Talk:Interlingue/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 21:04, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Alright. After the failure of the first review, this should not be allowed to linger. Since I owe about four reviews at the moment, I will take this one.

I will be printing it out, doing some light copyediting per my belief that no one's GAN should fail for easily fixable copy errors, and then coming back after a few days with my comments and suggestions. Daniel Case (talk) 21:04, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I haven't looked at this page for a while since the previous GA review dropped out of sight and just noticed all your recent edits. Much appreciated. Mithridates (talk) 13:58, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Review
OK ... I'm done now.

I have somewhat mixed feelings here. On the one hand, a great deal of work was put into this. On the other, I am not sure that GA status is the best thing for this article at this time.

First, what I like about it:


 * The history section is excellent. I get a sense of the vigor of the entire auxiliary language movement in the early 20th century, of Occidental/Interlingue as evolving from that. It sort of reminds me of the wiki movement today, actually. I hope any lessons that can be learned from that are good ones (we may be thankful for the effect of the pandemic after seeing what the outbreak of another war did to all these artificial languages).


 * And certainly one cannot get through the article without getting a glimpse at least of Interlingue's grammar and morphology, demonstrating the points its founders sought to emphasize.

However ... these are also exactly what makes me hesitant about promoting it.

I compared it with our other articles about auxlangs, and unlike them it seems like this article is attempting to be the one article about everything Interlingue. If you look in, you'll see besides this article only bios of de Wahl and several other people involved with its development. Whereas in and, say, you find separate articles about their history and grammar, as well as comparisons between these languages.

I think Interlingue could really benefit from this treatment. There is already plenty in the article to unpack into separate History of Interlingue and Grammar of Interlingue articles to go with our other auxlang coverage. And I see places that would suggest Comparison of Esperanto and Interlingue and especially Comparison of Interlingua and Interlingue, given how easily they get confused.

Such a split could leave behind a main article that would be nimbler, more readable and a better GA candidate.

OK, now to some specific things that need to be addressed that I didn't feel comfortable doing as a reviewer:


 * First, there is no need for that picture of the postcard to be so wide (Try reading the article on a phone!). Half of it is mostly blank anyway. Either crop it or just reduce the upright= parameter to something more in line with the other images.


 * Second, the article needs to decide whether it wants to use American or British English. I see both -ise and -ize spellings used. We can't have that ... the article needs to be consistent. I think, given the location of the language's history being in Europe, British English would be preferred, but that's not my decision to make. The important thing is consistency.


 * I think there are a couple of places where "De Wahl" is used where his name does not begin a sentence. I could be wrong. But if I'm not that needs to be consistent.


 * There is at least one place in the text where I think the text would be better served by being in an endnote—the "Written in the international language Occidental" translation. I'm sure another reader can think of others.


 * The prose generally has been wordier and denser than it needs to be, with a lot of prepositional phrases and passive voice where adverbs and active voice would do just as well and keep the reader moving. Also, there is sort of a well-educated non-native feel to the English, with odd word choices like "didactic", for which I substituted "instructional" where I found it. I tried to address all these in my copy edit, which resulted in shaving about 1K off the article, suggesting by my scale there was some fat in the language. And it might have been larger if I hadn't added all those fact tags.


 * In fact (ahem) given this article's general willingness to cite sources, the places where it does not really stand out. I was surprised there were so many of them.

Have to go now; I will be back later to finish this. Daniel Case (talk) 20:35, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

OK ... I'm back.

And having discussed the places where the article's general devotion to sourcing its claims is absent, I now can turn to discussing the issues with the footnotes themselves:


 * Generally, far too many of them use the ISO 8601 format for dates that is filled in by default in the text to copy from the appropriate template page. Per MOS:DATE, this is generally discouraged, and not to be used at all when other dates in the article's main text do not use that format. These should all be changed to another format, preferably the British DMY format as it was used in a couple of other dates given in the article, and per my expressed suggestion for the use of British English for the article.


 * Footnote 22: An interwiki link never works as a citation. Not only is it incomplete as given, as a wiki it is not an acceptable source for anything but its own existence. If there are sources given there, they should be used if they meet our standards.


