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Wikipedia:Featured article review/Speed of light/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed by User:Joelr31 23:46, 7 December 2008 [1].

Speed of light

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Review commentary

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Notified:Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics

This is a top importance article which gets around 6,000 view per day. It has been featured for over 4 years now, and has not been formally reviewed in all that time despite having changed substantially. There are quite a few references and citations, but parts remain poorly cited, and no doubt there are egregious MOS violations too. -- Testing times (talk) 14:42, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with these concerns. I haven't actually read the article, but just skimming I see several [citation needed], sections with almost no references, unnecessary use of TeX for simple inline equations and symbols, inconsistent use of quotation marks, inconsistent use of fractions, improper formatting of SI units, and inconsistent formatting of large numbers. I also think that the lead is too short and incomplete (e.g., no mention of history at all). Finally, the external links section has accreted a lot of stuff that doesn't belong (if fact, I doubt that this topic needs an external links section at all). --Itub (talk) 12:06, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Issues I'm just skimming through, and listing all the technical issues I see. Working backwards...

  • External links: Do we really need links to random news articles? That's what links to sister projects like Wikinews are for. See WP:EL
  • References: See WP:CITE, PDF documents need to be denoted as such through the format= field if using templates; use en dashes in page ranges, mix of Citation and Cite XXX templates needs to be converted to one format, ref 4 is just a bare untitled link.
  • See also needs to be pared drastically, I bet most of those links are already in the article. See WP:LAYOUT
  • "The constant speed of light is one of the fundamental Postulates" What's the reason for the random capitalization?
  • Only captions that are complete sentences should have periods, see WP:CAPTION.
  • Overlinking throughout, examples: mirror, second, vacuum. See WP:OVERLINK.
  • Wrong use of bold text, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text_formatting)#Boldface.
  • There are one-sentence sections that could be merged with others.
  • Unnecessary use of templates for fractions.
  • Use {{Convert}} template.
  • Inline citations should be outside punctuation, not inside.
  • Use of slightly unencyclopedic language ("Note that").
  • Instead of "A more complete description of the passage of light through a medium is given by quantum electrodynamics.", use a see also template. Dabomb87 (talk) 03:31, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, I've done a few of the tasks noted on the page: Moved some of the most newsy external links, fixed reference 4, fixed some of the "citation needed" places, and worked on the lead. I agree with all the suggestions, and I hope someone does them sooner or later, regardless of whether or not the FA status is kept. :-) --Steve (talk) 06:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dabomb87, while I agree that "[i]nline citations should be outside punctuation", Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation and inline citations does not mandate it, but says "Inline citations are generally placed after any punctuation such as a comma or period …" (my emphasis). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 10:20, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, most other FAs put inline cites outside the punctuation. Also, the format is inconsistent right now, and most of the existing inline citations are outside the punctuation, so it makes sense to fix that one example. Dabomb87 (talk) 01:09, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
One convention I've seen used is to put the note after punctuation if the citation applies to the whole sentence or clause, and before if not. For example:
Light can be red or green.[1]
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Light can be red[2] or green[3].
In the first case the reference covers both colors, and in the second each reference covers only one color. --Itub (talk) 06:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

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Suggested FA criteria concerns are referencing (1c) and MoS (2). Marskell (talk) 13:47, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's a problem with Image:Usaf-laser.jpg: no source is given. The original file on wiki, which was unlicensed, was labelled as PD-USGov by an anonymous IP. DrKiernan (talk) 17:31, 7 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is beyond my expertise, but I'd be inclined to remove it. There are long sections without inline citations, making it difficult for an outsider to assess reliability. I'd recommend trimming the table of contents and the see also links (it's unnecessary to put links already in the text or common terms, such as meter and SI units, in the see also section). DrKiernan (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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