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Madonna (entertainer)

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: No consensus. In an attempt to find consensus, a new discussion has been started by Giggy. It can be found at WP:Good article reassessment/Madonna (entertainer)/2. Geometry guy 18:26, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Im quite sure this article no longer deserves a GA states (at least i woundn't have passed it today as a GA reviewer myself, which is a shame being a fan). Maybe standards have improved since its last review. These are just some of the basic issues I have found with the article. I didnt delist it automatically as i dont want hate mail.

I havent read the article indepth in over a month, so ill do that and add to this list. However, regardless, the examples i have already provided indicate that its no longer worth of its states. Realist2 ('Come Speak To Me') 17:10, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. While I don't concur with all of Realist's points, it's obvious that the article is deficient. There are several citation request tags. Some sources are less than stellar. Several sections, such as "Legacy", are underdeveloped, while the "Influence on Taxonomy" section should be removed. And yes, the lead is a tad on the bulky side. Majoreditor (talk) 04:25, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment There are some unnecessary informatios in the lead especially the fourt one. Its like a mere collection of her films. --Efe (talk) 08:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DONE Ultra! 19:58, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delist Needs sourcing to a lot of sections. Paragraphs are stubby in some sections. References are inconsistenly formatted. A lot of unnecessary information in the discog section; only studio albums. MoS issues. --Efe (talk) 09:01, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
DONE Ultra! 20:28, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Silly me, i probably should have delisted it and not hastled everyone like this, i was just scared of a backlash. Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 14:25, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No. It should be better in here. This article is so huge so comments from fresh eyes would be better. --Efe (talk) 09:04, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK ;-) Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 14:02, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Im taking away my "delist" decision. This article is worth GA, only that it needs to be referenced well and references should be formatted well, among others. Maybe you can use {{Cite web}} and {{Cite news}} to better achieve this. I am not leaning towards "support", however, until all concerns are addressed and not just by putting "done" where in fact, its not. --Efe (talk) 06:49, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I will be adding further tags later today when im not busy. ;-) --Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 08:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree, it is possible and will help to condense the article. For instance:
  • move the David Banda adoption controversy to the "2003-2007: American Life and Confessions on a Dance Floor" section as this event took place in 2006.
  • why do we need to know about her personal relationships with Dan Gilroy and Stephen Bray when they can be mentioned in the early life section? This applies to all of her relationships- move them into the body of the article.
  • all of her political views in the article are from 2006-present and can be moved into the biography under "2003-2007: American Life and Confessions on a Dance Floor".
  • could you go through FA's of other people (not just musicians), especially those of multiple marriages, affairs and children? They have personal life separate as its flow is lost if you write all of it in career. But the politics bit - I'll try and merge. Ultra! 14:54, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article has a poor representation of WP:WEIGHT. Madonna's marriages are not a vital aspect of her overall biography, most of her personal life and criticisms are already mention within the body of the article (such as the scandal over kissing Britney and Christina). These events do not need to be mentioned twice. Other BLPs may be different, when marriages, affairs and children are what the person is best known for. However, with Madonna, this isn't the case. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 02:50, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Undue weight applies to more than just viewpoints. Just as giving undue weight to a viewpoint is not neutral, so is giving undue weight to other verifiable and sourced statements. An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject, but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its significance to the subject. Note that undue weight can be given in several ways, including, but not limited to, depth of detail, quantity of text, prominence of placement, and juxtaposition of statements. WP:UNDUEWEIGHT The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 03:14, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ive replied to my comments above, i feel hat some parts that have been marked as DONE are not sufficent. There are still insufficient sources, lack of source formatting. Lengh is still a concern but i think that will come along as this process reaches a conclusion. The articles still does not satisfy the requirements of GA. If there are no objections im going to remove any dead links and unreliable sources, replacing them with fact tags. I could also add fact tags to unsourced areas. I think this might make the job of the edit easier so that they can see what is exactly needed. Thoughts? Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 15:59, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I support removing deadlinks, unreliable sources, and controversial material (likely to be challenged) which is unsourced or relies upon or is sourced by such unreliable sources. Geometry guy 20:11, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I went through removing dead links and unreliable sources. I will add more tags to areas that need citations later, for now im really tired after looking through 150 sources lol. I have now 100% tagged the article. Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:59, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. My first instinct on seeing this article was that it could be saved, and was probably worth saving as a GA. If I had more time I would have made a small attempt myself by removing unsourced and digressive material so the article remained broad yet focused and verifiable, hence good enough to be a GA, if not perfect. (I didn't have time, but at least I removed the Camilla ref!)
I'm now delighted to see another editor doing that, and would like to keep this GAR open for another week to see if the initial concerns can be addressed. I would like to note, however, that absolute length is not a GA criterion. If there is encyclopedic information about Madonna which is worth presenting in this article, then please present it. Please consider summary style and spinout articles if this information grows out of hand. However, I would emphasise that any reasonable length (my own ballpark for this one would be 60K to 120K) is acceptable: just because Michael Jackson does the biz in 90K does not mean that this article must. It depends upon the nature of the topic and the way summary style spinoffs are structured. I would encourage all editors to write the best possible article (or family of articles) that they can for the encyclopedia, and not let artificial measurements hinder that process. The recent cutback has probably been beneficial, but please don't forget the true purpose of the encyclopedia. I will support listing this article according to whether it meets the GA criteria, not according to whether or not it falls under 100K in length. Geometry guy 20:11, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Agree, length is now sufficent that its no longer a primary concern, it was however originally 106,000 bytes which was ..... So anyway, if everyone supports (i see you do ;-)) im prepared to citation tag it where needs be and we can see the full extent of the articles deteriation in the paste few months. I also support extending the period to give the editer more time to implament improvements and complete the list above. Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 20:21, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, please add tags according to the GA criteria. If adding citations and supporting information lengthens the article, I have no problem with that. The article must be judged against the GA criteria, not an ideal list, although the list presented by Realist2 is quite close to the GA criteria. Geometry guy 20:28, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Went through adding tags to unreliable sources and dead links, will add more tags to other unsourced areas later. Which I have now done, the article is 100% tagged. --Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 23:00, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sum up requests

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OK, this has got very long now so i want to make the list of nessary improvements needed crystal clear here. Other edits please add theirs. Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 00:28, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Resolve citation tags and format all sources
  • Resolve POV issues - i see words like outrage, uproar etc on every other line
  • Please remove repetition, a lot of the criticism section is already repeated in other areas. Infact the only aspect of the criticism section that is new is the animal fur part. Almost ALL of it is already elsewhere in the article. Please consider adding the fur comments to their chronological place and then removing the criticism section.
  • comment: The PETA stuff should be moved within the biography. Once that is done, two paragraphs wont warrant a full section to criticism. Those two paragraphs can rightfully be merged into the "Legacy" section. Being a controversial artist, is in fact, a big aspect of Madonna's legacy as a recording artist. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 22:11, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also, her work at the Kabbalah Center can be considered an aspect of her legacy. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 22:16, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Still have concerns about the LEAD. A large part of this article talks about various controversies and her personal life, none of which are mentioned. The LEAD does not provide a sufficient overview of the article or her life. It should also be neutral, when talking about her acting abilities dedicating 3 positive lines and half a negative line isnt neutral. --Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 00:40, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Remember WP:BLP#Criticism_and_praise Unless the criticism is a majority view and is a longterm aspect of her biography (not a single instance such as the Brit and Christina kiss for example) it should not be mentioned in the lead. I don't believe any aspect of her personal life is significant enough to warrant its own section in the article, let alone become mentioned in the lead. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 22:11, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Ouch, lol, poor madonna ;-( . Maybe your right, im not totally familiar with her person life and its media coverage, im only aware of her career. Reading the lead you would think shes was a respected actress..... Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:27, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

comment

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Billboard charts at Allmusic to clear up the rather absurd number of citation-needed tags. Note that for a sentence like ""Live to Tell" (U.S. #1),[citation needed] "Papa Don't Preach" (U.S. #1),[citation needed] "Open Your Heart" (U.S. #1),[citation needed] "True Blue" (U.S. #3)[citation needed] and "La Isla Bonita" (U.S. #4).[citation needed]" just one use of the ref at the end sentence is enough (since its the same one.) Alot of the cite needed are being used for self-referential stuff. For eg: "n 1985, Madonna entered mainstream films, beginning with a brief appearance as a club singer in the film Vision Quest.[citation needed"--there the reference is the movie itself. It doesn't need a specific third-party ref or anything. Same goes for "In 1991, Madonna starred in her first documentary film, Truth or Dare (In Bed with Madonna outside North America), which chronicled her Blond Ambition Tour, as well as her personal life." indopug (talk) 21:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, if a single source can be found for every chart position then it can be added to the end of a sentance and all those tags can be removed. However if a single source cant be found then each one needs a source. As for other citation requests, the editer has removed some giving reasons why the tag isnt needed in the summary, i have monitered these actions and where the reasoning is good i have agreed and let it be. Infact i will link the editer to your point because its very valid. Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 21:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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Note:Amazon.com is not a reliable source and can't be used for anything. Their aim to shift as many CDs so it can be argued that they'll refer to every new record in more-or-less positive terms. indopug (talk) 23:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Noted, will take out, if you see anymore please let us know, cheers. ;-) --— Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 23:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this, TMZ, reliable link. Ive always thought they were a little tacky for an encyclopedia? — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 00:12, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is linking people to random pictures reliable? Italians do it better shirt (JPG file) Madonna - Ciao from Italy (JPG file). Thoughts. --— Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 00:17, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In 2006 a new water bear species (Latin:Tardigrada), Echiniscus madonnae [1] Scanning Electron Microscope photomicrograph of Echiniscus madonnae Michalczyk & Kaczmarek, 2006 was named after Madonna. The paper with the description of E. madonnae was published in the international journal of animal taxonomy Zootaxa in March 2006 (Vol. 1154, pages: 1-36). The authors' justification for the name of the new species was: "We take great pleasure in dedicating this species to one of the most significant artists of our times, Madonna Louise Veronica Ritchie." The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) number of the species is 711164.[2] ITIS - Echiniscus madonnae

Does the above-mentioned quote ("We take great pleasure in dedicating this species to...") come from the above-mentioned article (Zootaxa, Vol. 1154, pages: 1-36)? If so, then I'd say that there is a strong case to be made that the species is named after the artist known as Madonna. Majoreditor (talk) 01:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have no idea sorry. How can we find out other than buying the article somehow? — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 02:00, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Time to delist?

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Is it appropriate to delist this article yet, the review was opened on May 16, the article is still way off GA standard and hasnt seen much in the way of improvement in recent days. Thoughts welcome. Cheers. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 15:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How much longer is this review gonna last> I see a lot of stuff that can be cut down, to reduce amount of text and enhance readability. For eg: "It produced five successful singles: "Live to Tell" (U.S. #1), "Papa Don't Preach" (U.S. #1), "Open Your Heart" (U.S. #1), "True Blue" (U.S. #3) and "La Isla Bonita" (U.S. #4)" can be cut down to just "It produced five singles that broke into the Top 5 of the Hot 100." There is no need to list the chart position or even name every single she's released (becaause she has so many), that's what a discography does; only mention it if it is famous for other reasons. Eg: "Papa Don't Preach" and single teenage mother controversy.
A whole paragraph to her movie career gives undue weight to it, besides its mostly just a list names. How about "In addition to her music career, Madonna has also acted in a number of films. Although her performances have mostly been critically panned, her titular role in Evita (1996) won her a Golden Globe award." If you agree to my suggestion of cutting down details (chief culprits are often lists of names), I'd be glad to help. A list of her studio albums (discography) is pretty much mandatory BTW. indopug (talk) 08:43, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Cut out the numbers. Ultra! 09:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
A paragraph about her film career is not undue weight. The woman has been in 22 films. Trim if you must but the article and the lead cannot due without an overview of her films. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 09:03, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Trimmed down. Nothing except Golden Globe is significant enough for lead. About the singles listing: I know there are many but it's rare that one album produces five or six hits. So those lines are mentioned. Ultra! 09:13, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Good point. It must be concisely mentioned to avoid many {{Citation needed}} tags. Its annoying right? --Efe (talk) 08:51, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Ultra! 09:15, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can we agree upon the uniform usage of the Billboard charts at Allmusic ref, Allmusic is not a user-contributed site and is one of the most reliable websites on the internet (if you see the page, they say the chart info is courtesy of Billboard). Since all the chart positions are in that one Almusic page, its so much simpler, neater and more compact to just use that on ref. indopug (talk) 14:31, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, agree, just make sure what written in the sources maches the claims in the article before adding it as a source. Also remember madonna new album, needs more detail. Its underperforming against her confessions album but is still a hit. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 15:35, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Have you all read allmusic's privacy policy? It gathers info from logged in users. Ultra! 18:39, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Why not use this billboard link more, youve already used it at least twice in the article, it seems to be a definitive list of her singles positions. Its already formatted correctly in the article so you only have to use the <"ref name"> See link here. Will this link help? — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 18:56, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article is set up to use the link, if you what to use that billboard link you only need to use <ref name = billboardcharts/> as your source. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 19:07, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Updated assessments

