Australian Serviceman (plurality)
 * No attempt to provide linkage
 * Bizarre terminology: serious cricket, formed to give cricket to, ad hoc games occasionally, First War, Servicemen (twice with upper case), British Empire eleven, 90 from 1943–45, sides played along with teams, good class matches.
 * Clearly no concept of article structure with a pile of disjointed sentences simply "dumped" into the lead which thereby lost context and became hampered by unnecessary verbiage.
 * Use of "for example" several times without any punctuation or grammatical concept.
 * Unnecessary repetition of information already present in the article such as "Teams were formed to give cricket to Servicemen and Civil Defence volunteers".
 * Incorrect information: "Nottinghamshire played four times in 1940". Birley, an eminent source, says it was six per the existing citation.
 * Lost context: inclusion of irrelevant material about 1945, especially in the lead, indicates failure to appreciate that the scope of the article is limited to the period 1940 to 1944.
 * Removal of content without requesting citations is a breach of site rules. I have reinstated the sentence and requested a citation (the information is not in Birley).

All of Asquith's "facts" have been lifted piecemeal from a Datasport compendium published in 1990. I am not sure if this is a commendable source or not, but it certainly does not meet the "academic" status which "Dr Asquith" so hypocritically demands when he presents condescending claptrap on other people's talk pages.

This article is only a "stub" and it would be rewarding to see it expand but when an article has effectively been ruined by a seriously bad editor like Asquith, good editors are naturally discouraged from trying to improve it as they must first perform a repair. My advice to Mr Asquith is to stay away from Wikipedia unless he is prepared to behave in a civil manner towards the members and make a genuine effort to comply with site standards and produce readable work. Incidentally, he is a blocked user evading his ban and so one must suppose that all his edits could be erased. However, I have tried despite a limit on my available time to make some good out of his poor work. --Jim Hardie (talk) 06:26, 13 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Just one point where Asquith may have been right. He deleted: "The number of matches increased after the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies after El Alamein and Stalingrad." That sentence has been restored and flagged with "citation needed", but looking at those matches played in each English season which have been included on the CricketArchive site indicates that a surprisingly large number were played in both 1940 and 1941, and if there was an increase from 1942 onwards it's far from obvious. JH (talk page) 09:01, 13 April 2012 (UTC)