Talk:George M. Stratton

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:George M. Stratton/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: GabrielF (talk · contribs) 15:12, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

GAR Criteria

• 1 - I have some concerns about Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. You want to be careful that when you're using a source you don't copy too much of the sentence structure and phrasing that the source uses. Take the following for example:

“ George Stratton's father, James Thompson Stratton, of colonial English ancestry, was a civil engineer who came to California in 1850, in his early twenties, to join the gold rush. He came by ship and across the Isthmus of Panama. He had only indifferent success, and returned to his home in Ossining, in New York state, within a couple of years. Here he met and married Cornelia Smith, of Dutch and English descent. He brought her back to California and they settled in Oakland. As a civil engineer he became Surveyor General for the state and had much to do with surveying the old Spanish Grants and determining definite boundaries where only vague descriptions had existed before. ” — NAS Biographical Memoir

“ Stratton's father, James Thompson Stratton, was of colonial English ancestry, and a resident of Ossining, New York. James Stratton was a civil engineer and came to California at the age of twenty, on June 6, 1850, across the isthmus of Panama, during the days of the gold rush. Not having much success amid the gold rush, the senior Stratton went back home to New York. There he met and married Cornelia A. Smith, of Dutch and English descent, on October 30, 1854. The couple moved back to settle in Clinton, now East Oakland, California. As County Surveyor for Alameda County in 1858–59, he made many surveys throughout California, becoming an expert on the large Mexican grants and subdividing many Spanish ranchos. James Stratton went on to become the U.S. Surveyor-General of the state and then Chief Deputy State Surveyor. ” — Wikipedia text

The order in which facts are presented and much of the sentence structure and wording is very similar here. This is a bit of a nuanced and difficult area and I would recommend reading Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing, and especially the examples on that page, carefully. You don't need to worry too much about the word structure when you're describing simple facts - there are only so many ways to say that a person is from Ossining, New York, but for more complex sentences and for paragraphs you should be careful that the structure is your own. For example, I might rewrite this paragraph as follows:

“ Stratton's parents were James Thompson Stratton, a civil engineer of colonial English ancestry and Cornelia A. Smith, of Dutch and English descent. They met in James' hometown of Ossining, New York and married on October 30, 1854. In 1850, while in his early 20s, James had traveled to California as part of the Gold Rush, but had returned, largely unsuccessful, to the East Coast. After their marriage in New York, James and Cornelia moved to California, settling in Clinton, now East Oakland. ”

This is just a quick example, and I might tweak it, dropping or rephrasing the "colonial English ancestry" and "Dutch and English descent" bits for instance.

Please go through the text carefully and compare it with the sources you're using and look for cases where sentences are largely the same except that a small word or a tense is changed, or where a particular turn of phrase is used in both places (example: "across the isthmus of Panama") or where information in a paragraph is presented in the same order. I realize that this is tough to do and the line between close paraphrasing and okay text can be a bit fuzzy, but this really needs to be addressed before the article can be a GA.

I rephrased, rearranged and reorganized statements, going through section by section all the way to the end. I don't know whether paraphrasing was too close before for those, but figured reparaphrasing couldn't possibly hurt and would help if paraphrasing was too close before. How does it look now? Churn and change (talk) 05:58, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• 3A - All aspects of his career and life are addressed.
• 3B - Additional work is needed here. I'm not sure that some of the detail (titles of classes taught, number of students, salary over time) really belongs in an encyclopedia article. You should think about what information is particularly notable (he started off teaching philosophy even though he was an experimentalist, interest in psychology among students grew) and which are routine parts of any professor's work. For instance, when you say that he contributed money for a bust, why is that something that's interesting 100 years later? Was he the sole contributor or a major contributor or was he one of many?

Yes, will cut down here. Things like which ship his father came in on, his trivial article in the Berkeleyan, his specific standard lectures (just summarizing the move from philosophy to psychology and the large number of students), the cost of his mirror system, details of salary (perhaps summarizing to promotions), money he contributed to various things, and the like. It is painful to cut reliable material one digs up, but, yes, I agree it is really trivia. Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Cut down references to salary, details of courses a psychology prof. would be expected to teach and so on. Please let me know if you think there should be more stuff cut or moved to a footnote. Churn and change (talk) 17:42, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• 4 - No concerns about neutrality.
• 5 - No content disputes.
• 6A - The photo in the infobox has a fair use rationale and the rationale is detailed. All other images are in the public domain.
• 6B - The historic images are good and are sufficient for the GA criteria. Additional images that help illustrate Stratton's experimental work would be helpful - for instance a photo of his glasses or a diagram that shows precisely what is meant by "There he wore a set of mirrors, costing around $50 in 1900 dollars, attached to a harness allowing, and forcing, him to see his body from above."