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  • Comment. The article now meets many of the concerns raised. From my point of view, the main remaining issues are minor. One is the formatting of the references. It was pointed out above that the use of cite templates is not a GA requirement. That is true. However, citations should be formatted consistently, and a plain external link is not enough: cite templates are one way to achieve such consistency. Another issue is that the article may need a copyedit. It is easy for the prose to become bloated and tortuous when multiple editors revise content. I've trimmed the legacy section, but I'm not ready to support listing until a couple of reviewers with copyediting experience have given the article a once-over. I could be one of them. Geometry guy 20:32, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Im still concerned about formatting, either needs to be a basic level of neatness weither it be through templates or some other method. The article needs a copy edit and the new album details need updating. We still need to actually read the sources and ensure the source backs up the claim, its been time consuming enough just checking all the sources manually and reading the article. The sources might be of good quailty now but I have deep suspicitions that not all of them support the claims. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 20:46, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I examined six citations picked at random, and they all checked out fine. However, I agree that it's best to audit as many as possible. Equally as important is to make sure that the citations are from reliable sources. Majoreditor (talk) 01:48, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes all sources now come from reliable places, ive checked that much ;-), however now me have to make sure that whats written in the article accurately reflects these sources. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 01:51, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've checked about nine of them at random so far, and the sources all support the assertions. However, several of the citations aren't properly formatted. Some of them are just hyperlinks. This will need to be addressed before the article is up to standard. Majoreditor (talk) 01:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there seems to be some confusion over what degree of formatting is minimally required for GA. Giggy pointed out that formatting isnt compulsary for GA but they look really messy, something has to be done. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 02:07, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, the article still needs copyediting. I'm finding numerous issues from punctuation to half-baked prose. I fixed a couple of problems, but there's plenty more. Majoreditor (talk) 02:05, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The whole Billboard/Allmusic thing again: having worked on two featured list discographies and regularly reviewed at FLCs, I can tell you for a fact that, oddly enough, the Allmusic charted singles list for an artist is almost always complete, while Billboard often don't list some of the older entries. Why? I guess because they reserve some stuff for their pay-only part of the site. For example, none of Madonna's 1983 singles (maybe others too) have been listed at Billboard's site. I think 200+ FAs and FLs will vouch for Allmusic's reliability by the way. In any case, the Allmusic page acknowledges that "Chart information courtesy of Billboard.com © 2006 VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.", so there's no doubt. indopug (talk) 20:02, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • KeepThis article requires an inordinate amount of citation and much of that has been done. I think a few citations might be necessary here and there, but for an article requiring a gross amount:) of citations just to retain good article status the editors have done a good job. Furthermore, any article getting 20,000 hits a day, has the additional vandalism concern and contrary editor problems. This article is now very worthy of good status.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 01:27, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • The number of hits is irrelevant to GA status, and vandalism is not part of the criteria. It should not influence an article's GA-worthiness. giggy (:O) 02:46, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Agree with Giggy, infact ive had this article on my watchlist for 3 weeks now, monitering EVERY edit. There hasnt been a single instance of vandalism.... unless you count fan gush and cruft as vandalism? Popularity should have nothing to do with it. Fundamentally the article needs a copyedit, sources need a minimal degree of formatting, more info on the new album is needed, pov issue need resolving & favourably obsessed fans should be banned from the article until they learn what a reliable source is. Ive seen how the editers on the article behave and im quite sure we will be back here in another four months. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 02:58, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • Comment I am not saying that I vote keep because the article is getting a lot of its. I am saying that in spite of the number of active viewer/editors. Based on this tool May was the third highest month in total of edits for this article since it was crated in 2002. I am just saying that the editors have done a fine job of keeping the page encyclopedic. I have not followed the page closely and none of the last 500 edits are marked rv, but the page is and has been protected.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:11, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
          • Im not so sure they have kept it encyclopedic, like I said I monitered the article. I put about 80 fact tags in the article, a slim majority of the content was simply deleted to avoid having to source. A lot of which seemed like legitimately worthwhile material for the article. To save the article before it was deleted tons of unsourced material was just deleted, I DONT thing thats in the best interest of the article. The information needed sourcing not removing. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 17:00, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Too long

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(<-)This discussion is now so long and twisted it reminds me of FAC :) Are we near to closing or should we try a procedural restart? Majoreditor (talk) 14:37, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well only one, maybe two, people have said "keep", the vast majority have said "delist". Work on the article has slowed to about 4 edits a day and only picks up again when editers are worried we are about to close the reassessment, then we keep it open and the level of work slows down. This is not a game, I, like a number of other edits have invested a lot of time monitering the process, this has now gone on for more than 3 weeks with a consensus to delist. This cannot roll into a 4th week, it should be closed as delist and editers should spend time doing this properly rather than widely deleting unsourced material. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 18:10, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Simply put, no way this is a good article, beginning with the opening paragraph, where someone has described her as a "multi-instrumentalist". That's like describing George Bush as an athlete.

  • Apologies. The length of this discussion is partly my fault for thinking this article could easily be saved. That has proved not to be the case. I read through the article again today and it has multiple problems. The lead is weak, too short, fails to summarize the article, and wastes its energy listing albums. The prose is poor in many places: for instance "During this time she also had a controversial appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman", "In mid-2006, Madonna signed on to become the worldwide face of H&M", "The New York Post claimed animal lovers were "horrified" by Madonna dyeing her sheep for a photograph, and "vilified" for organising pheasant-hunting parties at her estate", "Other promotion of the album will include the Sticky & Sweet Tour due to kick off in August 2008 in Cardiff, Wales", and "The lyrics were themed on the aspects of the American dream, fame, fortune and society".
The notes are still an inconsistently formatted mess. On the other hand, I do believe that the article has improved, and at the GA level, deletion of unsourced material not a bad thing: broadness, not comprehensiveness, is our goal here.
I will close this as delist in the next day or so unless someone beats me to it or there are dramatic developments. Geometry guy 20:36, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
DONE I did all the changes. Ultra! 07:49, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you fixed some things, but barely touched the notes. Your determination to fix issues raised is much appreciated. Here is a list notes which are not well formatted: 5,12,13,15,18,28,35,41,44,46,50,60,66,68,70,74,87,88,89,91,92,96,99, 103,108,110,117,121,122,132,137,140,144,155,157,163,168,169,175,185. The main issue is websources: the title of the webpage/article should be linked, with the publisher and/or website supplied afterwards; there should be no raw urls on display. Geometry guy 10:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
DONE No raw url+title left now. Any more things to fix? Ultra! 12:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You need to correctly format 5,83,85,148,160,161,170. On 107 the date has a mistake. None of the sources you formatted give the details of who wrote the piece (and please dont write names out all in capitals!). You need more details on the new album. We need the US peak position, first week US sales, first week worldwide sales. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 16:50, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DONE sales, format, peak, names Ultra! 22:12, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The formatting of the references has been improved, but there are still many inconsistencies: I refer to this version in the following. First, print sources should provide a year: 22, 27, 41, 142 and 149 don't. Second, published books should provide only a year, not a full date: a full date should only be provided for newspaper articles and other periodicals (and websites if possible). This may be an issue for 26, 33, 45, 50, 54, 56, 103, 140, 144, 166 and/or 171. There is also some inconsistency about where the date is placed for newspaper articles and other periodicals: this should be consistent. In addition, I noticed general inconsistencies still with 34, 40, 43, 68, 102, 116, 118 and 135. I hope that the next time this is "DONE" and I go through it again, I will only find two or three remaining issues, not over 20. Please self-review for consistency as well. Geometry guy 20:43, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Fixe inconsistencies. About placement of date - it depends on the cite templates. Their origdate, date, archivedate, accessdate are all at different locations. Ultra! 08:36, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I still see plenty of problems: I encourage you to read through the references yourself. I understand about the various dates. Part of the problem is that cite news and cite web format differently (which is stupid, but nevermind) so if you want to use cite news at all, you have to use it consistently for all news sources. Since most of these are weblinks, it might be easier to use cite web throughout. 27, 33 and 55 have no author. 67 has no date. And I think a better way to format the album notes (44 and 102) would be helpful. Geometry guy 10:07, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Added authors wherever they exist, put date, and album notes need not be cited as video template is already in use. Ultra! 11:03, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Consistancy needed i see both US and U.S. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 00:11, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Have some major concerns after going through the article today. I found multiple instances where the sources didnt support the claims made in the article or inflated what the source was saying in a sneaky manner. For example one sentance said ".... went to #1 in the charts". However it wasnt the billboard chart but some obscure radio chart. Pros are poor to the extent that certain sections dont make sense. The article isnt neutral but ive improved that today. I even see a source retrieved date that says 1984. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 03:30, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for checking, Realist. Can you please tell us which particular citation numbers don't support claims? Majoreditor (talk) 03:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The ones I found I changed myself but I only looked through the career section (where I found 15-20 errors) because thats where I expected to find most of the fan craft. I havent checked the other half of the article though/yet. That would be the lead, early life (pre 1982), legacy, influences and all the personal life sections. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 03:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Madonna (entertainer)

