Talk:Catenary/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Failedwizard (talk · contribs) 16:49, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
	1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	Some minor things (there's lots of things that I would phrase differently but I don't think they'd improve the article much and I think they'd get in the way - I think the article currently has quite a nice voice) There's an oddness with wikilinking - 'integrated' and 'Cartesian coordinates' are not, but 'posthumously is - links get much fewer further down the article. "Catenary arches are often used in the construction of kilns. In this construction technique, the" should this be "In such construction techniques"? I'd like to see more text in-between equations in the mathematical description section. It's very elegent, but the interested reader might get lost quite early. 'Other properties' reads very much like a list that isn't quite one... I think making it into a paragraph (or a 'proper' list) would help. "Balancing forces as before", can we expand on the 'before'? part....
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	As a development issue - I the lead most definitely needs to expansion to summarise the other sections in the article. Otherwise I'm happy with the layout and other criteria. Per Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Mathematics#Suggested_structure_of_a_mathematics_article I think the lead is also a bit higher level that might be desirable, although I can quite sympathise with problems in bringing it down again. There's been a little bit of improvement to the lead but I still don't feel that it quite covers all the major points.
	2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	Pending I think this is a noticeable area of weakness for the article. References 54 points us to the external links, some of the other references could really do with being linked to google books or similar and although I appreciate it would be a lot of work - It would be nice to see the references in the reference section be a link to the document in the Bibliography... the use of 'following' and the appreciation of 'Art.' is not ideal even for the informed scientific reader. UPDATE, this is looking a lot better... }}
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	Certainly the sources are solid (not a massive fan of mathworld being in there, but I'm happy with it for GA; however, as mentioned above I'm not entirely okay with the presentation of the references to readers... Some very minor bits - can we source: "possibly having seen Huygens' work on the catenary." "He did not publish the solution of this anagram[14] in his lifetime, but in 1705 his executor provided it as Ut pendet continuum flexile, sic stabit contiguum rigidum inversum, meaning "As hangs a flexible cable so, inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch."" "Equations which define the shape of the curve and the tension of the chain at each point may be derived by a careful inspection of the various forces acting on a segment using the fact that these forces must be in balance if the chain is in static equilibrium." just to be on the safe side.
	2c. it contains no original research.	"A careful reading of his book Two new sciences[7] shows this to be an oversimplification. " looks ORish - is the Fahie source where the statement came from?
	3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	It's not my field, but there's enough nearby information to convince me.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	Hmm, maths article... I think certainly the casual reader would have been blown away by the later half of the article, but given that it is a maths article... I personally would drop the alternative derivation, but I'd be interested in hearing the editor's response to the suggestion...
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	Hard to be particularly POV about a curve... :)
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	Appears fairly peaceful, at least for the last month. Had a couple of bits to look at going through the history but all appear to have been good give-and-take.
	6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	I'm fine with these, but this is absolutely an area of weakness for me and I'd appreciate anyone looking over my shoulder on this.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	Definitely relevant, if anything there are too many images and this distracts somewhat from the text. Some development points - the caption "Arch of Taq-i Kisra in Ctesiphon as seen today is roughly but not exactly a catenary" sounds really interesting - but it's not mentioned in the main text and I think it should be (would be great to get a source involved for the statement as well). Also I'd like to see the images being a bit more consistently sized (on width), but that's personal preference rather than GA criteria and should be treated as such.
	7. Overall assessment.	This is quite a shame, there's a solid article here, and I'd love to see it renominated, but it's time to cut this review. I'll keep it on my watchlist, and I'd happily review it again. I think the process has improved the article immensely, and I look forward to working with the editors in the future. Failedwizard (talk) 09:04, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

User:RDBury responses and comments

I'm just going to add comments and updates here as I address the various points given above.

