Talk:ISRO/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 02:25, 24 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi @Daniel Case, Will you be able to review once again. I have made most of the changes you have told. Theknowhowman (talk) 05:47, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I got your earlier note. Usually it's considered better form for a different reviewer to consider it, though I would certainly be willing to offer that reviewer my thoughts. Daniel Case (talk) 06:25, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Okay. I will wait for some other reviewer to review it. Anyway, thanks for your suggestions. It helped me to improve the page considerably. I am hoping to spin off the facilities section into a separate article, once that page is approved. Theknowhowman (talk) 18:17, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

OK, this has waited over a year—far too long—for a proper review. I will take it.

As is usually my practice, I will be printing it out for red-pen review, and then doing a light copy edit so that the article won't be quick-failed on those ground. Hopefully within a week of that edit (which I hope I can get to within a week of this post), I will be back to you with my comments. Daniel Case (talk) 02:25, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
 * So, have you any comments now? Aman Kumar Goel (Talk) 02:06, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I got a little sidetracked on the way to doing my copy edit, although I'm almost finished with the hardcopy. My goal is to start doing the copyedit later this week. Daniel Case (talk) 03:55, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Alright; I am finally done with the other large article I was working on for, oh, the last two months, pending its GA nomination. I will be starting the copy edit now. Daniel Case (talk) 20:04, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
 * OK, the copy editing is finally done. I will be back with my review in, I hope, a couple of days. Daniel Case (talk) 04:17, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Review
OK. Finally. Fifteen months after this article was nominated, we're here.

I will begin, as I always do, by discussing what I like about the article:

It is comprehensive and covers the subject exhaustively (It better, at this length). I learned some things I didn't know I didn't know.

And to my great relief, given this length and my experience reviewing other articles of this length, it was coherent. I never felt like I was getting lost. It arranged and presented its content in a manner whereby the transitions felt logical. It did not seem to spend an inordinate amount of space on any subjects of dubious relevance. My copy edit wound up taking the article down only by 1K ... that suggests to me that there was a 'little'' fat, so to speak, but not a lot.

And for the most part, it was written in a consistent voice (albeit one with a lot of non-native English influence, like many missing articles and odd word choices, that I had to correct when copyediting). Too often when I have reviewed a large GA (and sometimes even a small one), one can tell it was written by three different people at different times. That is too often the result of the expand-and-nominate method of getting to GA. This does not seem to have been the case here, for the most part. At least one person seems to have taken charge.

It is also generally well laid-out and illustrated. The images make sense with the text they are next to. There are no galleries, or other sections where people passing by decided to just stick something in that they thought looked cool. No vast desert of whitespace created by a complete lack of awareness of how to use formatting tools available in WML or, even, general principles of page layout. If I sound harsh on that score, you should see some of the nominations I've reviewed.

I should also thank the nominator for the edits he made while this article was pending after I had accepted the review. He addressed some of the issues with part of the text (specifically, the quote under "telecommunications" and the entire "Resource management" subsection, which were deservedly deleted) that I had identified in my hard copy and, most importantly, all the issues with the footnotes. Thanks! All I needed to do with the latter was add some access dates.

OK, now, what needs to be addressed in order for me to promote this article to GA:


 * Before I begin, there is the issue of this article's overall length. At 226K it is the longest article I have ever reviewed for GA. It is the longest article by far that we have about a national space agency ... longer than NASA, at 178K. It is longer than the 182K University of Notre Dame article that led me to this lengthy quick-fail review (and that article has, in response, bloated to 208K now). This is not to say that it is too long to be a GA. Certainly a lot of the considerations under SIZERULE have been heeded ... there seem to have been many articles spun off already. But I think more could be done, and in my comments below there are many areas where this article could be made shorter without losing anything important.


 * Right off the bat, the intro is too long. MOS:INTRO says "a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs". No matter how long the article is As it is we have six. Even allowing for the existing fourth graf to be combined with the shorter fifth (most of that detail on development of the rocket launcher in the fourth graf is really not needed in the lead at this point—it feels like it might have been left over from when the intro was, more or less, the article. I did not address this in my copy edit because I felt this was a content choice that the nominator or another editor should make, not the GA reviewer. But in that department, it also occurs to me that some of the historical detail in the second graf should/could be better left to the body of the article. If you'd like me to tighten that intro up later, just ask (I've done this a lot). Till then I will be tagging the article appropriately.


 * There are 23 fact tags throughout the article. These need to be cleared up either by citing appropriate sources or removing the uncited claims from the article. Again, pending those changes I will be tagging the article with refimprove.


 * Then there are some remaining languages. I added many of the missing articles (is this a characteristic of Hindi or Bengali or other Indic languages that I'm not familiar with (but I do speak Russian and that happens there)?) and was able to find the English word the author meant to use in many circumstances (I admit I smiled about the engine and rocket being "mated" with each other). But I am still unsure what to replace "indigenous" with. I can say with confidence that in this context it definitely does not mean what the author thinks it mean. "Native", perhaps? Some synonym suggesting that the technology in question was developed by ISRO itself is what we're trying to get to. In the future, also, the article should eschew the passive voice and much of the overly formal and bureaucratic phrasing that I trimmed. Perhaps this, too, is characteristic of Indian English, especially where the writer's first language is not English, I don't know, but it is (or was) hard on the reader. Conversely remember that it is not only Indians who may be reading this, and thus shorthand like "PM Modi" and the many other abbreviations of agencies that went unnamed (although they were linked), as common as they may be in Indian media, need to be written out so non-Indian readers can understand them on first reference.