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: kept There are still some minor nigglings, and I encourage indopug to keep working with the article's editors if he wishes to, but general consensus here is that it's back up to GA standards. giggy (:O) 01:33, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The length of this page (59kb) was getting slightly ridiculous, so I've restarted it. Find everything so far here. I'll ping everyone involved. giggy (:O) 11:58, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Restart a GAR? Is this even legal? :) indopug (talk) 12:05, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If FAC can, I figure we can. I mean, worst comes to worst, pages load faster. Dang. :) giggy (:O) 12:20, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is one of FAC's weaker procedures, and there are indications that a more appropriate archiving procedure will be used in the future. GAR discussions can be closed as "No consensus" and then a new discussion can be started. This is what I will do. Please bear with me. Geometry guy 18:10, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Now done. Please adjust your watchlists accordingly. Geometry guy 18:30, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Cheers, glad to have that other LONG nightmare off my watchlist lol. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 18:32, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
A restart? Nice. The preceding one would generate no concensus. --Efe (talk) 07:41, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The references are still in desperate need of consistent formatting. It doesn't much matter which format you use, as long as the references include the pertinent information (last access date, publisher, author, etc.) and are written in the same manner. --Kakofonous (talk) 13:19, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Can you point out which ones need formatting? We closed this issue in last GAR. Further, most web sources here don't mention any author and dates vary per the cite templates being used (accessdates are used only if a url is present, not for the books or DVDs.) Ultra! 14:18, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not a requirement; it could only be a suggetion in the context of GA. Maybe you want to check the reliability of the sources used to conform GA's second criterion? --Efe (talk) 05:47, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist The article is huge and goes into unnecessary detail. No need to even mention lists of singles (""Live to Tell", "Papa Don't Preach", "Open Your Heart" and "True Blue""); that's what a discography is for. Only mention a single if it is to be significantly discussed. For example: "Like a Prayer" and the Vatican. To further cut down the size, replace the Billboard refs with the Allmusic one; although come to think of it, we should not really be dealing with chart positions so much (remember discographies?). Too much recentism in the article too, sadly: "Madonna opposes United States President George W. Bush" indopug (talk) 13:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Read the first GAR again. These are successful single in one album, so they get a line. All Music is not suitable for a BLP as it collects info from any registered Tom, Dick and Harry. Check its policy pages. And is there excess of charting stated? Just Top 10 numbers! Finally recentism isn't even a GA criterion. All your points are invalid. Ultra! 14:14, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
200+ FAs use Allmusic (plenty BLPs too; no objections are raised ever about it at FAC either), re-add the studio album list as its mandatory and standard, summary style is a GA criterion (so it shouldn't go into too much detail in some periods of her life), Wikipedia hates the United World chart now (AfD and all), and stop shouting. indopug (talk) 15:05, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Madonna has so many top ten singles that mentioning them all becomes excessive. indopug (talk) 15:06, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
People cannot put size complaints and refraing from going to the navs for her discog. And I don't get it: Should size be allowed to affect comprehensiveness of a VA? And Wikipedia does not aim at hating anything, even if UWC gets deleted it's a record anyway. Ultra! 15:10, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The singles, I trimmed some. Ultra! 15:10, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No size is not a consideration, excessive detail is. A biography is supposed to critically discuss her career, chart position after chart position (esp for a consistent chart topper like Madonna) will affect the readability of the prose and the interest of the reader. By "hate" I was being figurative; anyway, including her "record" on the UWC is about as notable as her being the top-selling artist on "indopug's list of fantastic record sales". The UWC has been deemed completely unrecognised and their system of charting has been found to be rather arbitrary. Their opinion/statistics on anything doesn't matter one bit; just like mine doesn't. indopug (talk) 15:20, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK, find a source for "Indopug's list of fantastic record sales"! Let'sa just leave it aside (! line won't harm anything). And I am removing non-notable singles. Ultra! 15:33, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm done till Ray of light. Ultra! 15:41, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) OK. find a reliable source for the UWC thing. That mediatraffic thing is not reliable by the way. I can't understand why you would want to go against community consensus regarding the UWC and include the chart; there are plenty of non-notable publications out there, each with their own ""Best. Artist. Ever", some apparently even backed up by "statistics". indopug (talk) 15:44, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
They're both the same. See this search.[3] Ultra! 15:49, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Let's stick to American charts, they are 16 (not counting country, soul, other genres and multiple Billboards here[4]) They don't contain her as any top record holder. Ultra! 15:54, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oh my head hurts. Back to square one. Ill look through the article AGAIN and collect my list of complaints together. :-( — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 17:05, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist - Sources still need formatting, not pleased with the lead it really doesnt sum up who Madonna is very well, not happy that a lot of worthwhile material was deleted instead of sourced (a lot of it seemed geninuely worthy), pros are poor in some areas. Many sources dont watch up with what the article actually says (as you will see, I investigated this on the previous page... to my alarm). Oh and I removed that United world chart source, its been denounced as unreliable, the site should probably be added to the spam list to stop people using it. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 17:27, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Current refs need retrieve dates #19,20,58,93,107 & 108. #37 & 128 have retrieve errors. #23 should be MTV, not Mtv. #42 looks really bare and simplistic. For #48, you cant use 50 pages from a book. It is impossible for someone to check that. You either need to be more specific/find another source/remove. Also looking at the refs, a lot of them have extra sentances tagged on giving extra details, I dont think its needed and makes the article longer and the sources messy. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 18:08, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Dates, spell, pg nos., ref quotes done. Note - #42 is the way to cite a book whose full detail is already in earlier refs. Ultra! 20:08, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK, the refs are good now (you could trim #204 a little), ive crossed out that as one of my concerns although others might disagree. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 20:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Trimmed 204 further, But how to improve lead? I added a Catholic church line. Ultra! 20:54, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For a 90K article the lead should be four paragraphs, with each paragraph at least as long (on average) as the current three. Please read WP:LEAD and expand the lead while concentrating on the most significant aspects discussed in the body of the article. Geometry guy 21:08, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Agree, I will add that currently the lead doesnt touch on the latter parts of the article. The lead should be an overview of the article in some respects. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 21:11, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
What latter parts? One line on her two marriages, (one on adoption?), Kabbalah, Politics... Which one gets the most importance so as to be in lead? Ultra! 21:24, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Politics definately not important. Marriage/children/adoption should be included (she is a human being not just a singer remember :-)). The kabbalah thing might be worth including as its her religion and is important to who she is, however only 1 line on that. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 21:33, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Family and adoption done. What next? Ultra! 22:34, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Add some stuff about kabbalah, then its best to wait and see wat others thing of the lead. --— Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:39, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Please note that formatting references are not a requirement in the context of GA. --Efe (talk) 05:55, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep formatting of sources is an FAC issue. Here the standard as 2(a) reads is that information be sourced. not sourced consistently. In terms of the WP:LEAD, her performing career is adequately represented in the lead. What is missing in my opinion is her role as a fashion/style icon and trendsetter. In this regard, people like Joanne Gair should be linked to the article. Joanne who? you ask. That you have to ask is why it is not sufficiently deficient to be knocked down from WP:GA. Many a good GA has substantive omissions that are not adequately sourced. For a biography that is sufficiently complex that it could exceed the limits of WP:SIZE if fully chronicled to WP:FA standards, there will always be omitted substance at a GA level. The way to read this restarted article is to ignore deleted material from prio GAR discussion and look at the article as it stands. I am not going to investigate deleted material. If it is looks good now, I don't care what has been deleted.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 17:45, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Your right not EVERYTHING needs a source, but I at least expect to see whats in the source match the claims the article makes.— Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 17:49, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Do you even know what pop culture is? Personal life isn't even culture! These things aren't unnecessary. Ultra! 07:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And what makes you say there is no critical analysis? Lots of critic words are in already. Ultra! 07:49, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Instead of going on for three section about the details of the personal life, which no professional biography would do, you can use that space to gather critical analysis of her voice, register, vocal range, musical genres and themes, and choreography. Most of the "critical analysis" in the article only mentions if critics gave an overall pass or fail, without mentioning her voice, production, arrangement, etc. Her personal relationships are all mentioned within the body of the article, they shouldn't be repeated in a separate section. her work at the kabbalah center is fancruft at best. its not a notable aspect of her career as an entertainer and typically only gathers media coverage when people attempt to mock her for it (hence pop culture). The adoption controversy is basically the same thing. The media only cared cause it involved Madonna, it had no impact on her overall career. The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 08:15, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry but you have zero understanding of what a BLP is. It has to cover all about the person's life. And Kabbalah is fancruft? You're just wasting my time. Ultra! 13:32, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Kabbalah, in and of itself is not fancruft- the media coverage of Madonna's practice is. Its not something she set out of be shoved into the public eye.The Bookkeeper (of the Occult) 23:50, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Asking for critical analysis of the singer's style is of FA requirement. Maybe a little touch on what music she sings and lyrics she write. --Efe (talk) 06:04, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Half of them are missing details on their Auther and retrieve date. Some still arent formatted at all I believe. Ive seen one that had a retrieve date of 1984 lol. Even though that do have retrieved dates have inconsistancies (Retrieved April 23, 2006) & (Retrieved on 2008-02-09). Tke a look at some of the refs in the early-mid 130's as an example or poor ones. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 05:43, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For the 100th time I say this: all sources listed don't have authors. And retrieve dates are meant for urls only. Ultra! 07:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Correct and I can see web sources with NO retrieve date.— Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 08:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Correct. Retrieve dates are meant to online sources or offline sources with online links. --Efe (talk) 07:52, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Let me clarify. Are there specific citations which don't support corresponding statements in the article? In other words - are there citation issues other than format-related problems? Thanks, Majoreditor (talk) 06:12, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I would have to personally finish checking the other half of the article (I guess no1 else will help) to answer that question. My gut instinct would say definately yes considering what I saw in the 1st half. Unfortunately it takes about 2 hours to check half the article for its accuracy. I can get it done later today hopefully. Sorry for miss understanding your original question. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 06:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments to refresh

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These are comments to help refresh the page.

