Wikipedia:Peer review/NeXT/archive1

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[edit] NeXT

I am attempting to get this article up to Featured Article Status. Any suggestions/comments? Thanks! — Wackymacs 10:09, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

  • The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program. They may or may not be accurate for the article in question (due to possible javascript errors/uniqueness of articles). If the following suggestions are completely incorrect about the article, please drop a note on my talk page.
  • Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at WP:LEAD. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.
  • Per WP:CONTEXT and WP:MOSDATE, months and days of the week generally should not be linked (Don't link September or Tuesday unless there is really good reason to). Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
Yes, I know all that - but I wanted specific ideas and details. ;-) — Wackymacs 12:51, 16 June 2006 (UTC)


Some things I saw:

  • From the lead: ", known for their futuristic black casing. " Do we need to cite this?
  • "NeXT developed the NeXTSTEP operating system, later sold for Intel processors as OPENSTEP," We have no reference to them ever being used for any other processors than Intel, so clarify or remove Intel specific statement
  • "NeXT was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs and was headquartered in Redwood City, California." Should this be higher up in the lead? What's more important here, the company or the computers they produced?
  • "In a new departure, a few months later he visited universities to determine the directions of the industry." Awkward phrasing. Better is "A few months after his departure from Apple, Jobs visited universities to determine the direction of the computer industry."
  • "The first major source of venture capital was Ross Perot, who invested US$20 million in 1987 for 16% of NeXT's stock, and became a Director at NeXT in 1988." The job title means nothing... symbolic? on the board of directors?
  • "Soon after NeXT, Inc. was formed, Apple brought a lawsuit against the company. In an out of court settlement between the two parties, as of January 1986, NeXT was restricted to the workstation market." It seems to me that the date is in the wrong place here.

References and citations needed. Also a good copyedit. Themillofkeytone 06:20, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Fixed the things you mentioned, yes a copy-edit is needed. I'm working on the references. — Wackymacs 08:43, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
Starting to look a bit better, but some of the prose is still a bit iffy. Examples:
  • "The company had now come full circle. Originally intending to sell a toolkit running on top of other OSes, they had ventured into hardware, failed, and returned to selling a toolkit running on top of other OSes. Although OPENSTEP had an enthusiastic audience of developers using it for enterprise software and the like, it never attracted really large numbers of paying customers, and lack of revenue growth was a perennial problem."
  • "He concluded that several technologies were going to be the next source of change, including PostScript, which appeared to be on its way to becoming the standard graphics language; the Mach kernel, which seemed to be rewriting the whole idea of the operating system and Object-oriented programming, particularly using the Objective-C language. He collected these ideas into a product concept that he thought would be the next big thing: an object-oriented toolkit, aimed primarily at the academic market, using PostScript as the display technology."
For now I'm going to stay out of editing this one, so that I can vote with a clear conscience when you FAC it... but if you want me to go through and copyedit it myself, I'll be happy to. Let me know. Also, good job expanding references, but there are still many statements that could probably use sourcing (like the 2nd example above) Themillofkeytone 16:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
It'd be good if you could copy-edit too. I just fixed the paragraphs you mentioned. I am still working on the references. — Wackymacs 18:54, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I have gone through and performed a pretty serious copyedit... I also added a large number of {{fact}}s. It's important to remember that this article is about NeXT, not Apple, so I removed a lot of statements about OS X that weren't directly related to NeXT's software contributions. Themillofkeytone 16:00, 21 June 2006 (UTC)