Wikipedia:Peer review/Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition/archive1

Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
We do not know your feelings on this article e.g. what could be improved; this makes it harder to suggest improvements please state your feelings 82.40.19.146 20:51, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

OK: Ernest Shackleton is one of the three or four most famous Antarctic explorers, and this is his most famous expedition. The resource and "see also" lists at the end of this article by no means list all of the analysis and work that have been done by historians, authors, and film makers on this particular expedition; its story is a compelling story of survival. Does this article reflect that? How might it better reflect that? Fworsley 20:36, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR t 23:45, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Yomangani

 * Very detailed, well-researched rewrite of the article. It is a little unbalanced - for example, far too much on the conditions during the voyage of the James Caird when the voyage to Elephant Island is covered in half a sentence. Nothing on the Elephant Island party until they are rescued, yet an in-depth account of the initial freeze.
 * Thank you for the comments. I would like to put in some more about the trip in the three boats and the conditions on Elephant Island, as well as perhaps remove some of the text about them blundering into the ice. However, the emphasis was somewhat intentional, I wanted to emphasize the active parts of the journey, while writing less of the details of their misery. I find the trip in the James Caird to be truly amazing, and I didn't want to leave out why.
 * Maybe it can be summarized more here and the main story told in the James Caird (boat) article. The size of the waves is repeated twice - once in the description and then in the excerpt from South. It's good story in its own right and you can't really do it justice in a parent article without increasing the article to huge proportions. Worsley has some good info on the trip to Elephant Island in Shackleton's Boat Journey.


 * Some other points:
 * The "Trivia" section should go: if it isn't interesting enough to be worked into the main body, then it isn't interesting enough to be in the article.
 * Most of the points that I put into the trivia section were facts that I thought were interesting, but not relevant to the main points of the article. Any tangent to include them would be too distracting, so I threw them all under Trivia at the end. Trivia sections seem to be popular on Wikipedia, perhaps because they give other users a chance to easily add random facts that they happen to know without rewriting a paragraph, etc.
 * Which is one of the problems - they end up as a magnet for every "interesting" "fact" that has a vague connection to the subject ("A character in the anime series Oh la la is called Enduro, which sounds a bit like Endurance" etc.) If you want to get this to FA standard it will have to go.
 * The lead doesn't conform to WP:LEAD.
 * I'm going to look at these conventions and improve this section.
 * Section titles don't conform to WP:MOS (sentence case) and are a little flowery and derivative for my liking (Endurance Beset is a popular caption for the photos, Into the Lifeboats feels like it needs an exclamation mark)
 * Likewise.
 * There is over- and under-linking: for example, Frank Worsley is linked several times (once as Captain Worsley), Vincent is linked in a footnote and the crew list but not in the body, the James Caird isn't linked at all.
 * James Caird is linked as a photo caption, but I will link it in the main text as well. I linked everybody in the crew list, but was more selective in the article. At the moment, no page exists for John Vincent, only a disambiguation page listing other people with the same name. This is true for some of the other crew members as well. I'm going to review these, but links to disambiguation pages where the subject isn't even listed are confusing.
 * Point taken, but you can add them to the disambig pages even if the article doesn't exist yet.
 * Date and measurement formats are inconsistent (ft v foot) and I would have thought British English would be appropriate for this topic.
 * Someone else requested the metric units, and I thought that they couldn't hurt. I spelled the units when hyphenated, and abbreviated it otherwise. For some reason, "23-ft (7-m) boat" just looked wrong, so I wrote it out as "23-foot (7-meter) boat". Maybe I'm just not used to seeing metric units in parentheses like that. I'll see what the MOS says.
 * Footnotes are far too expansive (there's almost another article in there).
 * Come on! They aren't that long.
 * Lots of the information could be covered by a wikilink to the appropriate article.
 * It could do with a copy-edit, there is some clunky phrasing in places: Shackleton was forced to give the order to abandon ship, and onto the ice, and into freezing temperatures of minus 15°F (−25°C), the crew took themselves, their sled dogs, their supplies, and three lifeboats.
 * I kind of liked that sentence. I'll review the article again after I've made some of the new changes.
 * James Caird was 22.5-foot not 23-foot (though that is wrong in the James Caird article too). McNeish should be McNish. Endurance should be in italics throughout. South Pole should be capitalized. The description of Elephant Island should use the same tense throughout.
 * I rounded the length. Shackleton wrote of "McNeish", but I'm going to change it; I think you are correct. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.
 * I believe it got changed to McNeish by Shackleton's ghost writer (and by an over-enthusiastic editor in Worsley's case). His birth certificate says McNish, though he signed MacNish.
 * All those images crowd the article a little - some seem to be just in there because they are available, not because they illustrate anything in the article.
 * Every one was meant to illustrate something. If their relevance is not clear, then perhaps I should improve the captions. You seem to be familiar with the topic, and I wonder how the article reads to someone who knows less about it. Pictures can bring a great deal of understanding. It's one thing to say that the men set up a camp, and another to see a photograph of Hurley and Shackleton sitting on the ground surrounded by ice. If you've already seen the picture, it probably means less. I'm sure there are some problems given that the article must display differently given the size of a monitor. I'll see what can be done.
 * Maybe rearranging them would help (I'm not keen on what you've done with the picture forcing the infobox down, but at least it has let the text breathe further down).
 * The "Advertisment" section is out of place at the end of the article and couldn't be added in a balanced way at the beginning. I suggest it is moved to footnotes (if you slim down the rest of the footnote section)
 * Originally it was at the beginning, but I moved it to the end for exactly that reason. I put it in its own section because it seems like exactly the type of thing that someone who had just seen a documentary film or something would be intrested in. If I put it in a footnote, they might not find the info.
 * Reference 19 is missing (p.97 of Worsley's Shackleton's Boat Journey ISBN 0-7126-6574-9. if it was missing because you couldn't find it, and mention of the use oil paints is also in Caroline Alexander's Endurance p.108  ISBN 074754123X)
 * Thanks for the references. I'm going to put Worsley's in.
 * Hope this helps. Yomangani talk 12:18, 31 January 2007 (UTC)