Wikipedia:Peer review/Ickenham/archive1

Ickenham
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've added a lot to the article recently and hope to nominate it for Good Article status soon. However, I'm not sure about the use of references for schools in particular - should these become in-line external links like the sports clubs are listed?

Thanks, Harrison49 (talk) 18:58, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments: This is a decent effort to highlight what might be considered a rather anonymous area of outer London. However, I have had some difficulty in getting to grips with this article, which at present has quite a few problems, and I believe that the GA nomination is premature. I have only been able to look closely at the lead and first couple of sections - my comments are below. There does seem to be a general prose weakness; attention from a skilled copyeditor might be called for.
 * Lead
 * The lead needs to be redrafted to comply with the requirements of WP:LEAD, that it be a concise summary of the whole article, rather than a collection of individual details.
 * Non-neutral statements such as "The area has a rich history..." should be avoided.
 * "14th, 15th and 16th century..." That's "centuries"
 * Prose needs considerale polishing; an example of an awkardly worded sentence: "The sale and development of much of the estate of Swakeleys in 1922 also brought with it many new homes, with the resulting expansion of Ickenham becoming part of what came to be termed 'Metro-land'".
 * Toponomy
 * Nice Domesday quote. Should be prefaced: "The second entry reads" not "read"
 * It would help if the reader was informed, perhaps by paranthetical note, that "hide" and "virgate" are old land measurements - around 60 and 30 acres respectively I think.
 * "1st and 2nd centuries" (plural)
 * Early developments
 * Punctuation problems in, for example, "The original lord of the manor of Ickenham was Geoffrey de Mandeville from whom it passed to William de Brock and then to John Charlton in 1334, whose son John owned Swakeleys from 1350." This needs punctuating and rephrasing along the lines: "The original lord of the manor of Ickenham was Geoffrey de Mandeville, from whom it passed to William de Brock and then, in 1334, to John Charlton whose son John owned Swakeleys from 1350." Check for similar instances.
 * Who, or what, are "the Shorediches"?
 * Dodgy grammar, e.g. "The Shorediche family built their manor house on a track off Long Lane, which they originally named Ickenham Hall but subsequently changed to Manor Farm." In this phrasing, "which" refers to Long Lane rather than the manor house.
 * Who are "the Crosier family"?
 * It would be useful to have more date indicators, covering the various transfers after Charlton's widow's life interest expired.
 * There is some confusion in the second paragraph, which seems to be offering a different history of Swakeleys. The use of the house during the Second World War is out of place here, in a section headed "Early developments".
 * Again in the next paragraph, you are mixing early with modern history, by introducing the 1980's covenant with the United Reform Church.
 * What do you mean by "the focus of the area"? Propbably better to say "A significant landmark in the area..."
 * Charlotte Gell donated the pump in 1866 – but she died in 1863. Reword this to avoid puzzlement on the part of readers.
 * There are lots of repetitions in this paragraph's prose that need attention. "Pump" should not be capitalised after first mention. Again, I don't think that 19th century developments, which are relatively recent, properly belong in this section given its title.
 * Generally
 * I have not looked at the later sections in detail, but there seems to be a rather large number of very short sections. It would be better if some of these were either extended, or merged.
 * I noted a few minor MOS infringements, e.g. use of hyphen rather than ndash, use of bullet-points rather than prose.

There are enough points here to enable you to make some significant progress with the article. As I am not able to watch individual PR pages at present, please contact my talkpage if you wish to raise points from this review. Brianboulton (talk) 15:56, 21 April 2011 (UTC)