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Oxford English Dictionary[edit]

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I submitted it as a Featured Article Candidate and the consensus was that my nomination was premature — the article is good, but as-yet not Featured Article standard because of issues with copy, structure, and referencing (as regards the last, I’m fairly sure I can provide a citation for any claim in the article, and that the main thing that needs doing is adding the ref tags in appropriate places referring to existing sources). (Relisted after the bot closed the last one because the FAC was still technically ongoing, then waited 14 days to comply with the rules).

DavidPKendal (talk) 20:24, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The main structural issue I see is that a lot of the paragraphs are very short. Combine them. Tezero (talk) 00:33, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Tim riley

I enjoyed this article, but it isn't ready for FAC. There are, as you say above, too many statements that lack citations. The second para of "Entries and relative size" has statements about the Dutch, German, Italian, French and Spanish equivalents of the OED all five of which lack a source, and for FA every substantive statement must be verifiable. Other statements lacking an attribution:

"Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips had been misplaced."
"Minor, a Yale University trained surgeon and military officer in the U.S. Civil War, was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. Minor invented his own quotation-tracking system allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of Murray and Minor later served as the central focus of The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman), a popular book about the creation of the OED.)"
"Most of the e-volume supplement in 1933"
Second supplement – most of this section
Second edition – paras two and three
Relationship to other Oxford dictionaries – last para

Other points:

The word "however" occurs eight times. It is almost always unnecessary, and weakens the prose.
An article about the OED should not perpetrate the singular "their" – "is able to use the service from their own home."
You seem to follow the OED's idiosyncratic usage for –ize endings, but then you have "optimise" rather than the OED's "optimize".
Avoid peacock or editorialising terms: its impressive size; a disappointing 4,000 copies etc.
"about one per year" – prefer good English to bad Latin: "about one a year".
"The revision is expected to roughly double" – it's asking for trouble to split an infinitive in an article that is sure to attract pedants. (I know it's an idiotic superstition that splitting an infinitive is wrong, but it's prudent to avoid the matter if possible.)
Duplicate links: you shouldn't have more than one link from the main text to Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, Onions, John Simpson and XML.
References: all printed books should have either an ISBN or an OCLC number: WorldCat will oblige. For preference standardise on either the 10 digit or the 13 digit form of ISBN, rather than have a mixture.
Further reading: it is usual to list these in alphabetical order of author.
Further reading: Jonathan Cape, the publisher, was not a co-author of Chasing the Sun

Those apart, I suggest you seek a good copy-editing to bring the prose up to FA standard, removing such tabloidese tricks as starting a paragraph, "And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project began."