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To me this article seems extremely convoluted; it presupposes a degree of familiarity with 18th century British politics we cannot generally expect from our readers, it provides too little context, and at time it's even unclear who specific statements refer to. Some examples:
I could go on, but I think this list of examples suffices to illustrate the issues I see with this article. Huon ( talk) 19:01, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
I don't know if the problems I see in this article today actually reflect partially successful attempts to revise the article since the 2016 comments above, but I might try a mild rewrite myself, which is a significant leap in my quantity of editing, so stand by unless someone else wants to tackle in the next week. I'm assuming not, since third-tier 18th century British statesmen are not especially urgent topics and aren't going anywhere.
I appreciate the concern that the article as is may be too assuming of familiarity with the period, although many wiki articles assume a good deal of familiarity with their subject and that's not itself a dealbreaker [consider almost any of the better written scientific articles- they demand a fair bit of the reader, and many historical articles have done so in the past - The Holy Roman Empire used to be longer and better]. I do agree they can be written more clearly than this one and links certainly help in these cases.
A lot of it as currently written does two things at once- assumes a lot of context, and has weird syntax: "A critical year was 1744 for the young aspiring minister: perhaps the pressure of Jacobitism, the return of the Army from Flanders, and the whiff of Jacobite conspiracy forced a change of allegiance." I took it as revisions by an editor very familiar with the subject, but writing in a second or third language, well but in an odd style. I will try to make only modest, clarifying changes asap. Random noter ( talk) 19:21, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
Just looked at Huon's comments again. Yeah, I had more than a few WTF moments with passages like those. Random noter ( talk) 19:23, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
William Barrington, 2nd Viscount Barrington article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To me this article seems extremely convoluted; it presupposes a degree of familiarity with 18th century British politics we cannot generally expect from our readers, it provides too little context, and at time it's even unclear who specific statements refer to. Some examples:
I could go on, but I think this list of examples suffices to illustrate the issues I see with this article. Huon ( talk) 19:01, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
I don't know if the problems I see in this article today actually reflect partially successful attempts to revise the article since the 2016 comments above, but I might try a mild rewrite myself, which is a significant leap in my quantity of editing, so stand by unless someone else wants to tackle in the next week. I'm assuming not, since third-tier 18th century British statesmen are not especially urgent topics and aren't going anywhere.
I appreciate the concern that the article as is may be too assuming of familiarity with the period, although many wiki articles assume a good deal of familiarity with their subject and that's not itself a dealbreaker [consider almost any of the better written scientific articles- they demand a fair bit of the reader, and many historical articles have done so in the past - The Holy Roman Empire used to be longer and better]. I do agree they can be written more clearly than this one and links certainly help in these cases.
A lot of it as currently written does two things at once- assumes a lot of context, and has weird syntax: "A critical year was 1744 for the young aspiring minister: perhaps the pressure of Jacobitism, the return of the Army from Flanders, and the whiff of Jacobite conspiracy forced a change of allegiance." I took it as revisions by an editor very familiar with the subject, but writing in a second or third language, well but in an odd style. I will try to make only modest, clarifying changes asap. Random noter ( talk) 19:21, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
Just looked at Huon's comments again. Yeah, I had more than a few WTF moments with passages like those. Random noter ( talk) 19:23, 11 December 2020 (UTC)