Wikipedia:Peer review/Flag of Singapore/archive3

Flag of Singapore[edit]

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A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for November 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because, despite passing GA a short time ago, I feel like this article needs a check on the English grammar and also put into a summary style.

Thanks, User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 04:50, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: This generally reads well. Here are a few suggestions for improvement:

I changed two or three passive-voice sentences to active, and you might look for others. For example, "The national flag is sometimes flown by Singapore-registered vessels... " would be stronger as "Singapore-registered vessels sometimes fly the national flag... ".

I'd suggest adding at least a mention of the main ideas in the "Use of the national flag" section to the lead. The lead ideally is an abstract or summary of the whole article. Please see WP:LEAD.

Numbers and units such as "8,667 volunteers" need to be held together with nbsp codes to prevent separation by line-break on computer monitors. Please see WP:NBSP.

Abbreviations like SARS should be spelled out on first use with the abbreviation in parentheses. I changed the first instance of Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA).

"Dimensions and colour":

Millimetres should also be given in inches in the sentence: "MICA recommends the sizes 915 by 1370 millimetres, 1220 by 1830 mm and 1830 by 2740 mm".

"In culture":

The sentence "The MDA's reaction to these comments was not available at press time" seems out of place. "At press time" is what the source, a newspaper, said, but the encyclopedia doesn't have a fixed press time. You might just delete this sentence or, better, you might add what happened later, if that is known.

It would be good to add what happened in the Loof case, if known. Loof either recalled the ad or did not. The state either punished Loof or did not. Readers will be curious to know what came next.

Most of the dates in the citations are in the yyyy-mm-dd format. The Manual of Style suggests making them consistent throughout the citations. I'd recommend changing the few d-m-y dates in the citations to yyyy-mm-dd. The dates in the main text look OK since they are consistently d-m-y. Please see the date-formatting section of WP:MOSNUM.

Direct quotations such as "I know as a citizen that we are not allowed to do it, but this is art and I am an artist" need a citation directly after the quotation.

I hope these brief suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 03:18, 7 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth is a really good copyeditor, but WP:NBSP asks for a hard space where "figures and abbreviations or symbols are separated by a space". So, we want "8,667 volunteers", but "8,667 km". That's been stable for months, so I think that rule is going to stick for a while. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:41, 7 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

With respect to Dan, I note that WP:NBSP lists three sets of examples of how hard spaces are used in Wikipedia. I'm relying on the third set, which includes the phrase "in other places where displacement might be disruptive to the reader" as my basis for nailing things like "45 cats" together. I've encountered objections to not nailing them together, but I can't find examples this morning to support this memory. On the other hand, no one has said to me that it causes harm to nail them together, although it's time-consuming and, I admit, might be slightly goofy. Finetooth (talk) 18:40, 7 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I did everything but the changing of the one or two references into the YYYY-DD-MM format and the hard space thing. I got the command to do it, but just haven't found time to place them in there. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 19:20, 7 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]