Hiding comments from Efe (talk · contribs)
  • The second para under the section Legacy: "Madonna has been lauded as a talented artist by numerous music critics,[162] although others have described her lyrics as simple, or even dull." This is the opening sentence of the paragraph but the following sentences talk of sexualities and related subjects not really related to the opening sentence.
  • First para under Relationships section: "In a 1991 interview with Vanity Fair, Madonna said, "I'd go, 'Warren, did you really chase that girl for a year?!?' And he’d say, 'Nah, it's all lies.' I should have known better. I was unrealistic, but then, you always think you're going to be the one." I think it would be better to write this in prose, not in quotation. The quoted material is somewhat informal and deviates in topic. What is the significance of this part in relation to Madonna hooking up with Beatty while working on the film?
  • After Andy Bird, Madonna gave birth to another baby: "On August 11, 2000, Madonna gave birth to a son, Rocco John Ritchie in Los Angeles with Guy Ritchie, whom she had met in 1999 through mutual friends Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler.[182] On December 22, 2000, Madonna and Ritchie were married in Scotland." While there is chronological order, readers are disjointed because another baby just pops up or another lover came in. Also, in the first line, it would read like both Madonna and Guy Ritchie gave birth to their son; I think it needs some rephrasing.
  • "As of 2008, Madonna resides in Marylebone, London and her country estate in Tollard Royal, Wiltshire, with Ritchie and their three children." Three children? Is the other one adopted? I only read two in the preceding part: Maria Ciccone Leon and Rocco John Ritchie?
  • "Since the late 1990s, Madonna has been a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre and a disciple of its head Rabbi Philip Berg and his wife Karen." This sentence defines the section and it would be very helpful to also define what Kabbalah Centre is.
  • "It received favorable reviews by critics.[140] The album was criticized for being "an attempt to harness the urban market" Favorable? Why it is criticized in the following sentence.
  • I Am Because We Are was lauded by critics. The Guardian said that she "came, saw and conquered the world's biggest film festival." Lauded by critics… but only supported by a single review.
  • "The ceremony, which also included fellow inductees John Mellencamp, Leonard Cohen, the Ventures, and the Dave Clark Five, took place on March 10, 2008.[131] Madonna was inducted into the Hall by Justin Timberlake." I think it would be better to remove those fellow inductees and Mr. Timbelake. Fancrufty.
  • Here: "In 2000, Madonna starred in The Next Best Thing. She contributed two songs to the film's soundtrack, "Time Stood Still" and the international hit "American Pie", a cover version of the 1970s Don McLean single.[85] Madonna's eighth studio album, Music, was released in 2000 and debuted at #1 on the U.S. album charts.[86] It produced three hit singles; "Music", "Don't Tell Me" and "What It Feels Like for a Girl".[87] The latter having a video which depicts crime, was banned by MTV and VH1.[88]" Hit is a very vague word. You can probably specify if it reached number one in the UK (or possible in the Philippines), for it to be considered an international hit or a hit particularly. What about the crime; too much detail.
  • Here: "1998, Madonna was signed to play the role of violin teacher Roberta Guaspari Demetras in the film Music of the Heart and studied for many months to play the violin but left the project before filming began, citing "creative differences" with director Wes Craven." Any importance of her attempt to study violin?
  • Hmp…. I believe the other child is David Banda? I just read the succeeding sub-section. But the preceding comment of this should be fixed; I mean the part "As of 2008, Madonna resides in Marylebone, London and her country estate in Tollard Royal, Wiltshire, with Ritchie and their three children". It would be better to mention in this part the adoption then the controversy in the following sub-section.
  • "In 1996, Madonna’s most critically successful film, Evita, was released.[71] She portrayed the main part of Eva Perón, a role first played by Elaine Paige in the West End.[72] The film's soundtrack produced two successful singles, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" and "You Must Love Me". "You Must Love Me" won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song From a Motion Picture the following year." Is Madonna part of the singles "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" and "You Must Love Me"? Or just a plain soundtrack to the film with no Madonna involved?
  • There are excessive details like Madonna released her compilation with two three four new songs etc. I think it would be better to just say she released a compilation if those songs did not make history or add notability.
  • This part is somewhat a collection of disjointed or not well-arranged ideas: "Madonna's 1998 studio album Ray of Light debuted at #2 in the U.S.[74] E! praised its lyrical depth.[75] All Music Guide called it her "most adventurous record."[76] The album produced three U.S. top 10 singles; "Frozen", "Ray of Light" and "Nothing Really Matters".[citation needed] It won three Grammy Awards for "Best Dance Recording," "Best Pop Album," and "Best Recording Package,"[77] and was nominated for Record and Album of The Year. the album's title track won a Grammy for "Best Short Form Music Video."[78] "Frozen" was adjudicated to be a plagiarism of Belgian songwriter Salvatore Acquaviva's 1993 song "Ma Vie Fout L'camp".[79] The album has been ranked #363 on Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.[80] Microsoft used the Ray of Light title track in its advertising campaign Yes you can, to introduce Windows XP."
  • "That year, she also appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, using abusive words and taking off her underwear." Is abusive your point of view? A potential POV. Needs sourcing and/or attribution.
  • Needs some sourcing: Warner Bros Records released the video as a video single—the first of its kind.
  • In the first para under the second section, the sentence "Madonna's then-boyfriend John "Jellybean" Benitez remixed and rearranged them." is not well-established. I think there is a gap. Although this is not about the album, it would be better to touch on why the album was remixed and rearranged. Or better not mention about it anymore.
  • "They revoked the commercial and allowed Madonna to keep her $5 million dollar, as the contract was nullified.[45]" There is something wrong with this sentence. Madonna was allowed to keep her dollars because the contract was nullified?
  • "Rescue Me" became the highest-debuting single by a female artist in U.S. chart history, entering at #15 and peaking at #9." Miss B’s "Ring the Alarm" debuted at number twelve.
  • Needs some minor fixes throughout like missing commas and tweak-need punctuations, improper format, and the like. I will try to fix some.
  • The lead does not substantially summarizes the article. Madonna is consistently mentioned throughout in the article her being “sexually oriented” is not mentioned in the lead. I mean the backlash from religious sectors, which really define what kind of music/lyric Madonna sings. It would really help; as a non-Madonna fan and as a mere reader, I summarizes the article as Sex. =) (Also, there is no mention of her relationships/personal life.)
  • The article lacks something: Madonna's "musical identity". Lyrics are no requirement anymore in this GAR because there are mentions of lyrics (like that of having sexual innuendos and the like); but with a whooping eleven albums, I believe Madonna has established a music that somewhat identifies her in the industry. I think it would be better to add a little (not very detailed, though; this is GA). You can probably merge this to the influences section, like "Influences and style". Writing this would provide her being identified as pop artist, as mentioned in the lead.
  • BTW, she is identified as songwriter and author but nothing could be found in the article. I think songwriting could be merged in the suggested section above? The author? What about her authorship? Author of books? I cannot find it. Maybe she is only an occasional author and would be better if not mentioned in the lead.
  • There are no mentions of her being a fashion designer? And using guitar and percussion? (As reflected in the infobox. But these requests are up to you. You can add or not. But in FAC, I believe this will be scrutinized).
  • The whole article, especially in the career section, seems to be suffering from proseline. Although paragraphs are not stubby, almost all begin with a date.
  • There are inconsistencies: "number one" and "# 1". I would prefer the former. Also, there are some MoS issues on numbers. 1 to 9 should be in words. Anyway, I’ll try fixing them. But please help me. =)
  • What happened to the commercial and/or critical performance of Madonna's debut album? Another instance of gap.
  • What is the relevance of this part to her recording and film career: "In 1988, city officials in the town of Pacentro began to construct a 13-foot (4 m) statue of Madonna in a bustier.[41] The statue commemorates the fact that her ancestors had lived in Pacentro.[42]" It could be transferred to related section below.
  • Down there, these 2 line would make a hopelessly stubby para! Any better suggestion. Ultra! 07:48, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • As suggested. This topic is just a mere addition in that part (the present) and not an additional idea. So it would be better to put it in the right place, and merge to related para under related section. --Efe (talk) 08:51, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are some album releases that go nowhere. For instance, Bedtime Stories is only supported by released singles. How about the commercial performance?
  • And what is the relevance of the plagiarism?
  • This part seems to be fitting in the related section below: "In January 2005, Madonna performed a cover version of the John Lennon song "Imagine" on the televised U.S. aid concert "Tsunami Aid", which raised money for the tsunami victims in Asia.[107] In July 2005, Madonna performed at the Live 8 benefit concert in London, run in support of the aims of the UK's Make Poverty History campaign and the Global Call for Action Against Poverty.[108] Her performances of "Like a Prayer", "Ray of Light" and "Music" were included in the Live 8 DVD.[109]"
  • Second para under the same sub-section: "In September 1994, while walking in Central Park, Madonna met fitness trainer Carlos Leon who became her personal trainer and lover.[179] On October 14, 1996, Madonna gave birth to Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon in Los Angeles, California. Madonna then dated Andy Bird…." There is a gap. Madonna had relationship with Leon and then just gave birth and then date another man named Andy Bird.
  • "Singer and humanitarian activist, Bono, defended her by saying, "Madonna should be applauded for helping to take a child out of the worst poverty imaginable and giving him a better chance in life."[193] Her friend Gwyneth Paltrow also credited her as a inspiration for future adoption plans.[194]" Seems fancrufty?
    • Why? I've said the adoption is essentially reception. Right now, there isn't any detail about what words tabloids used (nor do I think it's needed). Blatant fancruft would have been the words of blogs on fansites or rather any third person who comments on all this in some interview (Eg. Angelina Jolie praising her act on people.com but still panning it as illegal). Bono and Paltrow are closely related. Ultra! 07:48, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • "If Scientology makes Tom Cruise happy," she said, "I don't care if he prays to turtles." This part is fancrufty/excessive. Others do not know who Cruise is and the quotation itself is very vague and disjointing (not to mention it not being so related).
  • Political views section is not well-established. It is a mere of a collection of political views. Seems not important.
  • Merged Ultra! 07:48, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, with these suggestions and minor fixes, the article is going to earn the GA quality. --Efe (talk) 06:02, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. I agree with many of Efe's suggestions. However, I wonder if this article is being held to standards which exceed GA criteria. Majoreditor (talk) 18:42, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Hardly, GA is getting harder and harder - like it should. I just think its attracting a lot of people thus you get a lot more ideas/complaints. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 18:47, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • I firmly disagree with both of of the first two statements: GA is not getting harder and harder; nor should it. It is the job of FA to push the quality envelope; the job of GA is to provide a minimum quality threshold. For instance the GA inline citation requirements are considerably weaker than they were a year ago.
      Ideas for improving the article are great, but the list-delist consensus is based on the GA criteria, not on whether editors like the article or not, nor on how hard editors think GA should be. Geometry guy 19:57, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Let me correct myself, GA isnt getting harder but reviewers are getting better (for the most part lol). I dont think anyone here is saying delist because they dislike madonna/the article. That said in recent hours the main editer has made a lot of pleasing improvements and aside some concerns about the lead ..... — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 20:16, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Final update

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Thanks to the contributions of many reviewers and editors, this article has been greatly improved. Some of the issues raised have gone beyond the GA requirements, but it is a good thing that the article has been improved accordingly. However, we need to get back to purely GA issues and close this discussion. I don't see a strong will to delist any more, in which case the article will remain a GA by default. However, it would be much better for GAR to endorse that it meets the criteria (up to a few subjective issues of interpretation) by making further fixes if necessary.

  • I also felt that my suggestion are beyond GA. But its only suggestions. The editor has the freedom to address them or not. But some of those are realy helpful. Like for instance, there are some passages that needs clarification (1a). --Efe (talk) 00:55, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Let me summarize a few remaining issues raised, their relation to the GA criteria, and my view on whether they remain an issue.

  • Inconsistant formatting of references. This is not explicitly in the criteria, but it has been raised frequenty (as a combination of criterion 1 and footnote 2) that there should be some consistency in the references. In my view the current article is still imperfect in this respect, but not enough to delist it (and it has improved greatly). In particular, I don't consider access retrieve dates to be a GA issue.
    • I noted on the above discussions that there concerns are beyond GA. There is a concern raised above if the sources are verifiable; none checked about it. Additionally, no one checked if those sources are reliable. Therefore, there "delist" is invalid. --Efe (talk) 00:55, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Too long, unnecessary detail, recentism. Length is not a GA criterion (and 88K is reasonable anyway), so the relevant issue is broadness and focus (criterion 3). I agree that the article could be improved by a more authoritative approach to the history, and less focus on recent events, but it seems pretty broad to me, and does not digress too much.
    • Agree. What now if its long? The question is if (a) it addresses the main aspects of the topic and (b) it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style). --Efe (talk) 00:55, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The lead doesn't sum up who Madonna is very well. The lead needs both to introduce the subject and summarize the article. This is a GA requirement. The current lead focuses too much on whether Madonna is critically acclaimed or not. In my view it needs a complete rewrite.

I also remain unsure about the proseline aspect of the "relationships" section (aka List of people dated by Madonna). If this and the lead were fixed, I'd be inclined to endorse the article's GA status. If other editors summarize their view below purely in terms of GA criteria, this would be helpful in closing this discussion. Geometry guy 00:03, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I did promise myself that I would stay out of this, but I'm going to make my opinion clear, now that I have had time to reflect on the article, besides I started this mess. Delisting should'nt occur. Lets pretend that the article was always in this (good) condition, I would never dream of seeking a reassessment. No its not the best GA around but delisting really isn't the best option. The LEAD still hits me as weak but its not terrible. It would be better to work on a LEAD, as a group (maybe on the talk page) and let this go. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 23:36, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You're right Mr. --Efe (talk) 01:06, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Its about the only clever thing Ive said all week. :-) — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 01:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Lead?

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Ok What does it exactly need? I think we must decide this finally. Ultra! 10:31, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest you include her music and her lyrics that are sexually-oriented. --Efe (talk) 10:39, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Done Ultra! 19:34, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've attempted to fix the lead myself. My fix indicates the approximate length of a reasonable lead for this article, and also an appropriate structure per WP:MOSBIO and WP:LEAD. I've tried to pick out the most important points from the article, but since I'm completely ignorant about all things Madonna related, I may have got it wrong. Please fix, and also add citations where they seem necessary. If my restructuring is a disaster, revert and try something else. Geometry guy 21:16, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Its good, i will just add... When she was doing SEX and Erotica, not only was it her critical low point but it was also a commercial low point (some people say that "America Life" was her commerical low point, there are mixed opinions on that). Needless to say, the period of SEX, Erotica and Bedtime story was a significant decline commercially. Hopefully you/someone can get that point across, I cant accurately do it myself. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 21:27, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a mention, but it may need cites. Geometry guy 22:18, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
DONE — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:22, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's a pretty crap source. Can you do better? Geometry guy 22:30, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Lol, I just reused one from the relevant part of the article, it only took 3 seconds but I dont mind digging up something stronger. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:47, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I thought that might amuse you :-) Geometry guy 22:51, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
DONE, ive written it so that it shows that the first half of the 90's (extending to Bedtime Stories) was a low point. Billboard is the source. It balances back nicely with her return to form in the late 1990's. Lol, I actually thing the early 90's was some of her best work.. oops! — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 22:59, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It is not uncommon for the most unsuccessful work to be the best! If I ever try to appreciate Madonna, I think I will start there! :-) Geometry guy 23:16, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(←) Okay, so my intention is to close this discussion as "keep with minor reservations". I think the progress on the article deserves much better than a "no consensus" keep-by-default result: it deserves a result which clearly states that the article at this date was basically sound, so that if it deteriorates and is challenged, editors can, as a last resort, revert. I will be away over the weekend, and will be happy to close the reassessment on Monday if there are no significant developments. However, any editor is welcome to close it based on the information here and responses to this comment. Geometry guy 23:16, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Close as Keep - I have no reservations, its a good article. — Realist2 (Come Speak To Me) 23:22, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I also believe, after much work, and many dedicated contributions from reviewers and editors, that this article meets the criteria, Geometry guy 00:06, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I stand by my Keep from above if this section is a reset of some sort.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:41, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The lead is quite awful; not sure why her husbands need to be mentioned nor that long diatribe about how sexually themed her work is. That paragraph which dishes out statistic after statistic to describe how successful she's been can be cut by a sentence or two too. I'll try rewriting the lead the lead to more accurately summarise her entire career and legacy later today. indopug (talk) 03:30, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please read WP:MOSBIO (e.g. #5), and reevaluate your comments in that light. Geometry guy 22:20, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Indopug doesn't like stats in the lead, its not perfect, but this is GA not FA. — Realist2 (Who's Bad?) 01:40, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thelema

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: No action per Majoreditor. Requests for reassessments should address the criteria. Geometry guy 16:10, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have started the process again for a GA status reassessment. Reasons: Someone has taken away the ability for a registered editor to re edit some of the article. The First paragraph is an example of this inability to re edit. Second: There is a strong POV thread thoughout the article especially over the issue to do with Thelema being presented has a religion. This is POV in that there is no agreement in the Thelemic community over what Thelema is or is not. And this hasnt been represented in the article. Thirdly the casual reader is going to be confused by the article. In the same opening paragraph it says Thelema is a "philosophy". Then it presesnts Thlelema as a religion. how can a philosophy be a relgion? Exactly? See the point? Confusing to the casual reader, and needs a more intelligent rewrite. Forth: There is still has been no reason or justification from Geometry guy for why my first request for a reassessment was deemed "inappropriate". The article is a mess.--Redblossom (talk) 08:42, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy close - Your unsuccessful edit was due to user error. You removed text from a quotation inside a footnote. In any case, as you have been repeatedly told, you should not remove cited points of view from the article. Ever. If you believe there are additional points of view not covered, then add them to the article along with citations to reliable sources.
This is a content dispute, not a problem with article quality. That was the reason clearly given by User:Geometry guy when he closed your last invalid request for reassessment less than two weeks ago (Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Thelema/1.


