Wikipedia:Peer review/Oyasato-yakata/archive1

Oyasato-yakata
This peer review discussion has been closed. I'm wondering if it is possible to raise this article to Featured quality. The subject is notable enough but is mostly covered in first-party (i.e. Tenrikyo) publications. The additional third-party publications I've found are listed for now in the "Further reading" section. Let me know what you think.

Thanks, Shii (tock) 00:09, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This article is quite interesting but perhaps not comprehensive. I come to it as an outsider with outsider questions, and like most other readers of the English Wikipedia, I do not know the Japanese language. Still, I can make some general comments about the content and some specific comments related to the Manual of Style guidelines.

General
 * I wonder as I read the "Origin" section, what body of thinking led to Tenrikyo. Oyasama was born into a culture without Tenrikyo; so how did she get from A to B in her thinking. What elements of Tenrikyo are new, and what elements are part of a culture much more ancient than the 20th century? Without going into unnecessary or irrelevant detail, could you bring the foreign reader up to speed on connections between Tenrikyo and, say, Shinto or Buddhism, or any other ways of thinking?


 * I wonder how many people live in Tenri City in 2010. How many students attend the university? What is taught at the university? Who are the city's residents, and who are the students? Would it be possible to include some demographic details? Is the university expensive? What are its admission requirements? Does the city itself have admission requirements?


 * What is a Besseki Lecture Hall? Does Besseki need to be explained?


 * Would it be possible to describe more fully the interiors of some of the buildings?


 * How does the architecture in Tenri City differ from the architecture of the rest of Nara? How does life in Tenri City differ from life in the rest of Nara?


 * Is it possible to include any specific examples of the Joyous Life? What effect might it have on daily activities for example?


 * Would it be possible to make more specific comparisons between the architecture of Tenri City and that of Karl Marx-Hof or the utopian phalanstère? Most readers will not know anything about them. The links are good, but just a brief bit in the text might inform them without requiring jumps to other articles.

Manual of Style


 * The lead is to be an inviting summary of the whole article. The existing lead seems to be an introduction rather than a summary. My rule of thumb is to try to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections and not to include anything important that is not mentioned in the main text. The existing lead does not mention the influence on the city, and it includes statistics such as the 25 wings and 68 wings that are not mentioned in the text. Perhaps a "Description" section in the main text would be useful; then the new lead could summarize it as well as the rest of the article.
 * "an incomplete square 872 meters" - Wikipedia articles generally give measures in imperial as well as metric units. I like to use the convert template for the conversions, though it takes a bit of practice to learn about things like rounding or adding a hyphen. This conversion would be 872 m. Ditto for similar constructions in the article.


 * "Currently twenty-five wings of the complex are complete." - Numbers bigger than nine are usually written as digits unless they start sentences; e.g., 25 wings. Ditto for other instances in the article.


 * "At the beginning of the 20th century... " - Constructions like 20th century need a no-break code to keep the elements from being separated awkwardly on line-break on some computer screens. WP:NBSP has details.


 * The blockquote does not need standard quotation marks around it. MOS:QUOTE has details.


 * "The yakata was designed along the lines of Edo-period tenement housing... " - Wikilink Edo period?


 * The author name in citation 9 should be last name first: Kidder, Jonathan Edward.


 * Citation 9 links to a Google Books preview. When I click on the url, I get this message: "You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book." These Google Book previews are, I think, OK for personal research but not OK as reliable sources because they are unstable. If you can track down a copy of the printed book and cite it, that would be much better.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 19:44, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This is a very helpful review, and I think I will be able to answer most of these questions and make the article much more useful. Thank you for reading it thoroughly, and I hope I can contribute such useful reviews to the peer review page myself! Shii (tock) 01:36, 24 November 2010 (UTC)