Talk:Josiah Holbrook

Good article reassessment
I came to this article from a Wikipedia criticism site, where it was pointed out that the section on equipment produced by Holbrook's company contained obvious OCR errors and its phrasing indicated that the source was an advertisement. This is inappropriate both as encyclopedic, neutral prose and as a serious copyediting failure. I was alarmed to see that had passed the article in substantially the same form I was looking at, without flagging even the copying failures.

I therefore looked further, and saw repetition of information (the creation of the company and factory), uneven style (the Genealogy section, in particular, did not fit with the rest in style), and unclear writing including burying the information on when he started his first school and simply puzzling sentences like "There were a hundred lyceums formed in the 1820s for crafts and mechanics of agricultural methods and geological surveys and further advanced the teaching system into other areas." I looked at a couple of references to see whether over-close paraphrasing was a problem, and found not so much that as clumsy integration of the information: "He developed a small factory for the manufacture of scientific apparatus" in the "17th Reunion" news source was "made a factory that was specifically designed to manufacture scientific apparatus" in the article. I also stumbled on the fact that the "Founder Yale Grad" source is the same text as part of the "17th Reunion" source; obviously some of these news reports have a common origin. I appreciate the work that has gone into scouring newspapers.com, but these sources needed to be used to reference a short, coherent account of Holbrook's life and work, and where there were duplicates, only the one with the fuller text should have been used. These issues should have been caught at the GA review.

I've tightened the text quite a lot, including removing the numbered list of objectives of the organization, which is not the subject of the article, but I still see unclear exposition and I suspect more about the lyceum movement and its extent could be cut; we have an article on it.

I don't participate in the GA process, so I do not feel comfortable formally delisting the article. But I think it should be reassessed. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:21, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for highlighting this. I feel very embarrassed that I missed these in the assessment and so have requested community involvement so that I learn how to do this better in the future. simongraham (talk) 11:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Copyright contributor investigation and Good article reassessment
This article is part of Contributor copyright investigations/20210315 and the Good article (GA) drive to reassess and potentially delist over 200 GAs that might contain copyright and other problems. An AN discussion closed with consensus to delist this group of articles en masse, unless a reviewer opens an independent review and can vouch for/verify content of all sources. Please review Good article reassessment/February 2023 for further information about the GA status of this article, the timeline and process for delisting, and suggestions for improvements. Questions or comments can be made at the project talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)