The paragraph is the first paragraph at the top of the page. I want to put in a refernce/citation to counterbalance the POV assertion that Thelema is a religion. The edit page doesnt display the same material on the front page. Why? Again another reason for the GA status to be removed until there is a decent clean up.--Redblossom (talk) 17:41, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Because the text you are modifying is between <ref>...</ref> tags which means it is a footnote! Please learn how to edit Wikipedia before complaining that it doesn't work right! Also, you tried to use a blog or forum post as your source. Such sources are not allowed on Wikipedia. Try to find the pov you are trying to add in a book or magazine, please. See WP:RS. Will in China (talk) 21:27, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just to add to the confusion, in the Aleister Crowley article/page the sub section on Thelema doesnt state Thelema as a religion due to the confusing nature of it. So which article is correct? Another reason the GA status should be removed until there is a coherent clean up.--Redblossom (talk) 19:38, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

John McCain

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Weak keep. The grounds of "Fails NPOV" by the nominator were not generally sustained, although some NPOV problems were found and fixed. Instead the discussion centred around the reliability of the sources, in particular the newspaper articles by Muller (updated by Nowicki). It was accepted that this source is more reliable than first appearances suggest, but that it should be used with caution when matters of opinion are concerned. The current usage is now (only just) careful enough for the GA standard, but may need to be revisited at FAC. Geometry guy 22:14, 3 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • John McCain was listed as having GA status on April 18, 2008. It has now been delisted (sort of, I don't think s/he did it quite correctly) by User:Dr.enh, with the reason "Fails NPOV". I believe that the article still fulfills all the requirements of WP:GAC, including the neutrality criteria #4, and that it has not changed much since it became GA. I therefore challenge the delisting, and would appreciate discussion of it here. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:47, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The review was inadequate and the delisting guidelines were not followed. I recommend restoring GA status for now (and intend to do so later today UTC), but keeping this reassessment open just in case there are genuine GA issues with the article. If this reassessment turns into content dispute or a political battlefield, I will close it with extreme prejudice :-) Geometry guy 08:36, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment It is not only considerate but also necessary that the editor requesting reassessment/deletion elaborate upon the reasoning for this action (a GA reassessment criterion (step #3) requires that a message be left on the article talk page detailing any problems; our votes will be based on circumstances rather than content unless a more extended rationale is provided). Therefore, unless more explanation is given, the article should be returned to GA status without deliberation. Parenthetically, because there have been several edits by various editors since GAN, I think a peer review and/or copy edit would help ease the flow of the article and aid it on its way to FAC. --Eustress (talk) 17:04, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I forgot to mention that we did have a peer review in May, after the good article review.[14]Ferrylodge (talk) 17:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I had a quick look at the article with a view to an early close, but immediately ran into points of concern. First, the lead is rather short and fails to summarize the article. Second, there do seem to be some neutrality and sourcing issues. In particular, the article relies heavily on "The John McCain Report", an Arizona Republic article by Dan Nowicki and Bill Muller, referring to it for matters of opinion and controversial statements. What makes this such a reliable source?
It seems to me that it is cheap journalism, an opinion piece, and a tertiary source which mostly relies on other work, including McCain's own books, for its information. I'm not convinced it is used fairly either: here's the first example I found. From the article: "There, he was a friend and leader for many of his classmates, and stood up for people who were being bullied." From the source:
Extract from The John McCain Report

It's 1955 in Annapolis, Md., and Midshipman John McCain and his roommate, Frank Gamboa, are eating lunch at the mess hall at the U.S. Naval Academy. A first classman, a "firstie" in Navy parlance, begins dressing down a Filipino steward. Gamboa hardly notices this exchange, but young John McCain is paying close attention. Since the steward is an enlisted man, he cannot fight back. The firstie is being a bully, a no-no at the Naval Academy. The man outranks everyone at the table. McCain and Gamboa are barely past being plebes, the school's lowest rank. Fearing trouble, other underclassmen eat quickly and leave. The browbeating continues. Finally, McCain can take no more. "Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size?" McCain blurts out. There is a moment of silent shock at the table. "What did you say?" replies the firstie. "Why don't you stop picking on him?" McCain says. "He's doing the best he can." "What is your name, mister?" snaps the firstie, an open threat to put McCain on report. "Midshipman John McCain the Third," McCain says, looking straight at the upperclassman. "What's yours?"

The firstie saw the look in McCain's eyes. And fled.
It seems to me that a heavily dramatized isolated incident is sourcing a generic claim. This is not the only such example I found.
My eyebrows also raise when I read sentences such as "He survived two airplane crashes and a collision with power lines." Well, we know he survived because he's still alive, so why say it like this: divine providence perhaps? Who was flying those planes? I assume it was McCain, in which case I would expect to read "He crashed two airplanes and flew one into power lines." Notice that this reads completely differently from the point of view of neutrality!
I'm against closing this GAR as "keep" while issues like this can be found so easily. I hope they can be fixed. Geometry guy 08:47, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Geometry guy, thanks for your comments.
    I agree with you that the lead could use some expansion, although I don't think it fails any of WP:WIAGA.
    Regarding the Arizona Republic bio series, yes it's largely a tertiary source that recaps other biographies and newspaper articles (although some of what it recaps, these guys wrote originally in the same paper). But I disagree as to its quality; the Arizona Republic is a respected, mainstream newspaper, akin to the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, etc., and historically it has been more adversarial towards McCain than the national press has. I think it's a good series and that it fairly recaps the material it's presenting (pretty much all of which I've read). It also has the advantage of being freely available online. If necessary, though, almost everything in it could be swapped out for the article's sources.
    Regarding the specific Naval Academy incident, I think our Early life and military career of John McCain article represents this better: "He did not take well to those of higher rank arbitrarily wielding power over him – "It was bullshit, and I resented the hell out of it"[30] – and would sometimes intervene when he saw it being done to others.[10]" The Naval Academy period is hard to summarize in as little length as it's given here in the main article, but I agree that the "and stood up for people who were being bullied" statement is too broad (there would be many times that he didn't). I don't have good alternative wording at the moment though.
    Regarding the plane crashes, again Early life and military career of John McCain goes into much more detail on them and McCain's flying abilities at the time. Lacking McCain's full naval military record, we don't really know whether these incidents were his fault or not. But I've changed it to "He was involved in ..."; hopefully that will sound more neutral to you.
    As for the other problems you easily see, alas you have to list them out, as by definition we haven't recognized them. And thanks again for the comments. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, thanks for the comments. A sentence that Geometry Guy focussed on was: "(1) There, he was a friend and leader for many of his classmates, and (2) stood up for people who were being bullied." This really has two parts, so I've numbered them here. Geometry Guy, I don't think you have explained why there is a problem with (1). The sub-article that we're trying to summarize says stuff like: "Despite his low standing, he was popular and a leader among his fellow midshipmen, in what biographer Robert Timberg called a 'manic, intuitive, highly idiosyncratic way'.[30] ....he was famed for organizing off-Yard activities...." And the reference is to Timberg, The Nightingale's Song, pp. 31–35. So, if you really object to this, please explain why. Likewise, for (2), I'm not convinced there's really a problem. You say that the cited source is "cheap journalism, an opinion piece." But I don't see that you've provided any grounds for that statement. According to Dean Christopher Callahan of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, Bill Muller "was a reporter who upheld the highest standards of accuracy, thoroughness and thoughtfulness. Plus, he was just plain fun to read. We are proud to work with the Republic to establish this scholarship in his name."Ferrylodge (talk) 17:28, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist GA until POV changed to NPOV. My apologies if my call for this Good article reassessment did not follow the correct procedure. (I found the procedure itself to be confusing, but that is another conversation). The John McCain is POV is several ways, and most of the POV biases are listed at [15].
    • John McCain is a maverick.
    • John McCain is a moderate.
    • John McCain is a straight-talker.
    • John McCain is a reformer.
    • John McCain doesn't do things just because they're politically expedient.
    • Just about all you need to know about
    • John McCain's character is that he showed courage as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
    • John McCain has too much integrity to use his war record to his political advantage.
    • John McCain is the lobbyist's biggest enemy.
    • The media honeymoon with John McCain is over.
    • John McCain has considerable foreign policy expertise.

The "Cultural and political image" section of John McCain is problematic. Image from the POV of whom? The US corporate media? The McCain campaign? The Arizona corportate media? The international corporate media? The Obama campaign? While a section of McCain's character might belong in Wikipedia, a section on his image from a particular POV certainly does not belong in Wikipedia.--Dr.enh (talk) 10:51, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

More POV: The section "Political positions" re: economy. See the "Budget, taxes, and deficit" section of Political positions of John McCain for NPOV text.--Dr.enh (talk) 11:00, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

More POV: the sentence "McCain is also opposed to extravagant salaries and severance deals of corporate CEOs" does not belong in the in the "Political positions" section, because it is not a political position of McCain (CEO salary is not within govt purview)., Moreover, the sentence promotes the POV that

    • John McCain is a maverick.
    • John McCain is a moderate.
    • John McCain is a reformer.

RealClearPolitics (an opinion website) is POV, and should not be cited as a source.

