Talk:IPad/GA3

GA Review
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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 06:39, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

This article was delisted from Good Article status in 2021 per Good article reassessment/IPad/2 based on two issues: (1) excessive detail (WP:GACR #3b) in the "Model comparison" section, consisting of large detailed tables that should (according to the review at the time) be replaced by prose listing only the variations in model history that have been deemed particularly salient by reliable sources, and (2) non-cited material failing verifiability.

26zhangi recently re-nominated it, writing in an edit summary "It previously was stripped of GA status because of excessive detail, but that has been resolved".

I do not think it has been resolved. The model comparison section indeed contains fewer tables (now only two, a badly-sourced listing of in-production models and a large and entirely unsourced table of all models, with production and support lifetimes. But it still consists of tables of excessive detail, poor sourcing, and none of the requested prose. The "Timeline" section also consists only of data with no prose and inadequate sourcing (basically a link to Apple's "here's where to look for our archive of press releases" page). And the "Market share" section is sourced only to a reference considered to be generally unreliable (Statistica). The first paragraph of the "Censorship" article is sourced only to a speculative editorial.

Even when we have prose rather than tables it is overdetailed, repetitive, and tedious, and packed with undigested marketing buzzwords in place of useful information. Do we really need an entire paragraph of fill-in-the-blanks boilerplate text for each release of each model in the "History" section? It appears that editors saw the request to trim the detail and use prose instead of tables and instead of thinking about what was important enough to write about, took the entire content of the tables and made text wrappers around each table cell instead of graphical box wrappers around the cells. And some of the details don't stand up to scrutiny. What was the predecessor to the first-generation iPad Pro, the machine that it was supposedly 1.8x faster than? Why is the number of cores useful information to readers of this article? Why is the number of transistors on a chip useful information? Why is the lithography line size of a chip useful information? What does it mean for a display to feature "50% optimized" technology? What does "attracts any orientation" mean, if it can be explained in a way that would pass Apple censorship?

Other more easily fixed issues include sentence fragments ("In addition to a camera connection kit which consists of two adapters..."), peacock prose ("Apple extended the range of cellular compatibilities worldwide with the release..."), outdated details ("The 3G-based iPad is compatible with any GSM carrier" dated 2010), verb tense wildly varying within single paragraphs, etc. It gives me the strong impression that nobody has made a thorough copyediting pass of the entire article to make sure its prose is still consistent and makes sense, something that should be done before any nomination, not something that one should expect the GA reviewer to have to do.

I do not think this was ready for a new GA nomination (basically, per WP:GAFAIL #5: previous issues still valid). —David Eppstein (talk) 06:39, 18 December 2022 (UTC)