 * My unfamiliarity with Indian English and its conventions meant that I was unsure whether "programme" or "program" was correct. The article primarily uses the former with the latter creeping in in two places. It needs to be consistent in this choice. I would assume "programme", would be preferred, expected from a Commonwealth country ... except that Australia is a Commonwealth country as well and "program" is TMU the preferred spelling down there, as I learned when developing Museum of Contemporary Art Australia to GA status earlier this year. Figure it out.


 * In "Goals and Objectives", I really question the need for those two long quotes. They would be better off paraphrased and quoted only relevantly, in shorter bites. If someone really thinks they're inspiring and a good thing to have here, they should go in the appropriate Wikiquote pages.


 * I also don't see the need at all for the next section, basically a list and diagram of all the DOS agencies. Certainly some of them, as the article later shows, work closely with ISRO. But for others on that list, it is their sole mention in this article. I really think this whole section would better off in the DOS article ... or reduced just to a brief discussion of the other DOS agencies that work with ISRO regularly. I am also not sure if the table of facilities afterwards is totally necessary ... some of the information is repeated elsewhere in the article, and while some of those facilities certainly are relevant, again, we have some that are only mentioned this one time.


 * We then have these short, single-sentence sections, about which MOS:PARA counsels: "The number of single-sentence paragraphs should be minimized, since they can inhibit the flow of the text ... Short paragraphs and single sentences generally do not warrant their own subheading; in such circumstances, it may be preferable to use bullet points instead." I think they very much do here; it would certainly resolve this puzzling choice to use the non-editable introductory semicolon for some of this sections but the bookended equals signs for others. I should also point out that much of the S-TIC paragraph simply reiterates information already given in the table above, as does some of the information in the first sentence of the Directorate graf immediately below it. As for the list of other facilities, again, some are mentioned later but others are only mentioned there. Is it really necessary to have this list in the article? I am beginning to think that this entire section might be better spun off as a separate list.


 * Are the tables on the launch statistics really necessary? Especially the one-line table of GSLV Mark III launches telling us that all four launches have been successful? Is space exploration the new international sport? Do these tables tell us anything that prose alone cannot?


 * I assume the acronym "IHSF" means "Indian Human Space Flight" but ... since that's just an assumption, I did not spell it out as such, particularly because that's the only place it appears in the article.


 * The ITLU "was to be set up". This language suggests this did not happen. If that was the case, why? If it did happen, when?


 * Has there been any change in the schedule for launching that crewed mission in the last 15 months? It would be good to research this and update that last sentence under "Crewed Spacecraft"


 * The SCE-200 will be "far more powerful". Than what? Language like that suggests a comparison is being made.


 * Is it really necessary to list every single nation inline in the text that ISRO has cooperation agreements with? It honestly seems to me that it would be more succinct to list those it doesn't, if there are any. Frankly this seems a bit crufty; summary style would apply better here.


 * I also wonder what encyclopedic purpose the graphs and table about ISRO's budget history serve. Again, this feels like fancruft.


 * The section on the S-band scandal was the one part of the article that felt like it was written by someone else ... the English was generally cleaner, for one thing. That said ... it seems to me that it should a) be discussed in the history section further up and b) spun off into a separate article with maybe a graf left behind here. There's enough there, and as a separate article its issues—citing the sections of Indian statute that the charged parties were alleged to have violated as opposed to the named crimes they committed, and its needed citations, among others—would then not be this article's problem.


 * Also, what's that text at the bottom of the references section about? It looks like it might have been a formatting error, but I can't figure out what it's supposed to be. Daniel Case (talk) 04:41, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

OK, lastly, it doesn't have to be done but I think it would be nice if someone could find or take a picture of ISRO's headquarters in Bangalore and put that in the article ... there are plenty of places it could go. All our other space-agency articles have some picture like that.

After putting this punch list together, it should be no surprise that I am putting this nomination

The work that needs to be done can be done. I am willing to give you more than the usual week to do it. If you feel you can't do it even in an extended timeframe, I would be OK with failing it so you can fix and renominate at your convenience. Just let me know.

Happy editing!

Daniel Case (talk) 05:40, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

OK. I have let this review go now for almost three weeks, during which no one has responded here, and there appears to have been almost no work on the article. In fact, the only result of this whole process is that someone has given me a virtual cup of tea by way of thanks (which I do appreciate, but that should have been the prelude to a feast).

I could take this occasion to ask more seriously for someone to work on this, but ... it has been almost a year and a half since this was nominated, and frankly that would just be needlessly prolonging things that have perhaps been prolonged too long (Is this a record? I wonder). So, since none of the issues I raised have been addressed, this will be a

❌.

If the issues above are addressed, it can and should be renominated. Again, happy editing! Daniel Case (talk) 05:25, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi @Daniel Case, I have made some of the changes that you have suggested. Will you be able to review this ? I have raised a nomination for Good article. Theknowhowman (talk) 17:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)