The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap ( talk · contribs) 09:19, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
Well, I'm sorry this well-crafted article has been languishing in the queue for so long: but on such a subject, and at such length, it's easy to see why reviewers might be daunted by it, or feel themselves quite unqualified to approach it. I considered just giving it a quick pass, as it's in many ways of high quality. But I think comments can be made at two levels. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 09:19, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
Several portrait-format images need an "|upright" parameter.
Ref [109] Stephen 1911 doesn't point to a citation.
Ref [290] needs a page number.
Several refs to the same book could well be merged, e.g. [198] and [199] are pp. 28–29; there are plenty of similar instances.
There are some small formatting issues, e.g. ref [200] has page range 253–56 where it should say "253–256".
Ref [271] Nietzsche is not consistently formatted.
Ref [191] "I. Ousby (ed) puts initial first, when the rest of the reflist has surname first.
I notice that we have an article on Sage writing. Perhaps this would be a useful link in the text.
The article looks very long at almost 177 kBytes, but actually the narrative text is only a smallish proportion of that. The rest of the text seems to me to be on several non-biographical subjects:
The inclusion of a lengthy "Glossary" is a curious, even idiosyncratic choice for a biographical article. Wikipedia is "not a dictionary", and the extraction of Carlyle entries from a 1907 encyclopedia is at least an "interesting" editorial decision. It could be argued to be non-neutral, as if intended to portray Carlyle in a good light; it would be far safer to have a reliable secondary source (a scholar or critic) saying that Carlyle had invented many terms, some of which had found their way into reference books (e.g. two or three instances).
But I wonder why a biography article contains such a large amount on Carlyle's philosophy, which is a separate subject from the man's life. It should, I think, be a subsidiary article
Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, which could be linked and summarized here.
The "Style" section is also curious, not least because it contains its own "Reception" section as if it was a stand-alone article,
Thomas Carlyle's prose style, embedded in the biography.
I see you've linked Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle in the lead; it should also at least be linked in the main text: there are a couple of places where it's mentioned. The normal approach when an article has a subsidiary is a subsection with a "main" link; the subsection briefly summarizes the subsidiary article in one or two paragraphs.
Same goes for
Thomas Carlyle's prose style.
That is followed, oddly, by a section named "Character" which is also a reception section (by any other name).
Also remarkable is that the Legacy section begins about halfway down the article. It contains, yes, yet another reception section, or rather a series of sections which contain reception elements: its "Philosophy" is the reception section of the subsidiary article on Carlyle's philosophy:
Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle#Reception, while the "Historiography" is again commentary on his philosophical impact.
Then there's a "Controversies" section: (is that title not deprecated?) - I wonder if this wouldn't be better worked into the biography, at least where the debates were with him directly.
Then there's an "In literature" list. I'm a bit doubtful about whether such lists belong in biography articles at all: it'd be better as
List of allusions to Carlyle in literature, and that indeed could be divided into a "Parodies" section and a more serious section.
In short, I wonder whether this article would not be better quite substantially rearranged, creating one or two subsidiary articles and lists, so that the text is crisper, in "summary style", and more approachable?
Nom has not edited (anything) for some weeks now, nor responded. I was hoping for a little more polish, but since the points have been actioned or made redundant by the hiving-off of material as indicated above, I think it's fair to say that the article is clear, properly cited with a wealth of sources, spot-checked, and covers the main points, now well supported by the linked subsidiary articles. I've actioned a few minor issues, so there seems nihil obstat now for GA. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 14:34, 6 May 2023 (UTC)