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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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MIT just underwent a good-article review here with GA-status kept. A major overhaul of organization and content was done in connection with the GA/R and I would appreciate some more eyes on it before listing for FAC in the near future. Thanks, Madcoverboy (talk) 21:57, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would especially like attention paid to ensuring that the content and organization is in line with other university FAs, that academic boosterism and other prestige-cruft has been kept in check, and the article is readable and interesting. Madcoverboy (talk) 22:06, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]


Comments from Ealdgyth (talk · contribs)

  • You said you wanted to know what to work on before taking to FAC, and my first suggestion would be to get your references into order. A number of your website references lack publisher and/or last access dates, which are the bare minimum needed for WP:V. Books need publisher, author, and page number on top of title. When you've got those mostly straightened out, drop me a note on my talk page and I'll be glad to come back and look at the actual sources themselves, and see how they look in terms of reliability, like I would at FAC. May I also suggest that you also attempt to secure more third-party sources that aren't connected with the university? 16:07, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
    • I believe that the current MIT-published references are fully inline with WP:SPQS to fulfill WP:V and WP:RS since no one besides MIT is as authoritative or reliable in publishing information about MIT for that information. Madcoverboy (talk) 05:01, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comments from The Rambling Man (talk · contribs)
  • General comment - some sections are somewhat too blue... like the lead, Research and accomplishments sections - link judiciously where it will improve the experience of the reader.
  • Order references numerically unless there's a great reason not to, you have [12][2][13] for instance.
  • Check image captions, those which are sentence fragments do not require a full stop.
  • "drastically " used twice in two paras reads repetitively.
  • "fantastic growth " peacock.
  • " international — especially Japanese — firms " spaces not required after the first em-dash and before the second one.
  • Not sure about the fair use of Image:Harvard-MIT-coop.png - it appears purely decorative in this context.
  • "168-acre (68.0 ha)" earlier on you gave it in sq km. Be consistent.
  • the Smoot - decapitalised.
  • "equal exactly to " exactly is redundant.
  • "Classical Mechanics and E&M," decapitalise Mechanics and explain what E&M is before using it as an abbreviation.
  • "Students often become published, file patent applications, and/or launch start-up companies based upon their experience in UROPs." is unreferenced.
  • Avoid squashing text between two images, per WP:MOS#Images.
  • Why bold categories in the table?
  • (Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in sanitary chemistry.)[172] - why whole sentence in parentheses?
  • "(Sc. D XVI '63), " what does this mean?
  • "Originally created in 1929, the ring's official name ..." et seq unreferenced.

The Rambling Man (talk) 10:51, 5 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from BlueAg09 (talk · contribs)

After a quick read of the article, here are some things I noticed:

  • "MIT enrolled 4,172 undergraduates, 6,048 postgraduate students, and employed 1,008 faculty members in 2007" - what do you mean by 2007? Does it refer to the whole year, or a certain semester? This needs to be clarified. Also needs to be fixed in the "students" section.
  • "MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers alone" - is this unique to MIT, or is it done at some other schools as well? Maybe you could expand on that in a sentence or two. A footnote would be fine.
  • "MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the largest university-based nuclear reactor in the United States" - might want to say second largest to be more precise
  • "Although the difficulty of MIT coursework has been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose," - characterized by who?
  • The rankings use the number sign (#) -- I'm not sure if it's okay to use it in this case, so you might want to check the MOS.
  • The people section is generally the last section of university articles, so it's best to move it to the end (before the footnotes).
  • The picture of the class ring has the wrong license. Use this as a guidance on how it should be properly licensed.

That's all I have for now. BlueAg09 (Talk) 23:11, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from dpbsmith (talk · contribs)

Madcoverboy asked me to amplify on the problems I have with the Research activity section. It's a little hard to know where to begin. I suggest a zero-based approach: wipe out the entire section, try to arrive at some reasonable judgement of what research activities characterize MIT, and start over. Basically, it's a huge and indiscriminate list that mixes in important and unimportant items with, apparently, an attempt to cram in as many as possible. To mention a few specifics:

