Wikipedia:Peer review/Mercury-Atlas 8/archive1

Mercury-Atlas 8

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I went through quite a comprehensive GA review with this article over the past month, and a couple of people commented to me that it has FA potential. I've not made any attempts to work at that level before - not in the past few years, anyway - and I'd appreciate a few more eyes looking at it before I take the plunge.

Parts of the article that I'm most worried about are the lead (it's short; how to expand it without being overly loquacious?) and the flight's context in both the Mercury program and the whole early-60s space race; I'm not sure this is covered as well as it ought to be. (The last section may also be a bit clumsily constructed, but I think I'm too glazed over by the writing to make any real judgement there.)

Thanks all - any comments appreciated. Shimgray | talk | 01:09, 4 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: This is generally well-written, nicely illustrated, neutral, stable, and well-sourced. Most of the remaining problems, I believe, are related to prose and style (MOS) issues. I'm not sure if the article is comprehensive, but it seems so. I fixed quite a large number of small things as I read through the article, but, as I note below, more remains to be done. Here are my suggestions.

Lead

You are right in thinking that the lead needs further work. MOS:INTRO says in part, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections in the lead and not to include anything important that is undeveloped in the main text. An article this long could easily accommodate a four-paragraph lead.

I'd suggest greatly reducing or eliminating the scare quotes around phrases such as "engineering evaluation" in the lead and "Space Race" in the background section. They often aren't needed and may be confused with direct quotations from sources. Any that are actually direct quotes need references. I see a lot of scare quotes and possibly unsourced direct quotes all through the article.

Abbreviated terms like NASA should be spelled out and abbreviated on first use; i.e. the Mercury Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). After that, plain NASA is fine.

I think you should make clear early in the lead that Project Mercury was a U.S. program.

Mission preparation

The MOS advises against sandwiching text between two photos. You could perhaps solve the problem in this section by moving the Mission Control photo down.

Post-flight

" the official report placed the credit for this firmly on the shoulders of the pilot" - Tighten to " the official report gave credit for this to the pilot"?

Images

The images will need alt text, meant for readers who can't see the images, to pass FAC. WP:ALT explains how to write alt text and where to put it.

General

The dabfinder tool in the upper right-hand corner of this review page finds two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.

Since this is a U.S.-centric article, the date formatting in the main text should be m-d-y. In the lead, you have d-m-y in the one instance, and all the other dates should be double-checked to make sure they are m-d-y. (The date citations in the reference section can be in yyyy-mm-dd, as you have them).

Generally, numbers from one to nine are spelled out and numbers from 10 up are written as digits. I changed quite a few of these as I went, but I might have missed some. There are several exceptions to the general rule, two of which are that sentences don't start with digits and that sentences that have a mixture of numbers less than 10 and 10 or larger should use all digits or all words, whichever you prefer. WP:MOS#Numbers as figures or words has details.

Most quantities given in imperial units also should be given in metric units. I like the {{convert}} template because it spells and abbreviates automatically as well as doing the math. I converted a lot of things as I went, but I might have missed a couple.

Since this is a U.S.-centric article, U.S. spelling is preferred. I changed several British English spellings to Yankee spellings, but I might have missed some.

"Whilst" and "amongst" are archaic. The preferred words are "while" and "among".

Spaced hyphens are a rare breed. WP:HYPHEN and WP:MOSDASH have details. I replaced them with em dashes but might have missed a few.

Page ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens. I fixed a lot of these as I went, but I didn't catch them all.

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) 04:36, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this! I've made the small corrections you recommend - at least as well as I can, it's quite tricky to look for non-Americanisms when I don't natively write that way! - and I'll make a stab at the lede and the image alt-text once I've done a bit of thinking about just how to address it. Shimgray | talk | 20:36, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have the same problem in reverse. I was once barked at for changing "internet" to "Internet", and I'm not sure of all the other diffs between BE and AE. I'd be happy to read through the article again (if you like) to see if I can spot any more that should be AE. I doubt that many are left or that they will cause any great problem. Finetooth (talk) 21:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's probably all sorted now - I can't be sure about US spellings, but I tried for all the -o[u]r and -ize endings I could see, and that's the worst of them. Thanks for the offer, though! Shimgray | talk | 16:33, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]