Talk:Victorian era/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 11:49, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm really sorry but this article is basically way too long for the purpose it is intended to serve. The procedure for any large and complex subject is to construct a group of articles which describe the main aspects, like the History or whatever; the article at the top of the tree then links to each of the other articles with a template, and provides a brief summary of that article. The result is a tidy, "summary-style" article, richly cited but relatively brief: in a word, encyclopedic.

This article isn't like that. It's a daunting 229,000 Bytes, containing around 22,000 words of text. If a reader comes along and absorbs 1000 words every five minutes, the article will take them nearly 2 hours to get through. Just the History chapter is over 7000 words (35 minutes); so is the Society and culture section. Impressive in one way, but way too much.

Fortunately this structure suggests a ready cure: split out subsidiary articles such as "History of the Victorian era", "Society and culture of the Victorian era", "Moral standards in the Victorian era", "Science and technology of the Victorian era"; link them as above; summarize them briefly, and select a few of the most illustrative images to accompany the summaries: and the article will be in far better shape.

One other thing is totally baroque in this article: the 7-section "Further reading" chapter. That could be made into a separate article of its own, "Bibliography of the Victorian era", and linked simply from the "See also" section (without a summary, or at least, no more than a few words (say " – list of books arranged by topic").

As I say, it's uncomfortable to have to make this sort of comment on an article which embodies much good work. It may be as well to reflect that readers are busy people, and that the purpose of the encyclopedia is to provide people with coverage which is accessible and convenient as well as accurate. A bit more organisation will see the job done. There could then be a navigation template like the others at the bottom of the article, with "Victorian era" as its title, and the names of the newly-created articles (and surely quite a few others that already exist) listed in the template body. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:49, 28 March 2023 (UTC)