Wikipedia:Featured article review/ROT13/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was kept 16:25, 20 September 2007.

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ROT13

Review commentary

User:Fredrik and Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography notified.

A 2004 promotion. It has shockingly five references, far less than I would expect from an FA (1c). Some whole sections are not referenced and some just seem completely off-topic, such as the letter games section. hbdragon88 00:49, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

It could certainly do with some more references to come in line with modern FA standards. I'll try and have a look. I don't think the ROT13 word-pairs are particularly off-topic; perhaps a bit of trimming. — Matt Crypto 08:54, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've made a first pass, adding a bunch of extra references, and otherwise tightening up on some of the more crufty bits. — Matt Crypto 11:13, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

I did a bit of basic MOS cleanup; pls have a look at WP:CITE/ES on formatting of the footnotes. All sources should have a publisher, websources should have last accessdate, and author and publication date should be given when available. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:25, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

I'll try and polish them up this coming weekend (anyone else is welcome to do it first, of course.) — Matt Crypto 20:30, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Hbdragon88, please notify relevant editors and Projects with {{subst:FARMessage|ROT13}} and leave a message here about notifications, per the instructions at WP:FAR. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:11, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I notified Fredrik (original nom) and the Crytopgraphy WikiProject about a couple hours before your post. Matt Crypto (who ranks as the #1 editor) seems to have already known. hbdragon88 01:36, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

This is a quite small topic, in both cryptography and the history of the Internet. The frivolous uses made of it in academic papers and word games are, in fact, fair game. WP does not have a dour Calvinist charter to forcibly squeeze the amusement others have made of a subject from any article about it. Their amusement is eligible for notice on WP. Though many editors attempt to enforce such a policy. This article does a good job ov covering its slight subject. Worthy of FA status. ww 09:51, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. The citation formatting is all over the place, no consistent style (see WP:CITE/ES. All sources need a publisher, all websources need a last access date, and author and publication date should be listed when available, all in a consistent bibliographic format. Cite templates can be used if editors are unsure how to format citations. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:22, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
• Comment – unless I'm missing something, the images have no fair-use rationales. Ashnard _Talk ^Contribs 10:46, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
  • It's not clear they need it. The first diagram has been dedicated to the public domain, so that does not need a fair-use rationale. The second is a screenshot of a ROT-13 rendering of the Wikipedia homepage. I'm not an expert on these things, but given that all the software and content depicted in the screenshot is freely licensed in some way, that probably doesn't need a fair-use rationale either. — Matt Crypto 15:46, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are citations (1c) and relevance of material (4). Marskell 13:07, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

• Remove—For such a short article to retain its gold star, I'd want to see better writing, better coverage of ht material, and a deeper overview of the big picture. Here are a few things that caught my eye; there are lots more.
  • "An additional feature of the cipher is that it is symmetrical"—um ... why not "An additional feature of the cipher is its symmetry". Let's not force our readeres to stumble.
  • MOS breach: no hyphen after "-ly".
  • Is there some point to enclosing text in those ugly dotted-line rectangles? Tony 12:50, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Could you clarify what you mean by a deeper overview of the big picture? The dotted rectangles are an artifact of how Mediawiki renders blocks of text in a fixed-width font; the idea is that people can line up corresponding plaintext and ciphertext. No doubt we can get rid of the lines easily enough. (P.S. I hope I don't come across as rude in saying this, but if you find a pesky hyphen that is in breach of the manual of style, I'd encourage you to zap it right then and there, rather than telling other people about it. It's of little benefit to document defects that would take less time to fix than to describe.) — Matt Crypto 17:43, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
• Comment, reference formatting has still not been fixed, see comment above and WP:CITE/ES. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:50, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

• I may have erred in asking for a "deeper overview of the big picture". I just feel, as a non-expert, that the lead doesn't prepare me—put me in the picture—smoothly for the rest of the text. Maybe I'm wrong. This statement: "A shift of thirteen was chosen over other values, such as three as in the original Caesar cipher, because thirteen is the value which arranges that encoding and decoding are equivalent, thereby allowing the convenience of a single command for both encoding and decoding.[4]" might be better in "Description" than "Usage". When Sandy's points are addressed, you can disregard my "Remove". Tony 11:56, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

• It's very short and Matt has already done much work, so I'll just format the refs myself. A couple of more sentences can be added to the lead, as well. Marskell 13:44, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Done. Marskell 16:18, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.