Talk:William Peter Hamilton

William Peter Hamilton was nominated as a good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (November 27, 2022). There are suggestions on the review page for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

This level-5 vital article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Biography

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article has been automatically rated by a bot or other tool because one or more other projects use this class. Please ensure the assessment is correct before removing the `\|auto=` parameter.

Finance & Investment Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Finance & Investment, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Finance and Investment on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Finance & InvestmentWikipedia:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentTemplate:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentFinance & Investment articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Journalism Low‑importance

	Journalism portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Journalism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of journalism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.JournalismWikipedia:WikiProject JournalismTemplate:WikiProject JournalismJournalism articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

New York (state) Low‑importance

	New York (state) portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject New York (state), a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of New York on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.New York (state)Wikipedia:WikiProject New York (state)Template:WikiProject New York (state)New York (state) articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

History Low‑importance

	History portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the subject of History on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.HistoryWikipedia:WikiProject HistoryTemplate:WikiProject Historyhistory articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article was nominated for deletion on 6 August 2009 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:William Peter Hamilton/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Phlsph7 (talk · contribs) 09:22, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'll review this one. I hope to have my initial assessment ready soon. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:22, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid this article has some bigger issues that need to be addressed. This would involve a lot of rewriting and writing new material, which might go beyond the scope of this review. It may be better to take some time to fix the issues and then renominate the article at a later time. What are your thoughts? Phlsph7 (talk) 10:15, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Given the "bigger issues" to which you refer, and the amount of new work involved, and given that, as you say, it may take some time to find the appropriate facts and material, perhaps it is better to take the position that it will need to be adjusted and then, later, renominated. Thanks for your advice. Lindsay658 (talk) 15:39, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, thanks for your understanding. Feel free to ping me if some questions come up in the process of addressing these issues. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:44, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Major issues

Over half of the text of this article is given in the form of long block quotations. According to MOS:QUOTATIONS and WP:LONGQUOTE, this is "incompatible with the encyclopedic writing style". Since the article is not very long, I suggest cutting the long quotations down to one or two. WP:QUOTEFARM recommends using summaries or paraphrases instead. Be careful when doing so since many of the quotes use words violating WP:WTW, such as had an extraordinary flair for predicting market trends.
A short google search and a google book search of "William Peter Hamilton" indicate that Hamilton's development of the Dow Theory seems to be his most influential achievement. But the article doesn't discuss his theory anywhere in detail. From what I can tell, it's only discussed in quotes in the body of the article. I think it should have its own section explaining what his theory is, how it differs from other versions of Dow theory, how influential it was (among traders and other theorists), and how it was criticized.

Others

WP:EARWIG shows no copyvios.
User:Headbomb/unreliable shows no unreliable sources.
Most claims have a reference but not all. I've added a few "citation needed" tags to show where references are needed.
There are no edit wars.
Some cases of WP:WTW

Hamilton's most famous WSJ editorial, "A Turn in the Tide": most famous
He was renowned for the concise precision: renowned

Peter Hamilton was born at Manchester, England on January: replace "at" with "in"
Barometer published sequentially over 1921 and 1922: replace "over" with "between"
Some violations of MOS:BOLD, eg "NYT.1" and "1922".
Usually, the section "References" is used for the "reflist" template. The section "Notes" is normally reserved for explanatory footnotes. The current section "References" might be better called "Bibliography" or "Further reading".
The article jumps back between various different citation styles: some citations are given in parenthesis, like editorial declarations" (Alloway, 1929). and still others use a shortcut like "NYT.1.", which is then defined in the section "References". I would suggest replacing all the parenthesis citations by using the ref-tag. As for the shortcuts, I don't think they are needed: you can put the source directly in the ref-tag. This way, the footnote links directly to the source and not just to a shortcut. A different approach would be to use the sfn-template. The sfn-template creates a short footnote that contains a link to the work mentioned later, for example, in a "Bibliography" section.