--Dr.enh (talk) 11:15, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For starters, I'd suggest you just only list what you object to in this article, not what you object to in the general media coverage. For example, this article doesn't say John McCain is a moderate. The word "moderate" is never used in this article. In fact, the article presents a nice chart of ACU/ADA ratings which shows he's not a moderate. The same applies for most of your long bullet list above. The article never says McCain "has too much integrity to use his war record to his political advantage", the article never says he "is the lobbyist's biggest enemy", the article never says McCain "has considerable foreign policy expertise", and so on. And some of the points in that long bullet list are incoherent ("Just about all you need to know about"?). So why don't you just refer specifically to things that are in the article, not strawmen. Wasted Time R (talk) 11:34, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the corporate CEO pay bit, it seems like McCain is proposing a new SEC regulation (or somesuch) regarding shareholder approval of CEO pay packages, so it is under government purview. Is this important enough to warrant inclusion here in the main article? Hard to say. But the word for this kind of proposal is "populist", not the three you give. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:39, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding Real Clear Politics, it's just used to id a columnist who gives the "conservative but not a conservative" observation. Do you really dispute this observation? If so, I suggest you go back and listen to any conservative talk radio host during the SC and FL primaries (and some still now), who were frothing at the mouth and going bug eyed with their McCain disdain. If you don't think immigration and Gang of 14 and closing Gitmo and campaign finance reform and climate change and whatnot gets these folks worked up, you ain't been listening. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:45, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding budget/taxes/deficit, I'll let Ferrylodge speak to that.
Regarding "Cultural and political image", if you look at the Cultural and political image of John McCain, you can see the areas that that article addresses; it handles multiple points of view, including McCain critics such as Matt Welch. I feel strongly that Wikipedia's treatment of McCain would be grossly incomplete without that article existing. So this section in the main article is trying to summarize that. As I've said on the main article talk page, this summarization is inherently difficult, as it is often the details in that article that are telling, and you lose the details when you summarize. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:33, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding budget/taxes/deficit, Dr.enh says: "More POV: The section 'Political positions'; re: economy. See the 'Budget, taxes, and deficit' section of Political positions of John McCain for NPOV text." It's good that Dr.enh is seeking to compare what's in the main John McCain article with what's in the Political positions of John McCain sub-article. After all, the former is supposed to be consistent with the latter. So let's compare, shall we?
The main John McCain article says: "On the economy, McCain would make the Bush tax cuts permanent instead of letting them expire, he would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax so as to assist the middle-class, he would double the personal exemption for dependents, reduce the corporate tax rate, and offer a new research and development tax credit."
The Political positions of John McCain sub-article says: "In summary, McCain would make the Bush tax cuts permanent instead of letting them expire, he would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax in order to assist the middle-class, he would double the personal exemption for dependents, reduce the corporate tax rate, and offer a new research and development tax credit.[54]"
So, I'm kind of mystified by why Dr.enh thinks the latter excerpt is NPOV, whereas the former is POV. But, then again, I'm mystified by a lot of what has been said and done recently.Ferrylodge (talk) 18:20, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - while I have not read the article in full myself, let me summarize: I believe that if someone wishes a page to be delisted, the onus is on that person to explain why. However, the reasoning provided by Dr.enh above is entirely awful. He cites a left-wing think tank to explain "media myths" about McCain, and yet most of those "myths" aren't even in this article anyway. With all due respect to Dr.enh, this appears to simply come down to a case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT because it doesn't say enough bad stuff about him. The Evil Spartan (talk) 20:36, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    The delist was poorly done and may well be a case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT, but it has been overturned already (the article remains listed). The article was brought to GAR by Wasted Time R not by Dr.enh. At GAR we are obliged to assess articles brought here according to the criteria, and not according to the reasons they were brought here. If GAR keeps an article that does not meet the criteria because the grounds were spurious, then it is (on a much smaller scale!) acting like the Supreme Court tolerating a breech of the first amendment because the charge that the fifth amendment had been breeched was incorrect!
    Uhh, just to repeat for the record, the only reason I brought the article to GAR is because as I read the (confusing as hell) instructions, it was the only way to overturn Dr.enh's unilateral action. Wasted Time R (talk) 21:47, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    The instructions are going to be revised soon, but you were right to bring the article here. I just wanted to draw attention to this for the sake of those who state "Keep. Bad faith nomination", when in fact your nomination was in perfectly good faith! Geometry guy 22:54, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Hence, comments here which are not based on the criteria will be disregarded, while those which address the criteria are most welcome. I encourage you to read the article in full and add your view. :-) Geometry guy 21:26, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment (continued). Thanks to Wasted Time R and Ferrylodge for helpful replies (and a couple of fixes to the article). I'm sorry I didn't have time to read the spinout article on McCain's early life before: I've looked at it now, and I agree that it handles the issues raised in a much better way. However, the fact that a spinout has good sources does not mean that we should tolerate poor sources in a summary section.
I am sure that the Arizona Republic is a fine newspaper, but this particular bio, as Wasted Time R puts it, is "largely a tertiary source that recaps other biographies and newspaper articles". I appreciate that it is not pro-McCain: I can see that it contains a great deal of criticism of McCain's character and integrity. It isn't anti-McCain either, but that doesn't mean it is neutral and unopinionated, hence reliable! This isn't Goldilocks and the three bears!!
On the contrary, it is full of opinion and interpretation. I provided the evidence of its nature already in one quote: just read it. There you will see an event from 50 years prior to the article described in colourful present tense language, such as "McCain can take no more", "McCain blurts out", "There is a moment of silent shock at the table", "The firstie saw the look in McCain's eyes. And fled."
This is not journalism; it is theatre. Even the punctuation gives it away.
There are other passages in the article with a similar flavour, which I'd be happy to quote if this one example is not convincing enough.
Let me be clear. I am not against using this source to support uncontroversial facts. I am not against it being used to illustrate opinions, as long as the article states, "According to the Arizona Republic,..." or something similar. I am not against it being used to provide a second source (available on line) for material where a more reliable source is also provided. However, this tertiary biography is not suitable as the only source for any material which requires a reliable secondary source according to the good article criteria. At FAC, you will have even more trouble. Each reference will have to be tracked back to its original source, just as the "friend and leader" reference has now been sourced to [Timberg, The Nightingale's Song, pp. 31–35]. If the track back is a book of John McCain, you need to rethink!
Here's another example to demonstrate that this is not an isolated incident. From the article: "During this period in Florida, McCain had extramarital affairs, the McCains' marriage began to falter..." This is all prior to the 1979 start of his relationship with Cindy Lou Hensley. So what does the source say?
In 1979, John McCain came face to face with his future.
He was in Hawaii, attending a military reception. While there, he met a young, blond former cheerleader from Phoenix named Cindy Hensley.
In other words, the allegation of multiple affairs is unsourced, contrary to WP:BLP.
I insist that the lead fails WP:LEAD, which is a GA requirement. It has nothing on his personal life, for example. Finally, let me remark that reading the early history spinout made it clear to me that McCain was the pilot during the three accidents mentioned. The article still glosses over this.
I know that the editors involved are experts at maintaining stability and neutral point of view in articles such as this. You need to sharpen up your act on this one. Geometry guy 22:54, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've tried again on the early crashes bit, see what you think. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:05, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The "During this period in Florida ..." bit had the wrong cite, it should have been Timberg not AZ. Have fixed. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:10, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WTR, it wasn't a wrong cite. Here is the cite that you say was wrong. It says: "Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs."Ferrylodge (talk) 23:15, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for clarifying: that still isn't quite the same thing as saying McCain had extramarital affairs before 1979. No doubt he did, but we need sources which make that explicit in order to say it. Geometry guy 23:25, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind having additional refs, but I think you're plainly incorrect. McCain was only in Jacksonville years before 1979.
Additionally, Geometry Guy, you cite stuff like the following from the Muller/Nowicki profile: "McCain can take no more", "McCain blurts out", "There is a moment of silent shock at the table", "The firstie saw the look in McCain's eyes. And fled." As you know, none of this is included in this John McCain article. Rather, your point is that such stuff indicates unreliability of Muller/Nowicki. I respectfully disagree. Such material is standard fare in biographies. Nowicki/Muller aren't purporting to be writing a news report, but rather were purporting to write a multi-chapter profile.
Muller/Nowicki is a combination of a tertiary and secondary source. Even if it were a pure tertiary source, that's not necessarily any problem at all. "Tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary sources may be more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others."[16].Ferrylodge (talk) 23:28, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not plainly incorrect: your information only confirms that McCain's marriage was falling apart before 1979; the admission of extramarital affairs is a separate sentence with no date attached — sometimes affairs happen after a marriage goes wrong rather than before (call me naive :). Anyway, no big deal: I just want to be sure explicit claims are supported by explicit sources, not implicit ones.
I agree that Nowicki/Muller are not claiming to write anything other than their own profile of McCain for the stimulation of their readers' interest, and I have no criticism of their article from that point of view: it is an entertaining read and presents an interesting point of view on the subject. I also agree that tertiary sources can be helpful. None of this is any reason to assert matters of opinion as fact without providing reliable secondary sources. Every use of Nowicki/Muller needs to be checked if you want a chance at FAC. That's just friendly advice :-) Geometry guy 00:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand. You say that it's wrong to "assert matters of opinion as fact without providing reliable secondary sources." But isn't it always wrong to assert matters of opinion as fact, regardless of what source does it?Ferrylodge (talk) 00:11, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It depends what is meant by "matters of opinion". If reliable secondary sources generally concur that "he was a friend and leader for many of his classmates", then the article can state this by citing one such source, even though this is, in principle, a statement of opinion. If there is disagreement in the sources about this view, then the article instead needs to say instead "According to X, he was a great friend and leader..., but according to Y, he irritated the hell out of his classmates by his arrogance" with cites to sources for both views. Okay I'm exaggerating for effect, but I'm sure you get the idea. Geometry guy 00:22, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Now I'm more confused. Are you saying that the statement that "he was a friend and leader for many of his classmates" is not adequately sourced? It's sourced to Timberg, Nightingale's Song, 31–35. What's wrong with that?Ferrylodge (talk) 00:28, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing. I'm giving it as an example of a statement of opinion which is generally agreed and which is therefore (now) reliably sourced. Geometry guy 07:39, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(walkaway ec) As for the Arizona Republic series, it's written to be interesting and lively (what you consider theatrics). McCain's not a stuffed shirt, he's a guy who has enjoyed life in its various dimensions, and a bio of him thus leads itself to a certain kind of treatment. And there's plenty of decent journalistic styles that go beyond the 5 W's basics. We can if necessary swap all the cites to it out of the article (having it be a second source like you propose will just drive up the footnote size and article load time to no useful purpose), but I'd like to see if other editors also share the objection to using it. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:41, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Multiple cites to the same footnote won't drive up the size, so where appropriate and necessary, page ranges to other biographies could be used in addition to the cites to the pages of the AR series. Geometry guy 00:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Geometry Guy also said that the lead fails WP:Lead because, for example, it doesn't say anything about McCain's personal life. But the lead in the Barack Obama article doesn't mention his personal life. Is it supposed to?Ferrylodge (talk) 23:50, 18 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The lead has to summarize the significant points in the article: usually e.g., marriages and children are regarded as significant in a biography. I'm pretty sure Barack Obama should not be a featured article, but WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not a valid argument. Geometry guy 00:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I respectfully disagree. MOSBIO gives the following example to follow for the opening of a Wikipedia biographical article: Francesco Petrarca. Check it out. That lead says nothing about his family, but the body of the article does give info about his family.Ferrylodge (talk) 00:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your respect, but if you are so respectful, why not read WP:LEAD? I checked out your example, and it is used to illustrate a good opening sentence in a section on the opening paragraph. As a lead, it is crap: with just one short paragraph, it fails to mention his prolific letter writing, his travels, his children, his bequest, or "Laura". Geometry guy 00:44, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I address this stuff below.Ferrylodge (talk) 03:32, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) I've started beefing up the lead, both with material that used to be in the lead (personal life, maverick, for example) as well as some new material (Vietnam relations, Iraq, for example). Of course, some of these additions are Trouble Magnets ... Wasted Time R (talk) 00:22, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) Good luck with those. I half-suspect that this is one of the reasons the lead is a bit erm, unspecific? :-) Geometry guy 00:44, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Please see MOSBIO. The lead paragraphs should say what the person did, and why the person is significant. Discussing his marriages is not appropriate or necessary, given the already long length of the lead. Next thing will be pressure to include extramarital affairs in the lead paragraphs. Likewise, discussing his ancestry or parentage is not appropriate either; if his father was a gigolo or an assassin, would you insist on including that too? That stuff can come later in the article. The lead should be about McCain and why he's significant, not about other people.Ferrylodge (talk) 00:33, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The lead is not long, it is too short: the article is 120K for goodness sake. The link you cite concerns the opening paragraph, not the lead section. Please stop creating straw men. Material should only be added to the lead if it is significant in the body of the article. I believe the editors of this article are perfectly capable of making that distinction. Geometry guy 00:44, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec)Geometry guy said "the lead is rather short and fails to summarize the article." I was trying to respond to that. Much of McCain's story revolves around his naval heritage; I've always thought that should be in the lead. Gg also said the lead lacked information about McCain's personal life. Some leads have this, some don't. In practice, there are as many opinions about what should be in the lead as there are editors on an article. Go ahead and revert out all that I put in. Lead battles are an even bigger sink hole of effort than everything else. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:45, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. It is challenging writing a good lead, but it helps to have a good body for the article, and then to summarize it as an exercise in precis. Geometry guy 00:48, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Geometry Guy, this article previously went through featured article review. The main gripe was that it was too long. So, we went to a lot of time and effort carefully cutting stuff out that wasn't most notable, and I am trying not to get onto the slippery slope back to a bloated article. The length of this lead is pushing the upper limit. WP:Lead says three or four paragraphs max, and we've now got four paragraphs, some of which are huge and should probably be split. The lead is for what is most notable about the subject. That he was divorced, or the number of kids he has, is not most notable, and has nothing to do with why this subject is significant.Ferrylodge (talk) 00:54, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article is 118,418 bytes; the lead is 1872 bytes. The lead is not the problem, and is a long way from any upper limit. None of the paragraphs are huge: they just look big because of the wide lead image. Geometry guy 01:07, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article's lead is not too long. In fact, that of Ronald Reagan, a featured article, is slightly longer. The image is large as a means of consistency between a number of American political biographies, including Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bob Dole, Strom Thurmond, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, etc. And the article itself is not measured by how many 'bytes' it is, rather it is measured by readable prose. This article's readable prose size is 41 kb, well within guidelines. Happyme22 (talk) 01:16, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
My main problem re. the lead is not its length, but rather what belongs in it. WP:Lead says that the "most notable" things about the subject should go in it. Details about his personal life are not among the most notable things about him. In the spirit of compromise, I guess we can include the occupation of his paternal grandfather, if people insist. But stuff about the number of kids, or divorce (or extramarital affairs, or fondness fo hiking) do not belong in the lead, IMHO. Look at Ronald Reagan for example. No discussion in the lead about wives, divorce, kids, or occupation of grandparents. And I do not think the Reagan article is crap.Ferrylodge (talk) 01:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I like leads to read like little micro-mini-biographies, for readers with very short attention spans who drop off once they see the table of contents. That's my rationale for including the personal life and heritage stuff. But many will disagree with me. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:40, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The lead could be improved by adding details on his personal life. However, I don't think that it's mandatory to include this material in the article's lead in order to retain its GA status. Simply put, it's not quite important enough. Majoreditor (talk) 05:04, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, in response to this reassessment, the lede now says that his father and grandfather were admirals, which seems like personal info about McCain that had a major effect on his life. What else would you recommend? If a person is not particularly notable for anything in their personal life, then how do we pick out non-notable stuff to put in the lede? I could list lots and lots of Wikipedia biographies that are featured and yet don't mention a word in the lede about the subject's personal life.
WP:Lead says that the lead "should establish context, summarize the most important points, explain why the subject is interesting or notable, and briefly describe its notable controversies, if there are any. The emphasis given to material in the lead should roughly reflect its importance to the topic according to reliable, published sources." While the number of kids he has, and the name of his wife, and that kind of stuff may be important to him, they're not very important to us, are they?Ferrylodge (talk) 05:23, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I won't go as far as to suggest that no additional detail son his personal life shouldn't be included in the lead. However, I agree with Ferrylodge's overall assessment. Majoreditor (talk) 05:37, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Just for the heck of it, I looked to see how many featured articles there currently are on political figures. There are only thirty.[17] I took a quick look at the first eighteen. I didn't see anything personal in the ledes for ten of those eighteen: Ban Ki-moon, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald Ford, William Goebel, George F. Kennan, Bob McEwen, Yoweri Museveni, Barack Obama, and Józef Piłsudski. And for the others, there's not much. Yasser Arafat merely mentions his final illness. Barthélemy Boganda merely says that “Boganda was born into a family of subsistence farmers, and was adopted and educated by Roman Catholic missionaries.” George Brown, Baron George-Brown merely mentions that he was prone to “excessive drinking.” Ngô Đình Cẩn was the brother of the Vietnamese president, so personal info in the lede was unavoidable. Only four of the eighteen had more personal life in the lede than John McCain now has: Wesley Clark has details about his education, Don Dunstan mentions location of birth and education, Emma Goldman mentions her sister, her marriage, and her divorce. And Thomas Playford IV mentions his political family, and that he grew up on the family farm. So, to make a long story short, we're probably okay with just mentioning that McCain's father and grandfather were admirals.Ferrylodge (talk) 05:59, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nowicki/Muller

