List of chronometers on HMS Beagle

List of chronometers on HMS Beagle (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured list candidates/List of chronometers on HMS Beagle/archive1

Nominator(s): SpinningSpark 23:20, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured list because it is a list of important instruments on an important voyage of a highly notable ship. Besides which it tells a great story. It has been through Peer Review and GOCE. SpinningSpark 23:20, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support --Thefrood (talk) 21:42, 20 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Initial comments I like! A really innovative and interesting list, something we should all encourage, so nice work so far.

• Image captions that aren't complete sentences should not have a full stop (e.g. the lead image).

  done

• Five paras in the lead is a little heavy, although a couple of those paras are brief. Check out WP:LEAD.

• This is an unusual page and I grant the lede is long for the average list article, but WP:LEAD is not really relevant to lists, in that the introduction to a list is not (or not only) a summary of the list. The relevant guideline is MOS:SAL which requires that the lede, amongst other things, "provides any necessary background information" and "gives encyclopedic context". Most of the lede can be said to fall under those criteria. The page addresses the intersection of chronometers and HMS Beagle. The first para gives background on chronometers, the second para gives background on Beagle and her mission, the third para gives background on chronometers on survey ships, the fourth and fifthe paras address the reasons for large numbers of chronometers on the mission. All this seems to me useful background for the reader, and you have not indicated which of these areas you think should be reduced or cut. On the contrary, all your comments so far which affect the lede require an expansion.

• Actually, we do respect WP:LEAD at FLC. You could always create a history section, or similar. The purpose of the lead remains the same, to adequately summarise the whole article. The Rambling Man (talk) 12:35, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Can you point to where there is consensus for that? I am open to suggestions that this might be done another way with reasons why it is an improvement, but I am not very open to arguments that it is against guidelines when WP:SAL says something utterly contradictory. SpinningSpark 13:12, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Well, SAL actually links to WP:LEAD. And if you look at any recently promoted featured lists, you'll see what I mean. The Rambling Man (talk) 13:17, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• It is astonishingly misleading to just say SAL links to WP:LEAD and just leave it at that as if SAL was deferring to WP:LEAD in every respect. MOS:SAL actually goes on to say a lot more than that: "Stand-alone lists should begin with a lead section that summarizes its content, provides any necessary background information, gives encyclopedic context, links to other relevant articles, and makes direct statements about the criteria by which members of the list were selected, unless inclusion criteria are unambiguously clear from the article title." If that is not the consensus, then the guideline should be changed, but guidelines are usually taken as evidence of what the consensus currently is, so I don't know where that leaves us. I took your advice and looked at the three most recently promoted articles List of Georgia Bulldogs head football coaches, List of Major League Baseball player–managers and List of Somerset CCC Twenty20 players (all placed on the FL page by you by the way). None of them could be said to have a lede that merely summarised the content of the body. All of them contain mostly material that could be described as "background information" or "encyclopedic context". I might be persuaded to do something if I was convinced it was actually of some benefit to the page. I will take another look later, but for now I am declining and will wait to see where this review is going first. SpinningSpark 16:00, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Not "astonishingly misleading" (unless you're easily astonished I suppose), but I'm just one reviewer. Let's see, it's certainly not a huge deal. No need to thank me for taking plenty of time for the review, by the way. The Rambling Man (talk) 09:34, 2 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• My apologies for not thanking you. I am, of course, grateful for reviewers attention, and know from experience how time consuming it is. SpinningSpark 15:40, 2 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Suggest you link longitude in the lead.

• done

• Only the second expedition has a link?

• As far as I know. The second expedition, as well as being notable for its mission per se, is enormously famous as the journey which carried Charles Darwin during which he began to formulate his Theory of Evolution. I have not dwelled on this aspect because that story is well covered elsewhere on Wikipedia and, frankly, Darwin has naff all to do with chronometers.

• " a copy of John Harrison's H4" if you mention Harrison in the lead, consider explaining why someone would attempt to copy his work, i.e. what is his significance?

• done

• " had become highly inaccurate" highly, or just unacceptably?

• done

• "By the time of the Beagle voyages, carrying chronometers had become routine and the ship carried a large number – an unprecedented 22 were carried on the second voyage." count the use of "carry" here in one sentence... suggest a minor rework.

• done

• "Such large quantities were necessary" not an immediate logical sequitur from the previous para.

• done

• Please make sure all tables meet MOS:DTT for screen readers etc. (That means including row and col scopes where applicable).

• done

Enough to start with, will come back once these are done. Nice list. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:44, 30 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Replies so far. SpinningSpark 20:11, 31 May 2012 (UTC) to 11:51, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Further comments

• "80 Cornhill.[18]" this could be expanded a touch so our international readers understand it.

• Added London, although Cornhill is linked on first mention and the London location should be assumed from the headnote if not explicitly stated otherwise.

• "furthest point south " horses for courses but somehow I prefer "most southerly point".

• Agreed, missed this one on the first run through

• The Nomenclature section is a little oddly positioned as sub-section to that which precedes the sections to which it is relevant.