Yes, the photos and pictures do exist, though they are not public domain. Will use the fair-use rationale and see if it sticks. Churn and change (talk) 15:53, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. Churn and change (talk) 19:34, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments

Significant

• The "Retirement and death" and "Legacy" sections need a bit of work. The last paragraph of the "Retirement and death" section seems to be primarily a summing-up of the honors that he received and the volume of work that he produced. This should probably be moved under Legacy. The first two sentences of the second paragraph, about encouraging his students, also seem like they would be more appropriate under Legacy where the article discusses his impact on his students. The rest of that paragraph, focusing on his hobbies and interests, doesn't seem to fit under "Retirement and death", unless you mean to say that these were things that he did in retirement, but it seems like they were lifelong interests. Often I've seen this type of information in a section called "Personal life" or something to that effect.

Fixed. Moved retirement and death to be a subsection of "work" with just one para there. Moved the encouragement of students and the honors etc. to the legacy section. Created a new "personal life" section, after the "work" one. Churn and change (talk) 21:37, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Minor

• "Stratton then obtained an A.M. Master's degree from Yale in 1890." - redundant phrasing since A.M. contains the latin for Master.

Fixed. Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• "He received his degree summa cum laude, with his thesis submitted to Wundt's publication, Studien" - Is there a reason you aren't using (what appears to be) the full name of the journal, Philosophische Studien?

Source says "Studien," which probably was the common name for the journal. Will change to the full name, since I don't think SYNTH is an issue, his PhD thesis, available online, clearly indicates the full title. Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• "Stratton's second daughter, Florence, was born at Baltimore on May 24, 1907" - born at?

Fixed. Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• "He also taught at Berkeley's extension school, the north section, lecturing on "Psychology and health" at San Francisco to people from the medical profession in 1918–19, and at Oakland in 1919–20" - what is the north section? Why are you using the phrasing "at San Francisco" rather than "in San Francisco?"

Fixed. Took out the "north section" (UCB extension has classrooms in many locations; too much detail in this context, I guess). Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• "Stratton wrote Social Psychology for International Conduct for social science teachers who wanted to analyze international affairs within a psychological framework. T[111]" - looks like something got moved around here an the T[111] is an artifact.

Fixed. Churn and change (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• "As an instructor, he began teaching psychology and logic courses, adding to a philosophy course." I'm not sure what "adding to" means here. Do you mean assisting with? Also, I think the page number you are referencing is 22 not 16.GabrielF (talk) 20:29, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Changed to "in addition to"; he was teaching psych. courses and a philosophy course. The Google books link is confusing, they bundle the reports for multiple years into one book and so the page number of the "book" is not the same page number as that in the report. The citation I have is to page number 16 of the report for 1894. The bundled Google book starts with the report for 1893 (the page number 22 you saw is actually from the report for 1893). The simplest way to check is to search for "Stratton" in the Google book and look at the hits. Churn and change (talk) 20:49, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

• "During World War I, Stratton served in Army aviation in various capacities, developing psychological recruitment tests for aviators." I'm not sure what the phrase "in various capacities" means here because the rest of the paragraph describes his work as developing psychological tests. I would interpret "in various capacities" to mean that a person did a number of different jobs for an organization (for instance he worked as a salesman, a manager and also performed customer support). GabrielF (talk) 20:36, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Took out "in various capacities." Was actually referring to his rank—he got promoted. Churn and change (talk) 20:51, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

• There are a few cases where a . is used instead of an apostrophe. See the paragraph "What Starts Wars" and the last paragraph of "Legacy" GabrielF (talk) 21:07, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. I think that happened because of some offline processing step on the text (I typically copy text out, process it with scripts and then copy back). Churn and change (talk) 21:48, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Everything now seems to be addressed, so passing. Wizardman 04:07, 17 November 2012 (UTC)