Wikipedia:Peer review/Gungnyeo/archive1

Gungnyeo
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because the article mostly based on Korean sources is relatively comprehensive but I am wondering whether English readers easily could understand it. I also want the article up to GA level. Thanks. Caspian blue 22:03, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is fascinating, generally well-written, stable, neutral, and nicely illustrated. However, the lead and the reference section need work, and it would be good to look for more reliable secondary sources. I also have a few suggestions about prose and style.

Heads and subheads Lead
 * The Manual of Style advises against repeating the important words in the title in the heads and subheads. It also advises against using "the" as the first word of a head or subhead. I'd suggest "Types" rather than "The types of gungnyeo" and "Roles", "Rank" and either "Number" or something like "Prevalence". I'd also recommend shortening "In the narrow meaning" and "In the broad meaning" to "Narrow meaning" and "Broad meaning".
 * The lead should be a concise stand-alone summary of the whole article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections and to include nothing important in the lead only.
 * "Gungnyeo includes sanggung (palace matron) and nain (assistant court ladies), both of which held a rank as an officer." - Should this be "palace matrons" (plural) and "officers" (plural) to match the plural of "ladies" for consistency? If yes, then delete "an" also.

Establishment
 * "Although the first record of gungnyeo appears in Goryeosa, a compilation on the history of Goryeo, a provision was first made... " - It might be helpful here to insert the date range for the Goryeo.

Election and education
 * "the method of appointing gungnyeo and their social status differed from time to time" - "Appointed" doesn't seem to be the right word for "social status". Suggestion: "the method of appointing gungnyeo and assigning their social status differed from time to time".
 * "However, if circumstances allowed, people around the king wanted to pick gungnyeo from commoners' children, using a custom of early marriage in households that had a daughter over ten years old." - It's not clear from this what the connection was between marriage and picking gungnyeo. Whose marriage? Did the courtiers want to marry 10-year-olds to make servants out of them? Did the parents of lower-class girls want them to become gungnyeo for financial reasons?
 * "As a result, since King Gyeongjong's reign, daughters from the lower class were prohibited to be appointed as gungnyeo." - A bit awkward. Suggestion: "As a result, after King Gyeongjong's reign, daughters from the lower class were prohibited from being appointed as gungnyeo."
 * "some female slaves of each government office were chosen to become gungnyeo since the reign of King Yeongjo" - "after" rather than "since"
 * The first two paragraphs of this section include many interesting specific claims that are not sourced even though they are not common knowledge. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for every paragraph and to source any statistics or unusual claims as well.

In the broad meaning
 * "They were generally related to the concubine's family, and their salary was paid from the concubine's living expenses." - Since you use the singular "housemaid" in the sentence before this one, should this sentence say, "She was generally related to the concubine's family, and her salary was paid from the concubine's living expenses"?
 * "The system lasted until the end of the dynasty and the number of uinyeo was about eighty during King Gojong's reign. The uinyeo system disappeared when western doctors entered the court." - It might be helpful to give dates here.

Gungnyeo's roles
 * The refs should be inserted after the punctuation, not before. I fixed a few of these as I went along, but I see more in this section.

The number of gungnyeo
 * "Each of these residences would have twenty to twenty seven jimil nain and the other places would have fifteen to twenty." - For consistency, I'd recommend changing all of the numbers in this sentence to digits. In most cases, one to nine are written as words and the bigger numbers as digits. In a sentence with both big and little numbers, you have to choose either all digits or all words.
 * "During King Seongjong's reign (1469-1494)" - Date ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens, thus: "1469–1494".

Lifetime employment and payment
 * "Service was assumed to be on a day-shift basis." - It's not clear what this means. Does this mean they had duties only during the day? How free were they in their off-duty hours?

References
 * Many of the references are incomplete. For references to Internet sources, it's good to include the author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date if all of these can be found. The access date is the last date you viewed the page that the url links to.
 * Insofar as possible, it's best not to rely on tertiary sources such as encyclopedias. If you can find reliable secondary sources for any of the claims sourced to encyclopedias, that would be good. These sources might include newspaper and magazine articles or books. WP:RS has details. Please see WP:CITE for general instructions.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 03:56, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for the reviewing and commenting about the article. I will try to fix the said problems. --Caspian blue 04:17, 22 October 2009 (UTC)