Wikipedia:Peer review/Number/archive1

Number
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because it's a level 2 vital article, and I think it needs to be brought up to "Good article" status. Any advice on how to bring up the standard of the article would be appreciated.

Thanks, Qwam (talk) 12:31, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is well-written in terms of sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and I think at least some of it will be accessible to readers who are interested in mathematics but are not mathematicians. I'm not a mathematician, and I can't very well judge the content closely or say how the particulars could be explained any more clearly than you've explained them. Even so, I can see that the existing article has three problems that will prevent it from being promoted to GA unless they are dealt with.


 * The first problem is the one identified by the major tag at the top of the "Reference" section. The article is almost completely devoid of inline citations and therefore violates WP:V. This can be fixed by citing reliable sources per WP:RS for any claims that have been questioned or are apt to be questioned, any direct quotes, and any sets of statistics. It's also a good rule of thumb to provide at least one reliable source for each paragraph. If an entire paragraph is supported by a single source, that's fine, and the inline citation can be placed at the end of the paragraph. Looking at mathematics articles listed at WP:FA, I see that they do not always provide a source for every paragraph, but they come closer to that pattern than this article does.


 * A second problem is that the existing lead does not seem to summarize the whole article. The lead should be a summary or abstract such that a reader who can only read the lead will come away with a fair understanding of the main points of the article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections. The existing lead seems rather skimpy.


 * A third problem involves the form of the three existing inline citations. For Internet sources, a good rule of thumb is to include the author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date, if all of these are known or can be found. It's helpful to many editors to use the "cite" family of citation templates found at WP:CIT. You can copy and paste the templates into your sandbox and fool around them to get the hang of it, or you can imitate the methods used in the mathematics FA articles such as Problem of Apollonius.

I hope this helps. Finetooth (talk) 03:36, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Reply: OK, thank you for the advice. I'll try and sort out the references section first then. Qwam (talk) 15:33, 9 July 2010 (UTC)