Wikipedia:Peer review/List of current Indian pretenders/archive1

List of current Indian pretenders

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Just looking for some feedback regarding where and how other editors feel I can make further improvements to the list.

There are also some issues with it that I can identify myself. Any ideas on how best to handle these would be appreciated:

• There are a lot of redlinks in the state column. A lot of the monarchies listed weren't very prominent or were quite tiny, so they haven't had articles created for them.
• Sortability is a problem. It's there, but it doesn't work, since the table includes rowspans for 2 entries. I have a few ideas about how to get around this, maybe <hr> rows?
• Information isn't very forthcoming on this topic. The list is almost certainly incomplete, and many fields (most in the dates column) are blank from lack of data.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Nightw 20:44, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This list includes an impressive lot of information, but I agree with you that it has plenty of room for improvement. Here are my suggestions:

• The sorts will work best if the sortable terms are exactly parallel in meaning to one another. The sort works on the first term encountered in each row of each column; those are the terms that should be parallel in meaning.

• The sort of the "Pretender" column can be made to work as a surname sort if you list the surnames first; i.e., Singh, Ajayraj rather than Ajayraj Singh. However, I can't help with the complications of names in India and what you might do in the case of someone who does not use a surname or who has a family name that differs from a public name. You'll have to decide what kind of name sort would be most useful to readers and how to list outliers that are hard to make parallel. In no case, should the "Pretender" column be filled with something like "1 December 2004" instead of a name. It would be better to say "unknown" if the name is not known.

• The sort of the "Since" column does not produce much of interest because it is sorting on the month rather than the year. To make a better sort, put the year first in each row of this column.

• Each row should have the same number of column boxes as every other row. Jamaluddin Khan, for example, only has three boxes but needs seven. All entries in this particular list need exactly seven.

• All of the dates in the Abolition column link redundantly to the same article. I would instead remove all of these links and use a single note to explain the entire column. The inline link to this note could appear right after the word "Abolition" at the head of the column.

• Two solutions are possible for the redlinks problem. You can either create articles, or you can remove the links from any items that are not likely to have articles written about them.

• Finding the missing data and making sure that the list is comprehensive is more difficult than fixing the sorts. A related problem is that much of the data seems to come from sources of questionable reliability. For example, what makes Genealogical Gleanings a source that meets the WP:RS guidelines? Do any editors check the work of Henry Soszynski for accuracy? Is Genealogical Gleanings a personal web site rather than a vetted publication? To answer these questions and to find the missing data, you might need to track down the published sources acknowledged by Soszynski and to find others (if any exist) as well.

• I often find it helpful to look at featured articles or lists to see how other editors have done things. You can find the complete list of featured lists at WP:FL. Many of them include sortable lists.

• The dab checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds one link, "list of monarchs", that goes to a disambiguation page rather than the intended target. Finetooth (talk) 22:21, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 22:16, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I think I've addressed the majority of those issues: sortability, repeat links, etc. Most Indians don't have surnames, and "Singh" is just the second part of the name. You'll notice that half of them combine the romanised words, while the other half separate them; so that "Ajayraj Singh" can also be written "Ajayrajsingh". Sorting the names just as they are written is best. Nightw 09:15, 18 March 2011 (UTC)