• Moved up one level

• " (Des. column) " but the column title is in bold, not italics. Same with the other explanations. Perhaps ("Des." column) etc?

• My belief was that this was to comply with MoS (terms in italics) but as I also think quotes look better I have changed it regardless.

• Does an en-dash under "winding" mean not known? It's not clear.

• Well it means I don't know, but not necessarily that it is not known to anybody. Would you prefer the cells to simply be left blank?

• Well, perhaps it's worth a note so other readers don't ask the same question? The Rambling Man (talk) 17:39, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• That seems superfluous to me. The note would in effect be saying rather obviously that the article has provided no information in fields which contain no information. Do you have a suggestion for wording? SpinningSpark 22:51, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Maybe. It could also mean not required, or something else. An alternative would be to have "unknown" explicitly rather than an en-dash. The Rambling Man (talk) 09:13, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• "Liutenant Skyring" typo.

• done

• Adventure's Z chronometer comment needs an en-dash if there's nothing to say, to be consistent.

• done

• You have two separate tables with the caption "Chronometers on first voyage (Adventure)", I'm not sure why, but perhaps I missed something obvious?

• Ultimately, the justification for splitting the table into two groups is that Parker treats them differently in his description. Although he does not explicitly state this, I gather that the first group are his officially issued chronometers. They are mounted together in the same structure and given designations for identifying them in the log of readings. The second group are provided by manufacturers, probably for the promotional value of having their product on an important mission, and do not have designations. Unlike the main group, their pocketwatch format indicates they were used as journeyman chronometers, although Parker only explicitly identifies one used for this purpose. My original concept for this article was to give each chronometer its own subsection. This was changed to tables due to a suggestion by the peer reviewer and I would not now want to revert to a scheme that another reviewer found objectionable. The current format is a compromise between the desire to have a compact table format and the need to keep extended text close the chronometers to which it applies, hence two tables at this point.

• Not entirely convinced links to major geographical entities like Chile, Peru, Australia etc are required. In fact, things like gimbal would be much more usefully linked...

• Agreed, although individual decisions could be open to opinion. Left in Melbourne, Calcutta, Madeira, Río de la Plata, Tierra del Fuego, Tenerife, Cape Verde, Rio de Janeiro, Tahiti, Galápagos Islands, Canberra, Cape Horn, Tasmania, Mauritius, Arafura Sea, Dardanelles; unlinked Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia. Not sure why you mentioned gimbals, it is already linked on first mention. In fact it was linked twice and I have now removed the second mention.

• Why I mentioned gimbal is that when I saw you'd lined Chile, etc, gimbal was the nearest word to it that I thought should have been linked. I missed that it was linked before. The principle was to link non-standard terms. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:09, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• " miles (15.3 km)on " space required.

• done

• "inflation adjusted £37,300" adjusted to when?

• The template automatically adjusts to the current(ish) value - ie, to the last time the template data was updated. It could be to a specific date but I feel it is preferable to let the template take care of it, that is the point of having a template.

• Why the big col spans for info in the "Chronometers on second voyage" table when you have a Comments cell that could contain most of this information? I fear, a little, for the [[WP:ACCESS|accessibility of this particular table since you kind-of abuse the headings etc to get in images and additional notes...

• This is due to the same compromise mentioned above in going to table format. Placing all the text in the "comments" column would push down and cause a lot of ugly whitespace, and writing it elsewhere would split it from the target chronometer. The alternative is to keep splitting the tables which is moving back towards the original layout.

• I was referring more the fact you have used a bunch of extra cells using col spans which would cause havoc with a screen reader. It would be useful to speak with User:RexxS about how JAWS for instance would interpret this particular table with its curiosities... The Rambling Man (talk) 09:19, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I would be consistent with the captions on the tables so "on the second voyage (Beagle)" perhaps?

• Why? the other tables don't require disambiguation. The Wikipedia convention is only to disambiguate where required. We do not put a bracketed disambiguation in article titles for instance, unless it is actually needed.

• The comment isn't one about disambiguation, more about consistency throughout. If someone were just looking at the tables, then it is not immediately clear which "second voyage" you are referring to. Honestly, for the sake of consistency, this shouldn't be too troublesome. The Rambling Man (talk) 09:19, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• "on 13 Oct 1843." in prose, even in tables, there's no good reason to not use October etc.

• Agreed

• You have Category:Clocks and Category:Horology but the former is a less refined category than the latter. No need for both.

• Actually "clocks" is the more specific category, and marine chronometers all seem to be in that category. Not very justifiably in my opinion since chronometers can be in the form of a watch. So I probably agree that horology is the correct category, but for different reasons. I have not had much to do with choosing the categories, but while we are on the subject, the article used to be in ship categories but they were removed by another editor on the grounds that the subject is not a ship. We could equally argue that the subject is not a chronometer. We really ought to be doing something consistent here, but I don't really have a proposal.

The Rambling Man (talk) 16:08, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Responses so far. SpinningSpark 17:34, 4 June 2012 (UTC) to 22:28, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]