Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/International Phonetic Alphabet/1

International Phonetic Alphabet

 * • [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/International_Phonetic_Alphabet/1&action=watch Watch article reassessment page] • Most recent review
 * Result: Delist I agree with Colins position that not everything in a GA needs to be cited, but Fiamh has acknowledged this and given an example of something which needs a citation. Since this has not been rectified and this has been open for over 4 months I am going to delist it. AIRcorn (talk) 22:59, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

There are long chunks of unreferenced sentences. I have identified and tagged, removed or corrected some OR and inaccuracies from time to time, but problems persist. IMHO it does a poor job particularly of differentiating what is the official, canonical IPA as set out by the International Phonetic Association and what are applications of the IPA; for example, [brackets] and /slashes/ are the only enclosing symbols recognized by the IPA, but the article only distinguishes them and other conventions as "principal" and "less common", with hardly any citation.

It may have deserved GA in 2006 when it became one, but I don't think it meets the standards we now expect from GAs. Nardog (talk) 20:36, 1 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm not seeing reason to delist. It seems understandable that a fairly prominent article like this would get some noisy contributions from time to time, but the diffs you linked don't seem like major issues. Something like this for example is a fine correction, but it's quite a small detail - the 'wrongness' of the previous wording isn't such that it would affect my thinking about GA status. The content you showed that you had removed for being unsourced or tagged with citation needed don't seem like they belong to one of the categories of statements for which the WP:GACR require inline citations. You clearly have a lot of expertise on this topic. On the one hand, that gives you a better ability than me to sniff out factually questionable claims or missing coverage. But it might also lead you to hold the article to higher standards than an average reader (or reviewer) would. I don't think I follow your issue about differentiating "official, canonical IPA" and "applications of the IPA" in the current state of the article - but I'd be interested in reading more if you'd like to elaborate. Colin M (talk) 22:04, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I have to agree  with Nardog. The essence of verifiability as I understand it is that the average reader can read any sentence in the article, find the source, and verify the information. Inline citations are not required for GAs, and that can be verifiable if it's a short article with relatively few sources. Some of the passages missing inline citations, such as the paragraph starting with "For example, while the /p/ sounds of pin and spin are pronounced slightly differently in English ..." are something you could find in any intro linguistics textbook, and I'd be willing to let that slide for  the purpose of GA reassessment. But what about more obscure facts? For example, the passage "Superscript diacritics placed after a letter are ambiguous between simultaneous modification of the sound and phonetic detail at the end of the sound. For example, labialized ⟨kʷ⟩ may mean either simultaneous [k] and [w] or else [k] with a labialized release. Superscript diacritics placed before a letter, on the other hand, normally indicate a modification of the onset of the sound (⟨mˀ⟩ glottalized [m], ⟨ˀm⟩ [m] with a glottal onset)." Of the sources listed for this article, which of these has this information? How do I find it? And if I can't, how do we call it "verifiable"? Delist, since this has been sitting here for months without improvement. Fiamh (talk, contribs) 05:13, 26 October 2019 (UTC)