Wikipedia:Peer review/Parrot Corporation Limited/archive1

Parrot Corporation Limited

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because…

This is my first contribution to Wikipedia. I would appreciate comments on the structure of the article, is it to the point, concise and ultimately is it of interest. It is my intention to contribute more to Wikipedia, so I would like to gauge my own contribution and see if I'm qualified to critique others and be of use!

Thanks, Mulletsrokkify (talk) 22:24, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Comments from Belovedfreak

First of all, welcome to Wikipedia and well done on your first article! I'm not sure if you're just looking for reassurance, or if you want a detailed critique of the article. As most people come to peer review looking to take articles to the standard ow Good Article or Featured Article, I'll try and give you a more detailed review. Don't be discouraged by everything I mention though, because you really have done a good job for your first article! I'll go through section by section. General

• It's always worth comparing your article to other similar ones that are already good or featured. You can find some in Category:FA-Class Companies articles and Category:GA-Class Companies articles.
• You might want to add an infobox that summarises the main facts about the company in the right corner of the article. It's not obligatory, and some editors don't like them. You can see them in use at BAE Systems and Blackstone Group.
• Check out the automated tips in the box at the top of this page for some suggestions
• It would be good if the article had some images, but I can understand they might be difficult to obtain. Options might be the company logo (which would be acceptable as a non-free image, with an appropriate fair use rationale), or perhaps a photo of the location of the company

Lead section

• per WP:LEAD, the lead section (the bit before the table of contents) should summarise the main points of the article. It's not just an introduction, but acts as almost a mini-version of the whole article. Apparently, many readers don't even get past the table of contents before moving on elsewhere, so it's important to get the main facts into the lead. Likewise, the lead should not introduce any material that is not mentioned later on in the article. The lead can be up to four paragraphs long, depending on the length of the article.
• "Parrot Corporation Limited was a UK computer diskette manufacturer..." - I would probably call it "British" rather than "UK", since British is the adjective
• "Ultimately it would fail ..." - why conditional tense? I would simply put "Ultimately it failed..."

History

• "Set up in 1983 as the only British based, fully integrated manufacturer of floppy diskettes for personal computers. A start-up venture funded partly by the WDA." You have some incomplete sentences here. There's no space restriction on Wikipedia, so we use a prose style rather than short sentence fragments.
• WDA links to a disambiguation page, so make sure it points to Welsh Development Agency. I don't know if you know about piped links, but you can link to the right article by typing [[Welsh Development Agency|WDA]]
• Watch out for overlinking. For example, in this section, you have added wikilinks to the word "diskette" three times. In the next section, you've linked to WDA four times. This isn't necessary. You only need to add wikilinks to a certain word once in each section, and maybe less than once per section if the word is repeated quickly. Also be careful that you only link to words that are relevant and would help the reader to understand the topic more. You have done well with this, I can't see any words that shouldn't be linked.

Company Formation

• ECSC also links to a disambiguation page, so would be confusing for a reader. However, since you have already linked to European Coal and Steel Community in that section, there's no need to link ECSC at all at this point.
• Although you've done really well not to link words that shouldn't be (apart from the repeated links) I think you could actually add more links, to add context. For example, Northern Trust Bank
• Per the section headings guideline, heading titles should be in sentence case. So, Company formation instead of Company Formation etc.
• The history and company formation sections seem to be about the sam thing really, could you merge the two sections perhaps?

Financial Irregularities

• On the whole, the article is well-cited, but because you are using several different sources, it's not always clear where some of the information comes from, or if it is cited at all. Make sure you have citations for everything that could be challenged. one thing that stood out to me in this section was the statement "...it was discovered that £2 million of the ECSC loan was allegedly missing from the Parrot accounts." That needs to be verifiable. The next section, where you say that the man was fired and then arrested, definitely needs a citation. We have a policy on biographies of living people that in fact applies to all articles, not just biographies. Information on living people must be cited to reliable sources.
• "Peters was extradited by the United States to Great Britain in 1989" - shouldn't that be Britain, or the UK?

Political Controversy

• Ok, I can totally see why you have ten citations for this first sentence, because you are talking about "much discussion". However, that many blue numbers in a row is not easy on the eyes, and a little distracting. In the following sentences you summarise the discussions (I think) so it would be better to put the citations after the relevant statements.
• "The WDA were criticised for its involvement..." - "were" doesn't match "its"
• "poorly invested public funds in a "murky transaction"." - direct quotes need citations; I presume it's one of the 10 above
• "It was felt that the Welsh Secretary of State..." - try to avoid unsupported attributions like "it was felt". (see WP:WEASEL); who felt that?

Current events

• Per MOS:DATE, dates shouldn't be formatted as "On the 1st of August 2007", but "On 1 August 2007"
• Again, be mindful of WP:BLP, and make sure there are citations right next to statements about criminal charges

See also

• This section should only contain articles not already mentioned in the article (make sure you've linked them in the article!)

References

• For dates in the references section (and this is not required, but an opinion), dates formatted as yyyy-mm-dd can be ambiguous and confusing to readers outside the US, so I'd change them to day month year. (eg. 2010-08-11 → 11 August 2010)

Now, I know I've mentioned a lot of things, so please don't be discouraged at all. As I said before, you've done a great job and it's an interesting and informative article. One last thing I though of, is that it's mostly a historical overview of the company. Is there any more info available on the products? Anyway, please let me know if you have any questions, and good luck with developing the article further!--BelovedFreak 21:45, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Some more comments from Belovedfreak

This is looking much improved, so well done. The main things that stood out for me this time were:

• Some words are linked that don't need to be because they are quite common words, eg. investor, loan, allegation, convicted, charges, sentencing
• The fair use rationale for the logo says that it is self-made. How did you make it exactly? What I mean is that if you scanned it or downloaded it from somewhere, you will need to say from where
• There is a lot of the conditional tense, especially in the lead, which seems strange. You can just use the simple past tense. We're looking at the whole story of the comany form a point in the future, so simple past works best.
• In the lead, "the WDA's investment practises" - in British English practise is the verb, practice is the noun.
• The passive voice is used quite a lot, which can be viewed as a weak point in prose. For example, "Financial difficulties were experienced" rather than "The company experienced financial difficulties" and "As a consequence, changes were made..." - who made changes?
• In the " Bankruptcy" section, I would lose the "unfortunately" as it's not completely neutral. We (Wikipedia) don't really care if the company suffered further losses. The reader might, but they can decide that for themselves!

Those are the main points sticking out for me, you've done a good job though, well done! --BelovedFreak 21:27, 21 August 2010 (UTC)