 * All footnotes with the original of a translated text, whether in Interlingue, Esperanto, German, French or whatever, should have that original included as a quote. As for those that use the translation of a quote from those languages, I suggest putting the English in endnotes and the original in the footnote.


 * Footnote 84 should use the lang= parameter set to de to indicate that the source is in German.


 * Footnote 106 needs to be completed with publication information. There are fields for the issue number and date that aren't part of the journal's title.

Between the footnote issues, the needed citations and my feeling that the article would be better off with daughters, I am really not sure that sufficient changes can be made in a week. Yes, I am willing to promote this article in its present form if that's what the nominator really wants, if the other issues are addressed, but all the same I wouldn't feel totally comfortable doing it—as it is the article feels like a bridge pushed to, and likely well beyond, its capacity limit, sometimes creaking audibly. I will be putting it on hold, but, if the nominator agrees that the issues I think can and should be addressed need to be addressed, I will fail it with an eye toward the nominator being able to make those changes over the long term and later renominate (although someone else will have to review it then). I really don't think a week is enough time to split off daughter articles and properly edit the main article on top of everything else.

A couple of suggestions regardless of the nominator's decision:


 * On top of the elephantiasis of the prose, an editor should really think about whether the article needs to rely on all those quotes, and at their lengths, both inline and blocked. Sometimes you need the source's eloquence, true, but when the quotes are largely imparting information you'd be surprised at how much tighter good paraphrasing can make it, per MOS:QUOTE.


 * It also occurs to me that it might be nice to have a sound file, or even a video with bilingual subtitles, showing us what Interlingue sounds like spoken (Maybe the video could even be one of those brief scenes of the sort you see in language textbooks, where, say, Monique waits on Martin and he asks her out after she's off work, or she's the hotel clerk when he checks in etc.) Maybe the sound file would be better with the phonology sections ... you might not need the tables so much.

OK ... for the reasons given above, I am putting this article. Daniel Case (talk) 05:47, 19 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the comments! I have been planning those other articles you mentioned, those exact four in fact - history and grammar are obvious necessities, while comparison to Esperanto (the biggest auxlang) and Interlingua (the one with the closest shared history) do make sense. I'll add each thought in a separate bullet point.
 * I appreciate your swift response too. I was worried that your recent inactivity might mean you wouldn't be able to get back to this, and after a few weeks I'd have to just fail it (That has happened with some GANs I've reviewed). Daniel Case (talk) 17:23, 20 October 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm curious, now that it's on hold does it have to be resolved within one week? I am working full time again but if I had a month I (and the others that use / know about the language) could certainly do it. This article waited for something close to a year before getting a review and my fear is that it would have to wait the same length of time. It does feel a bit sudden to have waited this long and then have a week to make the changes.
 * No, there's a lot of wiggle room granted reviewers, and TBH it's not really strictly enforced (I had one nom where the review started about a year ago and finished with promotion only in July). As long as you're willing to work on it regularly, and I remain engaged (which I will), it's OK. Daniel Case (talk) 17:23, 20 October 2021 (UTC)


 * A simple slimming down of the article in places (grammar for example) is certainly possible and something I've given thought to, including the blockquotes. We've been moving it to the Simple English Wikipedia as well and have cut it down to about half its size.
 * Spelling: I could do with all Canadian spelling since I'm a Canadian myself and sometimes am not sure whether the British norm is to use a s or z in places.
 * The British norm is almost always -ise (the reason was that this was the form French uses/d, since Latin makes almost no use of the letter "z" and it borrowed that form from Greek, which does) or occasionally -yse (as in "analyse") (Belated signature: Daniel Case (talk) 17:21, 22 October 2021 (UTC))


