Talk:The Broken Compass/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 04:16, 8 June 2012 (UTC) This article has languished at the top of the nomination pile for some five and a half months. Having just nominated one myself for the first time in quite a while, I take up the challenge of review as the customary repayment of the community for the service of (eventually) reviewing my submission.

From the talk page and edit history, it's clear that this article has been through hell ... numerous NPOV battles, Peter Hitchens himself getting involved. The nominator has done, it seems, a yeoman's job in getting it to at least respectability. I salute him for this unenviable task.

Unfortunately, it's not enough so far to get this to GA status. I printed out a hard copy for this review, as I do for all GANs I review, and when I had weighed down the first page with as much red ink as I did I knew the article would not pass.

Articlewide problems

 * Sloppy and inconsistent prose formatting: This is right from the get-go. Right underneath the article title, where the book's subtitle is set off from the main title by a colon as it is on the cover and indeed as is customary for English-language book titles, we see in the lede that the subtitle is in parentheses and unbolded to boot. Is there a reason for this? It doesn't seem like there is. In the synopsis, most chapter titles have their key words capitalized, but chapter 12 is just rendered as "The age of the train."


 * Structural awkwardness: I realize part of this is due to the limitations of the material. But it nevertheless looks strange to have an intro with one long paragraph and one short, stubby one. It might help for that second graf to go into at least some detail about what the left-wing reviewers said. Then, the "Background" section summarizes the book's introduction. That should really be part of the synopsis. Perhaps the "background" section could tell us about Hitchens and his political journey from clone of his brother to 180-degree opposite, and what his day job (so to speak) is. I'm not so sure the "Release details" needs exact dates anymore, three years after the book was published. The title changes should be kept, but perhaps moved to the second graf of the introduction. As for the next and last section, "Joke in book's index" ... come on. That's trivia, IMO. And if it's to be included, at least go into detail about it. As for "Further reading", I'm not really sure that Wikipedia should be in the business of suggesting books, which is how that presently reads. It sounds like it would be better in "See also" if an article can be written about it, and the connection asserted beyond being two books about the same general subject.


 * Prose, generally: I realize a book article that is chiefly a summary of the book, thus consisting largely of a synopsis, is not the easiest thing to write about without. But surely we could avoid long passages of sentences that begin "The author/Hitchens/he writes/says/claims/argues ..."? More creative use of English syntax and paraphrasing, with some of the longer quotes set off in quote, could make that synopsis flow better. And must we adopt Hitchens' stylings? Is it necessary to capitalize "Left" even outside quoted material, because he does? Likewise with "Communist Bloc". Also, some of the prose discusses the 2009 election as if it had not yet happened. This should be updated.

Specific, hard-to-classify ones

 * According to the infobox, the book's subject is "Politics of the United Kingdom" while its genre is "United Kingdom politics". Aside from the fact that these are linked to the same article, I think only the first suffices, and the second can be left out. Just because an infobox has a line for something doesn't mean you have to fill it in.
 * In summarizing the "Riding the Prague Tram" chapter, it seems like it should be made clear, as it seems from the context, that Hitchens' visits to the Eastern Bloc were in the 1970s. Saying "before the fall of the Soviet Union" makes it sound like they were ca. 1990.
 * "Hitchens claims supporters of Leo Abse's 1967 law reform on homosexuality are now accused of intolerance if they do not support homosexual civil partnerships or discrimination on the grounds of homosexuality". Is there possibly the word "oppose" missing there?
 * Don't we have a more recent picture of Hitchens than 2006? You'd think Gordon Brown wrote this, from looking at it.

Daniel Case (talk) 04:16, 8 June 2012 (UTC)