Talk:Wye College/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 15:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Comments
I'm really sorry but I've never seen anything so clearly over-edited as this article. The nominator has devoted some six months and well over 4,000 edits to expanding the article, on a now-closed college, from its status as a compact 19,000 byte piece at the start of June 2022 to a definitely oversized 212,000 bytes by February 2023. That is a commendable amount of effort, but the result has been that the article has grown to an unreadable size, the text interspersed by over 20 tables and several quite long lists. Contributing to the feeling of overgrowth is the key to a layout plan, not necessarily unencyclopedic in itself, with a list of 24 locations and 25 abbreviations or acronyms. The reader might well wonder whether they needed to know the location of Lecture Room C or of Administration and Ly-E "Library Entrance", not to mention T "Telephone". Something, in short, has gone seriously wrong here in terms of filtering of information, selecting what was necessary for a coherent, concise and readably encyclopedic article, and one that was instead grossly listlike, indiscriminate, and hopelessly overlong for the topic.

An extreme example of the article's hypertrophy and lack of appropriate selection or structure is in the section "Wye College", where the many short paragraphs give an extremely choppy effect, accentuated by the seven chronological tables that break the text up further with boldface dates and sentence fragments. Does the reader really need to know that in 1964 a "Two storey biological science laboratories [were] built facing onto Olantigh Road": it is one of many minor but space-filling details that clutter the article.

To give another example, "In 2021 Telereal Trillium obtained planning permission to convert the traditional college buildings"... this is cited, and would do as a statement; what will not do is the text that follows, consisting of four italicised (?) headings and five bullet-points on the conversion, all of which is plainly WP:UNDUE.

The Good article criteria state that "An article can be failed without further review (known as a quick fail) if, prior to the review:

1. It is a long way from meeting any one of the six good article criteria".


 * Criterion 1. "Well-written" requires that a. the prose is clear and concise, while
 * Criterion 3b. requires that "it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style)."

It seems quite clear that this article is not at all concise at the moment (indeed, the June 2022 text was arguably closer to what would be needed for a Good Article than the current text), and that it goes "into unnecessary detail" throughout its length.

An experienced editor with some GAs under their belt could probably perform the needed cutting and restructuring in quite short order, but given that this appears to be the nominator's first GAN, I think more time will probably be needed for the necessary revision or rewriting, and indeed for the needed degree of detachment from the current text, given their remarkable investment of time and effort. I am as I said above therefore sorry but I think it will be best to quick-fail this article now, with no prejudice at all against its renomination once the article has been reworked as described. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)