Wikipedia:Peer review/Bytown Mechanics' Institute/archive1

Bytown Mechanics' Institute

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because…I'm still relatively new at writing Wikipedia articles. Any help on technical issues would be appreciated. Also like some comment on the body of the text as there are limited other sources dealing with the history of Mechanics' Institutes.

Thanks, CJ_WeißSchäfer 16:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Comments by Jappalang

I think this article should be expanded with other information before being brought here. I shall offer a few suggestions as follow. It is not exhaustive of the issues to me as I pretty much stopped delving further while in the middle of History.

• Dablinks (toolbox on the right) shows one disambiguation link; please fix it.

Lede

• "The Bytown Mechanics' Institute is an Upper Canada example of knowledge transfer organizations aimed at the grass roots."

  Sad to say, I had no clear inkling what "knowledge transfer organizations" was trying to say during my first reading. My mind had assumed this Institute was some sort of school (and "knowledge transfer" some jargon). Most of the sources also did not refer to it as such; rather it seems "mechanics' institute" was the common terminology. I think perhaps this should be rephrased into something simpler? Perhaps "The Bytown Mechanics' Institute (BMI) is an organization set up to collect various sources of knowledge and disseminate them to its members. BMI was located in Upper Canada and targeted the grass roots to be its subscribers."

• "These institutions were Victorian and moralistic in tone and class oriented in structure which, in part, explains their failure."

  The way this sentence is structured makes it seem pretty biased (stating the characteristics as negatives). Which reliable sources said this and on what authority? The failures mentioned in the History section certainly did not make such judgments. The closest text in the body (Membership samples) that relates to this claim is sourced to a site that looks more to be a self-published website, which collates self-published genealogies (www.bytown.net). How is this site reliable by the way? For judging a site's "reliability" in terms of Wikipedia's requirements, see WP:RS, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-06-26/Dispatches and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-07-28/Dispatches.

Origins

• "Why is "newsrooms" in italics?"

• "The longevity of these organizations was influenced by the long hours of the working class."

  Unsourced

• More information is needed on the background of these "newsrooms" (if that is the correct terminology according to the sources). See the Source section below.

Institute Timelines

• Per WP:MOS#Article titles, headings, and sections, Timelines is not to be capitalised. This is a very short section and the article will be much better off if the list is dropped and this section merged into the later History section.

Sources

• Jeff Keshen and Nicole St-Onge's Ottawa—Making a Capital has information on the background and events that lead to the Institute's formation.

• J. David Wood's Making Ontario:Agricultural Colonization and Landscape Re-Creation Before the Railway defines what is a mechanics' institute and the general history behind such bodies.

• Elsbeth Heaman's The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society During the Nineteenth Century tells the activities of these mechanics' institutes.

• The Journal of education for Upper Canada gives an account of the merger in 1852. It is a contemporary source.

• Bulletin of the American Geographical Society of New York can provide sourcing for the institute's first two changes in names.

• In short, there are about 400 Book Google sources on BMI, whether they be primary or secondary sources and they should be used.

Sorry, but I think there is still a lot of work to be done. Peer review "is intended for high-quality articles that have already undergone extensive work". This does not seem to be it. I suggest taking the above sources and suggestions, and expand the article before bringing it back here. Jappalang (talk) 02:39, 1 September 2010 (UTC)