User talk:Chiswick Chap

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In appreciation[edit]

		The Completionist Barnstar
		You might have done more to complete the encyclopedia than any other editor. You are relentless in your production of high-quality articles. Keep it up! ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:16, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:18, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

History of Christianity[edit]

Hi! You were recommended to me as someone who might be interested enough in the Middle Ages history to give the center sections of this article a once over. I would like to see it go FA. I have never had one, but this is a kind of "flagship" article and I think it should be among the best - but I need help! Any comments at all will be deeply appreciated. Thank you! Jenhawk777 (talk) 18:11, 11 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Jenhawk777: well, I'm not a medievalist (even if I've read my Beowulf), nor much of an FAC denizen (even if I have some little bronze stars). The effort to attain an FA is probably at least 10 times that needed for a GA, though the ratio has perhaps become less with changes at GAN. The main things that I imagine I know about FAC are that there is an exceptional amount of attention paid to polish: small details of style, punctuation, phrasing, layout; that there is a concern for 'comprehensiveness', whatever that might be on a topic that may have had hundreds of lengthy books written about it; and that there is ferocious attention given to every citation. These are most easily mitigated by choosing a topic that is rather well-circumscribed; by starting from scratch and writing the whole article yourself, or in a small team of collaborating editors; and by adding each sentence with its source open in front of one, and following a rigid policy for citation, such as only using books and putting every book used into the 'cite book' template with all parameters filled at once.

The corollary of all that is that a topic that has been edited by many hands, that may contain many doubtful or obsolete statements, may have a wobbly division into sections, and that may be incompletely cited, cited to doubtful sources, or cited with poorly-formatted and incomplete references, is a recipe for a great deal of hard work to check everything, or else a great deal of trouble at FAC.

History of Christianity is an exceptionally long article at over 287,000 bytes. The body of the article (minus the lead, references, sources) is around 16,000 words or 36 pages of A4. That might take an hour to read. There are a terrifying number of references — almost 700, and an equally alarming number of sources. Those could raise serious concerns at FAC.

At a glance, the sources look extremely solid, as one might expect for such a subject, and they include some of recent date.

A small thing: the images occupy very different amounts of the screen (area, X times Y pixels). There are some tiny little maps in 'Africa', which I agree are readable in a general sort of way at such a small scale; there are conventional thumbnails; and there are some much bigger images, like the one of Pius XI. FAC might well wonder why this was. My policy is to use the default thumbnail size for landscape images, and "|upright" thumbnails for portrait images; I then make maps and diagrams sometimes much bigger so as to make any text they contain readable without a hand-lens; but all such rational choices can be criticised.

On the Middle Ages, well, there are four chapters Early-Middle-High-Late, adding to some 6,000 words of text. There obviously needs to be some coverage of this period; I note that you have a 'main' article in Christianity in the Middle Ages, just as you do on Reformation and so forth, so it would be possible to provide much less coverage here and just summarize each of the 'main' articles in a few paragraphs. Of course that would be a radical transformation here, which might cut the article's size quite dramatically, and so ease the article's passage through FAC.

If that approach isn't acceptable, I can say that the Middle Ages text is very readable and that it certainly looks richly cited. I notice that 'With civil authority' has statements cited to 3 or in one case 4 sources: that might well attract attention at FAC; near the start of 'Late Middle Ages' there's one with 6 sources and a note, which would certainly get commented upon. A statement like "Christians were dhimma." might well be thought somewhat wikt:Delphic, too: a brief gloss of the unusual term might be helpful. I see you've kept the table of contents to a minimum number of levels: with the odd exception of 'In Mesopotamia and Egypt', which incidentally makes the 'With Islam' section unbalanced, as there's one unnamed subsection and one named one.

I hope these brief jottings may be of some use. The other thing you might consider is picking a small article in a good state, and working it up to FAC standard first, so as to get practice (and with any luck a bronze star) before you go for the big one. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:01, 11 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]