 * Extra sources: those should be easy to add. I may have to remove the one about the most recent issue of Cosmoglotta since even though I have a copy myself I'm not sure if there is a place that I can cite to prove it.
 * Spoken Occidental/Interlingue: the easiest place is probably this course on Wikibooks (that's my voice). Would a voice be excepted from being counted as original research? Otherwise I could ask one of the people I know to upload some of the recordings they have made as we have some other spoken recordings as well as music samples that could go up on the Commons.
 * Per OI, media produced by a Wikipedian to support a factual claim in the article is not OR. Daniel Case (talk) 17:21, 22 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks again! Mithridates (talk) 13:44, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Going forward
Okay, thanks for the clarification and the easier schedule. Since I have the requisite time to make all the changes, I think the general direction will be to start the History of Interlingue and Interlingua and Interlingue compared articles as those are the two of the four that I'm most interested and best suited to write. The grammar one I could technically do but I'm more of an Interlingue/Occidental grammar specialist and not so much grammatical terms in general so that would be a harder slog. (As for Esperanto, I can read it for the most part but a full comparison would be better done by some of the other people I know that began using Interlingue-Occidental after a long period of activity as an Esperantist) And while doing those I'll continue to pull pieces away from the main article here to keep it a bit tighter and focused. I've just finished recording the final audio chapter for the book I mentioned and have 15 chapters left to edit and upload, so I think in about 10 days I'll be freed up to do this. Though in the meantime I'll start with sourcing some of the parts you noticed that did not have a reference.

As for the latest Cosmoglotta article, a new issue is being finalized in Switzerland right now (number 327, I think it was) and so I guess I'll just ask the owner of the semi-official site for the Interlingue-Union to add a note on that site and that will take care of that reference too. Mithridates (talk) 15:06, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Late November update
Okay, I'm done the language course I was putting together and began the Comparison between Interlingue and Interlingua page which today got nominated for deletion until I added some offline references directly comparing the two, which satisfied the reviewer about notability and uniqueness for the subject. Now that the new page is safe I'll be able to move back to the main page and start shuttling off parts of that into the new article (and the same for History of Interlingue which I'll start next). Steady progress! Mithridates (talk) 11:57, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Mid-January update
Okay, I think it might be slimmed down enough now. I've shuffled off the parts in their original wording in the new pages you suggested (and it's nice to have them for further expansion - I'm already adding a timeline to History of Interlingue) and have removed some excessive blockquotes and content that feels more apt for those pages than the main one here. I'm particularly excited about expanding the history one as the period in between the 1950s and the 1990s is pretty light but I do have some Cosmoglotta issues in the 1960s now to read through. Anyhow, do you think it's slimmed down enough as is? I don't mind extra changes if necessary. Mithridates (talk) 13:51, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
 * It looks pretty good (you still need to make that postcard smaller, the same size you have it in the history article). I will take a more in-depth look in the morning when I am fresher mentally. It looks a lot closer to promotion just from skimming it, I can say. Daniel Case (talk) 06:40, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
 * OK ... I took that postcard size back down to thumb and marked two places with tags. But it definitely looks less bloated (still think you could stand to take more over to the grammar article, though, but maybe you're already planning to do that). I think we are close to getting this done. Daniel Case (talk) 20:43, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, I found some time to do the changes this weekend. Of the two parts marked for citation one already had a source that applied to the whole sentence so I moved it to the end, while the other was directly followed by a paragraph that said the same thing (and had its own sources) so I just deleted the sentence. After that I moved a bit more over to Interlingue grammar and did some more general slimming down. Mithridates (talk) 14:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Courtesy ping to reviewer Daniel Case. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:08, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Status query
Daniel Case, Mithridates, where does this nomintion stand? I only see two Wikipedia edits by Mithridates since the 23 January update above, and the review will have been open for six months in about a week's time. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:26, 27 March 2022 (UTC)


 * He seems to have made one small edit this month ... I await his response with some sort of timetable on when he can get it all done. Daniel Case (talk) 17:49, 27 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Cat has been sick lately, can't concentrate. I'll still make the final changes. Mithridates (talk) 00:12, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

At long last ...
OK. ✅ The article is still long, but not unreasonably so. The citations missing have been attended to. This has gone on long enough and while there can be no end state for even our very best articles, certainly this one has now reached the GA lovel.

Congratulations, and happy editing going forward. Daniel Case (talk) 04:39, 13 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Wow, what a journey! Thanks for all the attention you gave to the article and for giving the idea to give birth to another four which I can now turn my attention to.
 * I see a bot has come by letting me know that it can show up as a "Did you know" item, good news! Going to do that a bit later tonight. Mithridates (talk) 08:39, 13 April 2022 (UTC)