Wikipedia:Peer review/Glenrothes/archive5

Glenrothes
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because I think it is extremely well written. Being new to editing on Wikipedia I am keen to establish what the article needs to push it higher than GA status to bring it into the premier league of FA status. Therefore I would like an honest review of the article to establish any potential issues with the page and to see if there are areas of improvement. I think the demographics section in particular could be strengthend. It would also be useful to establish if it has the potential to meet FA status requirements.
 * Previous peer review

Thanks, Yoostar (talk) 09:33, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a nice article, interesting, generally well-written and well-organized, and nicely illustrated. However, I think that some of the material is too detailed for foreign readers, who probably do not need to know what is happening in every suburb and every primary school. On the other hand, a bit more detail about geology, flora, and fauna would be of general interest. A climate chart, as in Dundee, might be nice. I'm not suggesting that the article is too short or too long; compressing here, expanding there for an international audience is more what I have in mind. In addition, it never hurts to proofread line-by-line multiple times for every little nitpicky thing related to prose and the Manual of Style. I elaborate on that a bit below.

Lead
 * The lead generally provides a nice summary of the article; however, I would try to include at least a mention of "Education", "Government", and "Transportation" to make the summary complete. You don't need to add a lot, and I would not expand the lead beyond four paragraphs. My rule of thumb with leads is to try to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections.


 * The prose in the lead is dicey in several small ways. Here's a short list of things that are apt to be red flags at FAC: (1) "east central Scotland" needs a hyphen; (2) "miners who where to work at the Rothes Colliery" does not make sense;  (3) "between the 1960s to the 1990s" should be "between ... and" rather than between ... to";  (4) "with several major electronics and hi-tech companies establishing a base in the town" uses "with" as a conjunction, which is awkward; it would be better to use a terminal period after "Silicon Glen" and make the second part of this sentence into a stand-alone sentence;  (5) "remain to this day" is vague because "to this day" is non-specific;  (6)"largest indoor shopping centre - The Kingdom Shopping Centre" should use a comma or unspaced em dash rather than a spaced hyphen;  (7) the meaning of "boundaries of the new town are virtually indistinguishable between its neighbouring small towns and villages" is unclear;  (8) "Whilst these communities"; "while" is preferable to the archaic "whilst";  (9) "with Glenrothes winning awards in the 'Beautiful Scotland' and 'Britain in Bloom' contests" uses "with" as a conjunction.


 * Rather than doing a line-by-line examination of the prose in the main text for small things like the ones in the list above, I'll leave that to you. The text generally reads well, but the FA requirement for professional prose means that every sentence needs to be polished. In particular, I would recommend looking for vague time terms like "now", "today", "currently" and replacing them with something more specific. To be honest, I'm seeing a higher density of small problems in the lead than in the main text, so please don't be discouraged by my nine-item list.

History


 * "The original town plan was to build a new settlement for a population of 32,000–35,000... " - Ranges like this should be expressed with the word "to" rather than a dash so that it makes sense when read aloud.


 * Quoted material such as "to establish a self-contained and balanced community for working and living" should not appear in italics unless the original material is in italics.


 * I'd check the whole article for overlinking. Common terms like "farming", "area", and "coal mine" should not be linked since readers of English most likely know what they mean already. Terms like "Silicon Glen" should not be linked twice in the same section. Generally, it's enough to link a term once in the lead and perhaps once on first occurrence in the main text.


 * "the development of 15,378 houses, 480,692 square metres (5,174,125 square feet)" - For consistency within the article, the imperial units here should be primary and the metric units secondary. The secondary units are generally abbreviated; i.e., 5174125 ft2. It might be appropriate to round these numbers for ease of reading. It would also be good to add conversions for the quantities in the article that don't have them already.

Geography
 * "The road network was upgraded to deal with projected increases in car ownership and new housing estates were developed to the west from Macedonia to Newcastle, to the south from Pitteuchar to Stenton and then to the north from Cadham to Collydean and Balfarg." - Readers from distant lands will probably not find this much detail to be meaningful. Would this be better tightened to "The road network was upgraded to deal with projected increases in car ownership and new housing estates on the town's outskirts"?


 * Could something be added here about the geology of the area? What kind of rock does the town sit on? How close do the coal beds come to the edge of town?

Culture and community
 * The second and third images in this section create a text sandwich between them, at least on my computer screen. Since there is plenty of room in this section, moving the third image down a half-dozen lines or so would fix the problem.

Education
 * "Warout Primary in Auchmuty followed and as development of the town progressed westwards further primary schools were developed to serve the central and western precincts such as those in Rimbleton, South Parks, Caskieberran and Newcastle." - Here's another example of what I consider unnecessary detail. Outsiders are apt to have little interest in a complete list of primary schools in any town unless it has only one or is special in some way.

Other
 * The dab checker at the top of this review page finds two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets. They are Gala and Presiding Officer.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 19:40, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)