User:Andrew Guarino/sandbox

Article Evaluation: Roman technology
The article refers to the technologies Rome used to change the world in the past, and perhaps by understanding that there's some insight to be gleaned into how technology changes the world today.

Lead
The introductory sentence describes the content of the article well and is concise enough. The lead doesn't necessarily touch on every one of the technologies described in the article, but I don't think it needs to, given how this page is a summary/collection article where a lot of the subsections link to a separate primary article about the given technology. The lead instead talks about the collective influence of Roman technologies on the world; it seems appropriate given that the article is about the technologies as a group.

Content
The content of the article does well to describe the technological advances used by and innovated by the Romans. It has large sections about each of the biggest categories in engineering, mentions technology as it related to their military, and then goes on to describe all of the individual, miscellaneous things. It seems very complete to me, perhaps to the and all of it seems relevant to the topic of the article, given the broad definition of "technology".

However, the Roman technology after the article is not good. It's probably a very complete list of any technologies attributed to the Romans, but it's unfinished, with blank boxes and simultaneously too many and too few links.

Tone and Balance
This is where things really go downhill. Right up at the top, the article has a warning: "This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia". And it's not awful — it's readable and it's coherent, but certain sections come off as not very well written. An example: Roman technology. It starts off with a "They", and the parenthetical is clumsily implemented. The next sentence also starts with "They", and uses the phrase "in just one country, Spain" where they could have just as easily said "in Spain". Essentially the whole article can be picked apart in this manner, and the result is exactly what it says at the top: the article's tone is not the encyclopedic tone it should be. There are definitely better arrangements of words to convey the information; the tone is not fitting.

Sources and References
The sources are not well implemented. There's an in-text citation under Roman technology, in MLA format. Down toward the bottom, the "Sails, Lateen" row of the chart has references 47 through 56, all in a row. Some of the rows on the table are no more than "See [8]", where 8 is just a link to this BBC News article. Reference #20 links to a 404 page. #19 is an article called "10 Incredible Roman Military Innovations You Should Know About" which is not at all a good source.

That said, there are also a lot of good references to books and trustworthy names like "Oxford" and "Cambridge University Press". Given the subject matter, it makes sense that most of the sources are from the 20th century, but it would be nice to see some more recent ones. It looks like the most recent source was published in 2009. I'm not sure if there are any more recent sources to be used, but recent sources is probably the least of this article's problems.

Organization
Each individual section seems appropriately sized, but it's a long article that covers a very broad subject. There's nothing that immediately sticks out as being too long or too short, but it does seem like there are a lot of extraneous parenthetical and more examples than there need to be.

There are a handful of grammatical errors. Misplaced commas, mostly, but improper capitalization, the inconsistent use of digits and number-words, SI vs Imperial units, English vs British spellings, and so on.

There are plenty of spelling errors as well, like "travelled," "metres", and "maneouver".

Images and Media
There are 31 images in the article, it's just solid images down the right hand side, extending all the way down past the References and into the Further reading. And not all of the images are necessarily relevant. The second one down is a statue of Marcus Aurelius, but he isn't mentioned in the text.

Not all of the images are appropriately captioned. One is simply "stern mounted rudder", just like that, with no capitalization, links, or context of any sort.

All of the images are licensed under Creative Commons or in the public domain.

Checking the talk page
The last note on the talk page is from October, 2013. There's no ongoing conversation of any sort, only warnings that the article isn't very good.

It's a C-rated article, tagged with six variations of "Technology articles needing attention to ____".

It's part of WikiProject Technology as well as WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome.

We haven't necessarily discussed Roman technology in class, and perhaps I should have picked a more relevant article, but I should like to think that the discussions we have in class have a little more substance to them.

Overall impressions
This article is in worse shape than it initially seemed, and is definitely a C-class article. It does well enough to convey the essential information related to the topic, and there's a lot to be learned about what a massive impact the Romans had on technology.

But the article's execution is poor. It doesn't read very smoothly, it's got all sorts of errors and inconsistencies, and the information is of questionable source. It could be improved by just having a go at it with spellcheck enabled, and a lot of it could be easily reworded and polished into more effective writing.

Assignment 5: Adding a citation
This following section on roads has zero citations, so I'll touch up the first part to add one, borrowing from the main article.

Roads
Roads were a vital element of Roman infrastructure, enabling armies, officials, and civilians to traverse effectively. In total, more than 400,000 km of roads were constructed, 80,500 km of which were stone-paved.


 * Removed "Further information: Roman bridge" because there's a section just below for exactly that.
 * The 85,000 kilometres extant in the article has no source, so I replace it with the 400,000 kilometres figure present in the main article. It's not quite the same bit of information, but it fits just as well.
 * Seeing as how it's just a pair of numbers there's not really a great way to rephrase it, but it's also not an idea that needs to be rephrased.

Assignment 6: Drafting
The section about bridges was lifted directly more or less straight from the main article and doesn't convey the salient points. I'll modify and add to it in order to have the section better fit with the focus of the article.

Bridges
By taking advantage of the segmental arch, the innovation of roman concrete, dovetail joints, metal bars to link stone, allowed Roman bridges to be the largest of their time. There are over 900 Roman bridges with surviving remains, and many are still in use. The Puente Romano is the largest Roman in use today; it is estimated to have once had a length of 755 meters.

The longest bridge constructed by the Romans was Trajan's bridge, built by order of Emperor Trajan in 103 A.D. over the lower Danube. It had a length of 1135 m and remained the largest bridge in both total and span length for more than 1,000 years.

For outstanding achievements of Roman bridge building, see List of ancient architectural records.

Assignment 9: Completed
As far as I can tell, I didn't receive a peer review. Instead, I read through the article's entire talk page. Not much was said that I didn't already know; the article's main problems are its tone and the way information is presented. I'll continue to rephrase things and improve the article's origination. The next thing I intend to do is address the monstrous table near the bottom of the article, first with an eye toward formatting, then to polish the content.

Week 12:
As per your suggestion, I've continued to improve my article. I opted to remove the huge table and limit the scope of the article to something manageable.

Foolishly, I tried editing in the regular editor as opposed to my sandbox, and I lost a good chunk of work. I'll be redoing it and continuing to work on my article on my drafting page here: User:Andrew Guarino/Roman technology