• 1a (bullet 1): I went through and added a bunch of wikilinks for terms that could be called technical or jargon, I've probably missed some so I'll keep an eye out or make another pass sometime. The link for 'posthumous' didn't go to a definition (as you might think) but to a general list of posthumous works. I'm guessing someone thought it was a good idea to link every occurrence of 'postumous' in WP to this list. I removed it for now. It's probably only natural that the links get more sparse lower down since the end of the article is aimed at a more technical audience. I'm assuming that anyone who's interested in the derivations has working knowledge of freshman calculus and enough physics to construct a force diagram. Some of the terms used, such as tangential angle, aren't always covered in a standard curriculum so I've tried to give explanations for these both in-text and in wikilinks. The last section uses terminology from sophomore level mathematics but I think that's unavoidable.

I like it, looks much better now, and I've marked off the relevant point in the list :) Failedwizard (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• 1a (bullet 2): I couldn't decide whether it should be plural or not so I just rephrased the issue out of existence.--RDBury (talk) 14:50, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

marked offFailedwizard (talk) 07:58, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

• 1a (bullet 3): See the comment under 3b. I tried to keep mathematical formulas and jargon out of the material above the 'Mathematical description' section. Starting there the math does start to come in thick and fast, but I don't think this can be helped. The most basic equation for the curved involves the hyperbolic cosine which probably isn't familiar to a random person on the street. An article like this should serve both non-technical and technical readers and the bottom half of the article is targeted at the latter.

• 1a (bullet 4): This looks tough and probably the best approach is to break up the section. Right now it's sort of a collection point for bits and pieces that don't seem to belong anywhere else, not the kind of thing where you can apply a quick fix. I'll continue working on it.

• 1a (bullet 5): I rephrased this to make it more clear what this was referring to.

marked off Failedwizard (talk) 07:58, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

• 1b: I rearranged and rephrased the lead so it should be clearer conform to WP:LEAD better. I also tried to put the more technical terminology in the second paragraph.

• 2a: On ref 54 (now 55), the previous cite (Routh) is intended to be for the entire section and the note on Freeman is in the nature of a footnote pointing the reader to further information on suspension bridges. The Freeman article is a primary source and I didn't think there was anything of general enough interest to include in WP. Theoretically it could be separated out into a separate 'Footnotes' section but I think it's the only one so I don't see how that would make sense.

It's a tough call and I understand what's happening here - but I think we're in a situation in which we don't want to 'overload' the references with a random footnote - if it could be worded (in brackets maybe) in article that would be much easier on the eye.

• 2a: On using "Following...": This is a way to indicate that the section or paragraph is being paraphrased from the source given rather that individual facts being cited. It would be impractical to have cites for every statement in a proof or derivation since they would all have the same information. Also, proof or derivation needs to be taken as a single unit, so it wouldn't make sense to cite individual statements anyway. I've been using the word "Following" in this situation because, as far as I know, the scientific citation guidelines aren't specific on how this should be done. If there are guidelines for this then I'll be glad to change the cites to conform to them.

Hmmm, I can see a few ways of doing it, but we're talking very much personal preferences - I've asked over at the manual of style [1] would you be happy with going with their recommendations, assuming they have any)? (don't worry about time on this one)

So we didn't get much of a response from MOS, so you're good for 'following' :) Failedwizard (talk) 07:58, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

• 2a: On using "Art.": Routh, in particular, is organized into chapters and articles rather than chapters and sections. Routh use article numbers rather than page numbers when referring to passages in the book and article numbers and shown in the table of contents and at the top of each page. Generally articles are shorter than a page so using an article number is more specific than a page number. So I'm following the format used in the work being referenced for the location of a specific passage and I believe it's the most appropriate format more these cites.

