Wikipedia:Peer review/Agriculture in the United Kingdom/archive1

Agriculture in the United Kingdom

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because rather to my surprise, it failed a GAN, and I'd like to know whether that decision was justified.

Thanks, —S Marshall T/C 17:54, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Have you fixed the article based on the issues raised? I think some were reasonable, like the use of more modern sources, and clearer structure. In the reviewer's opinion, at least one of the GA criteria were not met, so it's acceptable that it failed. Knowing nothing about the subject, it might be useful to model the article on a similar one that has been rated GA or higher. I can't find an example, but I'm sure you can find one. Aiken ♫ 17:22, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

No, I haven't amended the article at all. My immediate reaction was that I thought the reviewer was entirely wrong in every respect. I felt the sourcing was appropriate (sure, there's a source from 1949, but there are plenty of others from the 21st century; and the things I've used from the 1949 source are still true. The country's soil still dates back to the last ice age, and that hasn't changed in the last 70 years...) and I thought the article's structure was perfectly easy to follow. On seeing that GA review, I assumed it resulted from the reviewer's inexperience, that being the first GA review he'd ever done, so rather than jump in and do a whole lot of work revamping the article, I thought I'd ask for a fresh view from a third party.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with the GA reviewer or asking for a review of his review—I'm asking for a completely fresh assessment.—S Marshall T/C 21:37, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: The prose generally seems fine; the individual sentences and paragraphs make sense and are easy to read. However, I think the article would be much stronger if re-organized chronologically and trimmed in places. Here are a few suggestions:

• The article begins like a news story, focused on the early 21st century, even though the article title suggests something much more broad. The "History" section is not mentioned in the lead, which is surprising, and is buried deep in the article. Rather than starting with contemporary issues, I'd think about re-organizing the article chronologically and moving the "History" section to the top, just beneath the lead.

• Even though the U.K. did not technically exist before 1707, the land certainly did. I would suggest expanding the "History" section backwards to include a brief summary of earlier agriculture, including the earliest forms. When did farming begin in this region?

• Bits of history appear here and there in other sections. An example from the "Land reclamation" subsection is "In Britain the process of converting virgin land to farms has been going on for at least four thousand years. Larger-scale attempts to reclaim land have been in hand since the Stuart era, particularly between 1760 and 1860 and particularly in the Fen district." I would suggest moving material like this to the "History" section in a way that flows naturally.

• Beneath the "History" section, the article could logically proceed to "Current issues", which perhaps might better be called "Twenty-first century issues". Under this general heading, "Overview", which is really an overview of certain aspects of contemporary agriculture in the U.K., could become a subhead, followed by "Organic farming", "Biofuel", and so on.

• I would move the general information about agriculture in the "Land", "Arable farming", and "Pastoral farming" to last place in the article and shorten it partly by moving the history bits to the "History" section and eliminating some of the subsections, and by tightening the prose. For example, I'm not sure the subsections "Manure", "Nitrogen", "Phosphates", and "Potash" belong in this article since they are not specific to the U.K. The sentence (with links), "It is traditionally fertilised with manure, nitrogen, phosphates, and potash" is enough. In addition, I'd look for sentences that don't add information that readers are not already aware of; for example, I'm not sure it's necessary to tell readers in the "Diseases" subsection that "High-profile diseases tend to be animal borne, especially those that can spread to humans. Outbreaks of these typically cause international headlines and widespread concern."

• The article has way too many extremely short subsections. Through one process or another (expansion, deletion, merger) these should be altered to make the article less choppy.

• After re-organizing the article along the lines above (or something like it), I'd re-write the lead as a true summary of the main text. The existing lead does not meet the guidelines of WP:LEAD.

This is not a complete line-by-line review by any means, but I hope these general suggestions will prove helpful. 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. Please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 19:31, 14 August 2010 (UTC)