  • it's cool that some MIT people have won Pulitzer Prizes, but is that a "research activity?"
    • Not in a hard scientific sense but creating works of history, creative writing, and scoring are not trivial activities either. Is it that you object to the section title or the confounding of the hard and soft in the same section? Madcoverboy (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's cool that "Professors Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman wrote the popular Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs textbook" (by the way, is it in wide use outside MIT?), and that other professors have written other standard textbooks; but is this a "research activity?" (Rhetorical question. Answer: No, it is a teaching activity).
    • No, but they're both all-around interesting guys and quintessentially MIT in my eyes, so I wanted to find some excuse to include them. :) Madcoverboy (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do items about research misconduct belong under "research activity?"
    • One could argue its research being performed poorly! I think this is an essential counterweight to what could only otherwise be a booster-y section, although I am certainly open to finding or creating other sections for it. Madcoverboy (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I see some errors of fact, of the sort that occur when one is trying to concentrate on quantity of items rather than quality, such as Multics being "a highly secure predecessor of UNIX."
  • With so many items, I do not have time to examine them one by one, but many of them seem a little strained. For example, I read that "Penicillin was also first synthesized at MIT," but just how important is this? Wikipedia's article on Penicillin I read "Chemist John Sheehan at MIT completed the first total synthesis of penicillin and some of its analogs in the early 1950s, but his methods were not efficient for mass production." That makes it sound unimportant. But the MIT press release cited makes it sound very important. Rutgers is certainly famous for Waksman's work on antibiotics. Is MIT famous for Sheehan's work on antibiotics? (Not a rhetorical question; I honestly don't know. Do you?)
    • I agree that first-past-the-post may not the ideal metric for evaluating the importance of research contributions, but I think that the statement of fact does convey something about the extent of MIT's research in biochemical synthesis. Madcoverboy (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The section is well-referenced in the sense of proving that the named people really did the named work. It's not so good in showing that the work is very important. I read that "Popular technologies like X Window System, Kerberos, Zephyr, and Hesiod were created for Project Athena in the 1980s." Kerberos is certainly popular. I would question just how popular X Window System is; I remember hardware X terminals back in the early 1990s, but I don't think X Windows and OSF/Motif and so forth really turned out to be the mainstream of graphical computing. Zephyr? Never heard of it, and the Zephyr (protocol) article says "Zephyr is still in use today at a few university environments..." I'd want to see a source that attests to its historical importance and influence. Hesiod? Never heard of it either, and our article has received only 23 edits since creation and no substantive addition of content since 2006. Doesn't sound like one of the things MIT is famous for. This is another case of cramming stuff in indiscriminately; it's as if you said "Ford has produced popular models like the Model T, the Edsel, the Mercury Topaz, and the Ford Ranger EV." Dpbsmith (talk) 23:37, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Dpbsmith and I have gone back and forth on this repeatedly. His criticism of exhaustiveness at the cost of quality is certainly on the mark but I also argue that MIT suffers from a curse of plenty - is one Nobel Laureate's contribution more notable of deserving of inclusion than anothers? If they got their Nobel Prize for work before coming to MIT, is their work thereafter necessarily less notable or influential? What then of alumni and former faculty who received the Nobel for work done at MIT? (not currently included, AFAIK) I want to hack away at this mass of blue but honestly have no idea how to make a cut because it comes down to ridiculous hair splitting and teleological justifications as seen at WP:VITAL. Madcoverboy (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Perhaps there is some reasonable source or other that contains some kind of list of MIT's research achievements in a way that could serve as an authority... you know, perhaps on some anniversary or other of its founding maybe someone issued a little brag book, "Fifty Great Moments in MIT Research History..." If MIT could manage to pick Aristotle, Newton, Franklin, Pasteur, Lavoisier, Faraday, Archimedes, da Vinci, Darwin, and Copernicus as the top ten scientists of all time, then surely someone has made list of the top ten scientists at MIT... Dpbsmith (talk) 00:54, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • To quote from the extensive MIT Archives bibliography: "The only general history of MIT. Though missing the last quarter of the 20th century, it gives a good overview of the Institute." :( I think at least one or two things have changed since 1975. Madcoverboy (talk) 02:08, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Jamesontai (talk · contribs)

  • I quasi-finished packing, so I look a quick look. I think a lot of my comments were covered by The Rambling Man, specifically, the blobs of blue, the inconsistent numerical order in references, and just wondering what, if anything, will be done with Thomas Scott (sound engineer), the only red-link left. I'll come back in a few days and review it again. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 23:48, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from BQZip01 (talk · contribs) In general, it looks fine, but I'm a bit out of practice.

  • I'd convert the a,b,c,d info to simple footnotes. There's no reason sources and explanations cannot exist side-by-side and the switch between the two is awkward.
  • I'm concerned about a general lack of sources at the end of paragraphs. If it doesn't end with a source, it's wrong, IMHO.
  • Phrasing could also be a bit more neutrally worded.
  • I need sleep, but I'll give you more tomorrow or sometime over the next few days. — BQZip01 — talk 09:01, 16 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Wordbuilder (talk · contribs)
On quick glance, I saw a few things.

  • The ring image will need a fair-use rationale (see this for a related discussion).
  • In "Collaboration", text is sandwiched between the two images. You'll see this again in "Academics and research" and in "Traditions and student activities" (although the latter is technically between an image and a link to a music sample). Arrange images to avoid this.
  • WP:MOS states: "Do not place left-aligned images directly below second-level (===) headings, as this disconnects the heading from the text it precedes." This occurs twice in the article. Place the image above the second-level heading to remedy the problem (or move them elsewhere).

I'll take a more indepth look later. →Wordbuilder (talk) 19:27, 22 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Also take a look at WP:MOSNUM. For instance, "72 Nobel Laureates, 47 National Medal of Science recipients, and 31 MacArthur Fellows are currently or have previously been affiliated with the university." A sentence should not start with numerals. →Wordbuilder (talk) 17:16, 27 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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