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  • Refactored comment by Ferrylodge from the middle of above thread.
I didn't put the Nowicki/Muller profile into the footnotes of this article. WTR did that, and he evidently spent a huge amount of time and effort doing it. I don't mean to be giving you a hard time, Geometry Guy, but I just want to see if we can be as clear as possible about what, if anything, really needs to be done differently here. Various chapters of the Nowicki/Muller biography are cited in the John McCain article, at footnotes 5abcd, 33abcdefg, 55abcdef, 59abcdefghijkl, 83abcd, 100abcdefghijklm, 109abcdefghijklmn, 131abcdefghijkl, 140abcd, 219, 221, and 231. That's seventy-nine (79) footnotes! The McCain article currently relies very, very heavily on the Nowicki/Muller biography. I'm not aware that Nowicki/Muller have been wrong about anything. I don't see anything less reliable about Nowicki/Muller as compared to any other reputable biography, and the late Bill Muller had a very good reputation for accuracy. Do you think we'd need to overhaul only for the sake of FAC, or would you make GAR contingent upon it as well? FAC may be futile anyway due to stability concerns. And which of the 79 footnotes do you think we'd have to get additional sources for? Finally, if you wouldn't mind, would you explain why you find Timberg's Nightingale's Song more reliable than the Nowicki/Muller biography? Thanks.Ferrylodge (talk) 08:15, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I know you don't mean to give me a hard time, but then you give me a hard time :-). Okay I probably deserve it for using the word "cheap": I wanted to imply inexpensive (using readily available source material), with an emphasis on an entertaining style; I did not mean to imply shoddy or inaccurate. I have no reason to doubt that Bill Muller had a well-justified reputation for accuracy. However, that isn't what reliability in the WP sense primarily means. Our articles are not "correct" or "true", they are verifiable, which means that the reader can check out any controversial assertion made by a Wikipedia article; that is why we cite our sources. However, it isn't much help if the source we cite makes the same assertion without citing its sources.
I do not know for sure whether Timberg's Nightingale's Song is a reliable source, as I haven't read it. However, the table of contents suggests it has 20 pages of notes, 17 pages of bibliography and 5 pages of interviews, so I am assuming it does cite its sources (presumption of innocence being a good principle :). From what I read, the book is putting forward an argument, but it is an argument that is largely tangential to the question "who is John McCain?".
Much credit to the Muller/Nowicki bio for listing its sources (and thanks for drawing my attention to that), but it doesn't cite them. Further, the article is written for a purpose, to paint a picture, to give Arizona readers an engaging impression who their senator (and now presumed presidential nominee) is. As such it is full of opinion on these questions; that is part of what makes it interesting. (Random example: "Here is a contradiction that probably stumps even McCain.")
Anyway, I went through the 79 footnotes just to get an idea how many would benefit from a more reliable (in the technical sense) or an additional source. I base this only on the nature of the material in the article, not on what Muller/Nowicki say. This is just my tentative opinion: experts on the article are much better placed to make such judgements; I am just trying to help focus on the places where there are more likely to be problems. I divide the list into possible GA issues, additional FA issues, quotations, and particular issues which need special comment.
  • 22 possible GA issues: 33f, 59fgi, 100acdfghij, 109gijkm, 131abj, 141ac
  • 5 additional FA issues: 33bc, 59jl, 100k
  • 6 quotations: 55f, 91a, 109b, 131ek, 141d
  • 4 particular issues: 5d (made no effort), 33e (sudden white hair), 55b (celebrity of sorts), 131i (greatest legislative achievement)
My own view on the quotations is that Muller/Nowicki is probably good enough for GA, but FA might ask for a more verifiable source. There is a similar issue with election results, where a primary source would help. 5d may be a BLP issue (I wouldn't vote for McCain if he hates math :) so this could be a case where a cite or a quote from McCain himself would be helpful. 33e, 55b and 131i are strong statements in different ways, and strong statements usually require strong sources; however, 55b and 131i could also be clarified and/or toned down. So it is unclear to me what it is best to do with these.
I hope that helps. Geometry guy 19:59, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the very thoughtful reply. I guess I'll wait and see if WTR or anyone else would like to comment about it. It seems like, for some things stated in the John McCain Wikipedia article, you would like to see a footnote that precisely refers to something that precisely refers to something....that precisely refers to a firsthand eyewitness account. Ideally, that would be nice, I agree. As a practical matter, I'm agnostic.Ferrylodge (talk) 21:39, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome and thanks for the kind remarks. When I comment here, it is to raise issues, not to say what I would like to see. I welcome agreement, but urge all editors to consider what is best for the encyclopedia. Subject to that, I'm agnostic myself. I'm away over the weekend, so that should give others plenty of chance to comment without me chipping in (I think I've said enough already :) Bon courage! Geometry guy 21:58, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I'll start looking at this ... but to be honest, I've never heard of a requirement that an WP:RS have inline citing for every claim itself. There aren't many books written that way these days; the best you get are a notes section in the back, sometimes attached to footnotes, sometimes just to pages numbers, sometimes just existing. I've been part of a bunch of GACs and at least four FACs (including this article at both) and I've never seen this kind of requirement made of the sources. I guess I've been working on the wrong articles. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:19, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it might be useful to seek input at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard?Ferrylodge (talk) 23:42, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) Let me emphasise that there is no requirement being proposed here! After all, who am I to add such a new requirement? I was simply trying my best to answer Ferrylodge's hard question about why Timberg's Nightingale's Song might be regarded as more reliable than the Nowicki/Muller biography. You must remain true to your own judgement about sources. I have only drawn attention to points where you might want to reconsider the current reliance on Muller/Nowicki as a source. You've been working on precisely the right articles to have the judgement that this requires. Just apply it and it will be fine! Geometry guy 23:46, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Geometry guy, to be honest you've flagged some of the most well-known facts about McCain, that a dozen different sources could all attest to. 33f, yes he refused the out-of-sequence early repatriation. It's the most famous thing about his POW stay. 33b, yes he was badly injured in the bailout, landed in a lake, and nearly drowned. It's another famous thing about his becoming a POW. 33c, yes a mob of angry Vietnamese attacked him once he was pulled from the lake. Or, 59f, yes he was accused of being a carpetbagger. Every single account of that election says that, and I've read a dozen by now. 59g, you want a direct cite from the Phoenix Gazette? Their online archives, even for pay, don't go back before 1999; would mean a trip to a library out there. 59i, you think he didn't win the primary? His political career would have been over and we wouldn't be here. 59j, yes he easily won the general. These are Arizona Republic reporters writing this account, they're pretty familiar with Arizona election history! 59l, the re-election in 1984, ditto. In fact, if we used the primary source for election returns that you seem to want here, other editors might criticize us for OR or something in concluding the race was easy. Here, we're using a respected secondary source to make that judgement. These are not controversial points; everybody on earth agrees that, once he got past that first primary in 1982, McCain has had an easy time of it, facing weak or no-name opponents in his Arizona campaigns. Redoing all these cites would be a ton of work, and again to be honest it seems to me it would be busy work that wouldn't improve the quality or believability of the article one bit. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:14, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's good news that there are lots of sources available. I'm not asking you to remove any cites to the Muller/Nowicki, only to supplement them where you consider it would be helpful. Geometry guy 08:39, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And on the more general point, I've looked through WP:RS and WP:SOURCES and the citation style of the source is never mentioned that I can see. Indeed, "university-level textbooks" are ranked high among desirable sources, and they give their references the same way Nowicki-Muller do, if they do at all. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:35, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Who said it was? I hope you are not proposing to that University level textbooks are appropriate sources for this article just because you read it in some guideline? Use your own judgement, and stop wikilawyering. Geometry guy 08:39, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Above, Geometry Guy said "My own view on the quotations is that Muller/Nowicki is probably good enough for GA, but FA might ask for a more verifiable source." Since this is a GA review, and we all agree Muller/Nowicki is good enough for GA, why are we still discussing it? If there's a problem as far as the FA guidelines go, let's save that discussion for the next time some glutton for punishment nominates this article for FA. Coemgenus 10:55, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I certainly don't want to wikilawyer, so yes I'll stop here. My own judgement is that there's nothing wrong here with the use of Nowicki-Muller and that nothing needs to be done here as part of GAR. So I'm not going to do anything. If the GA gets pulled, that's life. If someone else wants to replace/augment/whatever all the Nowicki-Muller cites, they can. If I'm going to be a glutton for punishment, I'll bring Early life and military career of John McCain to FAC, not this. That article also uses Nowicki-Muller (28 times), and if this issue arises there I'll deal with it in that context. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I generaly agree with WTR. However, I do think that Geometry Guy's comments about Nowicki/Muller have been helpful, in the sense that we have now included more info in the John McCain article to establish that Nowicki/Muller is a reliable source. Especially see the revised footnote 5 of the John McCain article. That footnote now includes an external link to bibliographic material used by Nowicki/Muller, and also includes a wikilink to a bio that I just wrote about Bill Muller. So I think we're in "good" shape now.Ferrylodge (talk) 18:45, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(←) I left this for a few days, and see there has been very little further comment. I am somewhat disappointed by the response of regular article editors, who previously impressed me at the GARs for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps I shouldn't have provided such a long list of possible GA issues with Nowicki-Muller, but should have concentrated on the extreme. The response that none of these examples are GA issues, and that Nowicki-Muller has now been established as a reliable source for anything is nothing short of lazy. So, I'd better do more work myself and give examples. Here are two, from reference 101 (formerly 100).

From the article:

McCain made attacking the corrupting influence of large-scale contributions — from corporations, labor unions, other organizations, and wealthy individuals — on American politics his signature issue. Starting in 1994, he worked with Democratic Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold on campaign finance reform; their McCain-Feingold bill would attempt to put limits on "soft money". McCain and Feingold's efforts were opposed by some of the moneyed interests targeted, by incumbents in both parties, by those who felt spending limits impinged on free political speech, and by those who wanted to lessen the power of what they saw as media bias.

This is entirely sourced to Nowicki/Muller, who have this to say:

Most of the political establishment opposed, either explicitly or quietly, their crusade to clean up elections.

The latter is an unsourced sweeping generalization with the NPOV terms "crusade" and "clean up", yet it seems to be the only relevant material, other than matters of fact, which is not sourced to McCain himself. There's another sentence on the "signature issue", but it is little more than a statement.

From the article:

He was instrumental in pushing through approval of the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, which gave the president power to veto individual spending items. It was one of McCain's biggest Senate victories...

