Wikipedia:Peer review/William Lax/archive1

William Lax

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want an external opinion on improvements I need to make and I would like the article to receive a letter on the quality scale. Reviewers need to be aware that biographical information on Lax is extremely limited and essentially everything that is readily available in terms of data is already in the article.

Thanks, Farrtj (talk) 13:38, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd be interested in reviewing this article at some point more fully in the next week or so. For now:

• Referencing needs a lot of tidying up - three examples: the ODNB article is cited twice when that could be consolidated into a single reference (see also Template:ODNBweb); the citations to the Royal Society fellowship nominations need to be more than the current bare URLs; and the brittlebooks library bare URL needs fixing as well.
• It is always useful to say somewhere (such as the talk page) what the most authoritative and/or recent source is. I'm assuming the ODNB entry is the only recent biographical work on Lax, but looking at it it is very short. The rest of the sources seem to be brief mentions of Lax, which is not a bad thing but some care needs to be taken to be clear what information is from where (the ODNB entry, for example, does not name his mother as Helen - where is that information from?) and whether the right balance is being struck in presenting this information (for those with book-length biographies, this is not a problem, for those with only short biographical entries, it can be more difficult).
• Some of the external links look like they are used as references as well. Some consistency is needed here. If some of the external links are used as references, they should be cited and dropped from the external links, unless there is a large amount of further reading that might be of interest to readers (unlikely in this case).
• The public domain papers of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are now freely accessible online (possibly only relatively recently). This will include Lax's two papers that you mention, so it should be possible to link to them.
• It should be possible to provide convenience links for some of the references, such as the Journal of the British Astronomical Association one (i.e. link to the actual article using a doi number, as well as linking the journal as I just did here).
• Cavendish: the experimental life needs more details including year of publication. In fact, many of the references need year of publication. The ODNB citation is not complete (it was originally by Agnes Mary Clerke in 1892, and revised by Anita McConnell in 2004). This is part of what I mean above by "tidying up" the references. Have a look around at some other articles to see what I mean here, or ask and I'll help out where I can.
• You give pictures of his school and one of his churches. Why not a picture of Trinity College, Cambridge? Preferably one from the time he was there, or a building that would have been there when he was there.

Hopefully the above will be of some help. Please let me know if you want specific help with tidying the references. Carcharoth (talk) 05:24, 10 December 2011 (UTC)