I think we can agree that 'Article' might more descriptive than 'Art.'.. :) Also, you might like to consider linking the footnotes to the references like at Speech_generating_device, which makes things a bit easier for people to find. Failedwizard (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I added intra-article links to the cites. Art. seems to be a standard abbreviation for Article; it's more or less the same as using § for Section.--RDBury (talk) 13:38, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

• 2b: I removed the statement given the first bullet. Statements beginning with "It's possible" or "Possibly" are difficult to falsify anyway. On the second bullet, I believe the Lindahall.org cite is meant to cover the entire paragraph so the statement should be cited already. I'm not entirely happy with the source though and will try to find a better one. The statement in the third bullet is meant to summarize and introduce the material that follows, in other words it's just there to improve the flow of the section. As such I don't think it needs a cite.

• 2c: The Fahie cite is supposed to cover both sentences; I could easily combine them into a single sentence if it would help. Fahie is public domain so it shouldn't be too hard to add a link to it as well. This is a case where you could probably find as many if not more cites for the false version than the true one. Turns out the people who review math manuscripts for publications may be good at checking proofs and formulas but aren't so hot at following up sources on who said what (imo).

Not just math(s)... Anyway, I think you have a couple of options here - easist is probably just cite Fahie seperately for both sentances - that way it's a bit clearer that the statements are all coming from the same source. More elegant, might be to say "A careful reading of Galileo's book Two New Sciences, by Fahie shows this to be an oversimplification. (also you don't have to cite Galileo - although I'm aware it's nice to do so - it's the placement of the citations here that's giving the slightly OR feel... Failedwizard (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I rephrased the passage as a single sentence, it was a bit wordy as it was anyway.--RDBury (talk) 18:03, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

• 3b: I think the alternative derivation is encyclopedic though I can see how it might seem redundant. Perhaps it doesn't come through in the article very well but while the first method considers the problem as one of finding a function of x, the second method is one of finding more general curves in the plane. In any case I think the two approaches are significantly different and when you try to adapt them to other problems (which is why I think the derivations have value in an encyclopedia), one works in some situations and the other one works in different situations.

I'm happy for this to be your call - but I think it would really help to have quite a bit more text spacing out the equations...

I went though and added text between the equations as much as I thought made sense. I also broke up a giant string of equations in the elastic catenary section. The derivation of this given in Encyclopédie des Formes Mathématiques Remarquables is more polished but it's unclear if it's a reliable (per WP) source.--RDBury (talk) 14:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

• 6b: I didn't think anyone would say there were too many images. Actually one of my favorite things about the article is that it has pictures of things that are outdoors rather than just having a bunch of equations and blackboard diagrams. I can't take the credit (or blame) though; as far as I recall the only one I added was one of the blackboard type images.

I added something on Ctesiphon to the History section and added a ref. There is a cite on the Taq-i Kisra article which might be better but it's "No Preview" on Google books.

Very happy with the changes made and I've marked it off on the table.Failedwizard (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

So I just dropped by to see how you were getting on - there's been a nice number of edits and some well-reasoned and friendly responses, I particularly like that you're taking the time to edit many parts of the article and not just respond very tightly to suggestions. Let me know how you're doing regarding things like time, and if an extension might reflect well on the quality of the article. Failedwizard (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Some great work here, I've marked some more stuff off - the lede is the major thing that needs doing - much of the rest I can probably tidy up as I go past, but the lede is the major thing...Failedwizard (talk) 07:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

I did work on the lead and I'm not sure what else should be done with it. It seems to me it covers the points in WP:MOSMATH#Article introduction and I don't see to expand it further without adding unneeded detail.--RDBury (talk) 15:00, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

My issue is that 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, currently the lead doesn't mention any points from Catenary#History, Catenary#Catenary_bridges, or Catenary#Anchoring_of_marine_objects, and actually could take a summary sentence from each of the more theory heavy sections. The lead should also establish notability, a clause like, "and have been studied by mathamatitions such as Galileo, Hook, and..." would sort that that. Does that sound sensible? Failedwizard (talk) 22:38, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

I've added a couple of sentences to the lead. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:33, 20 January 2012 (UTC)