According to whom? Well, Nowicki/Muller, who say:

To combat the overspending problem, McCain helped push through a presidential line-item veto in 1995, but the courts overturned the law as unconstitutional. The line-item veto would have allowed a president to strike specific spending items in a bill while allowing the rest of the appropriations to become law. It was McCain's first big Senate victory, though ultimately it did not work out.

I'm unimpressed. Geometry guy 22:00, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the Line Item Veto, I'm not sure what your point is, Geometry guy. The cited source seems to support the statement in this Wikipedia article, right? And does anyone dispute that both the cited source (as well as the Wikipedia article) are accurately portraying McCain's role with respect to the Line Item Veto?Ferrylodge (talk) 22:22, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
"Instrumental" and "biggest"? Geometry guy 23:13, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Do you think that he was not instrumental in pushing this through, or that it was not one of his biggest victories? And are you saying that we've misstated what the source says, or that the source is wrong?Ferrylodge (talk) 23:20, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Are you disputing that McCain was instrumental in passing it, and that it was one of his biggest Senate accomplishments up to that time? Still unclear what your objection is. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:18, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See below. I don't have the expertise to question these facts, and even if I did, it would be OR. "Instrumental" and "biggest" are superlative statements, which are not in the source, and require a reliable source to support them. Geometry guy 23:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have removed the words "instrumental" and "biggest" from the article. I'm not sure they were unsupported by the source (e.g. if it was his first big victory then it was among his biggest to date), but anyway it's moot now.Ferrylodge (talk) 01:06, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And regarding the use by Nowicki/Muller of the word "crusade", I don't think it shows a POV. One of the sources that Nowicki/Muller cited was Paul Alexander's biography, Man of the People: The Life of John McCain, which says: "Soon after the Senate had killed campaign finance reform, McCain launched another crusade that was destined to generate controversy.” Do you think Alexander had a POV? Anyway, the word "crusade" isn't in this Wikipedia article.Ferrylodge (talk) 22:32, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not complaining about NPOV off-wiki: that isn't our business. The issue is reliably sourcing the statements made in the article, or presenting them as opinion where necessary. It sounds like Alexander's biography could be used to fix some of the sourcing issue for this paragraph.
On the line-item veto, Alexander says "McCain was working on an issue that was vital to him ... [later] the Senate voted for the line-item veto, a concept McCain had been fighting for for 10 years. After this legislative success, McCain saw his name floated around as a possible running mate for Dole." This just confirms what Nowicki-Muller are saying, no? Wasted Time R (talk) 23:29, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See below. I have no deep knowledge here. If other sources confirm Nowicki-Muller on issues such as this, then cite them! Geometry guy 23:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I hope you now see that doing nothing is not an option, and that I am just a tad disappointed that the entire list of my suggested issues was dismissed. That isn't the good judgement I expected from the editors working on this article. Geometry guy 23:13, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I don't see. Are you saying that the Wikipedia McCain article is going beyond what the cited source (Nowicki/Muller) says about McCain Feingold, or are you saying that Nowicki/Muller is not reliable about McCain Feingold? If you're saying the latter, then I don't see you pointing to anything incorrect or POV that Nowicki/Muller have said on this subject. And, if you're saying the former, then I think you are overlooking a considerable amount of material in the cited source (Nowicki/Muller) about McCain-Feingold, such as this: "Politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, take their incumbency seriously. The Senate duo's battle to enact the new restrictions on political parties' soft money would take seven years. Feingold would become so identified with their McCain-Feingold bill that he still jokes that people think his first name is 'McCain.' 'Soft money' was the insider term for the limitless contributions that special interests such as corporations, labor unions or independently wealthy individuals donated to the political parties. Party officials, in turn, often used the money to bankroll attack ads on each other's candidates. Although the candidates had to abide by 'hard money' restrictions on contributions, the parties did not. The 'soft money' phenomenon evolved over time from a loophole in post-Watergate campaign laws. By the mid-1990s, 'soft money' was saturating federal races."Ferrylodge (talk) 23:40, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Both, but note that I use "reliable" always in the technical WP sense. I do not mean to imply that Nowicki/Muller are inaccurate or wrong. WP is not about the The TruthTM. Geometry guy 00:00, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it would help if you'd specify what Wikipedia criterion of reliability is not satisfied by Nowicki/Muller. It's no less verifiable than any info in a school textbook. This profile of McCain won first place in the Arizona Press Club’s 1999 Awards for the Best Journalism in Arizona in government/politics reporting. The Arizona Press Club described it as follows: "This story soared above the competitors. This entry was written masterfully and thoroughly. The reporting was excellent as the writer drew from a myriad of sources and materials. No stone was apparently left unturned in providing insight into the real John McCain. This is the story to read for anyone wondering who John McCain is but wanting a fair, unbiased accounting. Particularly impressive was the section on the complicated Keating Five scandal, which is often written about in confusing, hard-to-understand terms. The scandal was portrayed accurately, but the details were not skimped on in making it easy to understand for those unfamiliar with it."Ferrylodge (talk) 00:10, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, you are doing a good job convincing me that this source can be more widely used than my first impression suggested. However, it is mostly tertiary, and it does contain a lot of opinion, even if that opinion is based on good judgement. I emphasise that "reliable" in the WP sense is not the same as "accurate". For instance the award description would also describe an ideal Wikipedia article (e.g. on the Keating Five scandal): but even though the latter would be more thoroughly sourced, we don't admit Wikipedia itself as a reliable source. Hence, however good Nowicki/Muller is, it has to be deployed with due care. Geometry guy 21:37, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(ec)Geometry guy, yes, it will help if you focus on the most egregious (from your perspective) cases. Regarding the McCain-Feingold opposition reasons, Nowicki-Muller doesn't list one that played a major part (free speech concerns), so I've added a cite from Timberg that does. I've also clarified that the free speech concern was tied into a belief among some that the proposed law would be ruled unconstitutional. But I'm not sure what your objection is here: do you think our article is inaccurate in this area? or do you think it is accurate, but that Nowicki-Muller's writing style is too breezy or informal or sweeping to be used as a source? Wasted Time R (talk) 23:15, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, that cite helps. I'm not questioning the accuracy of the article or Nowicki-Muller. My concern is that statements which contain an element of opinion should either make clear that opinion (and not only fact) is involved, or should cite reliable sources which support the statement concerned. In many cases Nowicki-Muller is okay for this, but in some cases the style of their article doesn't make it reliable enough to back up unqualified opinion.
If I have time, I will look for further concrete examples tomorrow, but if you understand where I am coming from and can find some such issues yourselves, that would be much appreciated. Geometry guy 23:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If we double- and triple-cite every assessment and evaluation and perspective and conclusion like you want, we'll just run afoul of the editors who complain about articles being less readable due to excessive footnoting. Every single source, including Alexander, Timberg, newspaper articles, etc. could be picked apart by someone looking to criticize writing style, closeness to subject, institutional bias, broad conclusions without laying out all detailed reasoning, etc. Indeed one of the reasons I leaned on Nowicki-Muller so heavily in the first place is that because it's largely a tertiary source, it pretty much presents the collective/conventional/mainstream wisdom about McCain's life. And thus I was hoping I could get by without too much multiple citing. I understand your take on this, and I understand the people who complain about heavy citing, but sometimes us writers get whipsawed in between. 00:12, 24 June 2008 (UTC)Wasted Time R (talk)
And sometimes you/they/we find a healthy compromise :-) Actually, I do sympathise: I am also an editor who believes that many articles have too many inlines. For instance, in the discussion of footnote 101 above, it is used multiple times in quick succession to ensure each sentence has a cite. This is probably not necessary (it isn't a GA requirement).
By all means use a tertiary source as much as you can to simplify inlines, but be aware of cases where a primary or secondary source is needed as a supplement. Criterion 2b has been developed to minimize inline citation requirements. I have already suggested that a good tertiary source is probably okay for quotations; it is also probably okay for attributed opinion. But I wouldn't want to admit such a source for stated opinion, statistics, and counter-intuitive or controversial material (especially contentious material relating to living persons). The article does very well in this respect, but I believe it is worth checking whether the examples I have listed can be done better. Geometry guy 21:37, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience the "one footnote at the end covers all sentences in a paragraph" model doesn't last long on articles like this; people quickly bang {{citeneeded}} tags on all the other sentences. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:25, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree, that is not the approach I would take: instead I would focus on those sentences which are most likely to be challenged, or most need citation for other reasons. If a less controversial sentence is surrounded by more controversial ones with the same citation, then it may survive fact bombing. Geometry guy 10:56, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(←) Sorry to jump in so late to the discussion; I'm still catching up. Wow, did I accidentally get routed to FAC? :) I'm glad to see that issues with note 101 are resolved. I was shocked by G-guy's example, particularly for the Line Item Veto. I'm going to check some of the footnotes for myself to see if there are any other similar misattributions. In a perfect world the article wouldn't utilize Nowicki/Muller to the extent it has; that said, it's by and large reliable enough for GA standards. FA is a different matter. I'll check back later after I dive into the citations. Majoreditor (talk) 01:25, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Tentative keep. Belatedly, here are three examples from footnote 111 (formerly 109) which read as stated (rather than attributed) opinion.
    • A variety of interest groups that McCain had challenged in the past ran negative ads.
    • An unidentified party began a semi-underground smear campaign against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, and flyers.
    • ...because Bush mobilized the state's evangelical voters...
The second of these is perhaps not so problematic, as the following sentence provides details. I've no doubt these statements are widely accepted, and don't need to be attributed, but they would benefit from additional sources. Anyway, with this done, and unless Majoreditor spots any other issues, I'm inclined to agree with him that the article is now by and large reliable enough for GA, and that this GAR can be closed. Geometry guy 10:56, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep. The six citations I've checked -- admittedly, a small sample -- were fine. I'm still worried that there may be statements in the article which aren't supported by the actual statememnts in the cited references, as previously demonstrated. However, that's not cause for de-listing. Majoreditor (talk) 13:29, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delist. Although a reworking of this article has started, GAR is not in a position to evaluate it. It is better to delist the article now per the comments below, and encourage renomination once the article has been reworked. Geometry guy 22:24, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The article has numerous issues and is currently tagged with 5 cleanup banners - therefore not only failing the GA criteria but also meeting the quick-fail criteria. Tags suggest the article: needs additional references (GACR 2), tone may be inapproprate (possibly GACR 4), needs to be expanded (GACR 3), and needs cleanup and a copyedit (GACR 1). —97198 talk 13:06, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. The article suffers from multiple problems.
    • The prose fluctuates between mediocre and poor. An example: The film earned a major reaction in later weeks by word of mouth.
    • The article needs to be better referenced. I refer to the quality rather than the number of citations.
    • It also suffers from structural issues such as stubby sections and a dubious layout. The cast section is one example; it is placed too far forward in the article and is underdeveloped.

I concur with most of the concerns raised at the recent FAC discussion and suggest that if the article isn't improved in short order that it be de-listed. I hope that the article's editors are able to address the deficits and turn this into a truly Good Article. Majoreditor (talk) 14:31, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delist: No way is this GA-quality. The article contains multiple short, skimpy paragraphs which scream out for expansion. The "Reception" section particularly needs to be fleshed out. Also, the film had such a huge impact/influence on horror cinema that a "Legacy" section seems in order. There are undoubtedly a multitude of reliable source references (books and magazine/newspaper articles) that can be easily accessed to assist in adding the necessary detail. Once this article is expanded accordingly, we can worry about the prose and layout problems already noted. As the article obviously requires a great deal of work, I suggest it be de-listed immediately.-Hal Raglan (talk) 21:30, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: You can delist it, if you want. I hope the article's future editors will make this a good article, as I've decided to take a break from editing this particular page. It's been fun while it lasted, but I may come back. --EclipseSSD (talk) 13:57, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: No action, so keep by default. The article has much improved since it was nominated for reassessment thanks to the efforts of Gary King. Geometry guy 20:11, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am requesting a reassessment because I believe this article fails section 2 of the GA criteria. As I brought up in the FAC, the article has fundamental sourcing issues and sometimes completely misrepresents its citations. I've only checked in-depth the first five paragraphs of the article, but I found significant, troubling sourcing issues in most of the citations. I also believe that the prose could be much improved, but am unsure whether that is salient for the looser GA prose standards. I have copied below my concerns that have yet to be addressed since the FAC. BuddingJournalist 05:06, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Concerns from User:BuddingJournalist copied over from the FAC

Still an oppose Prose is still awkward in many places. Structure of sections is often odd. Examples:

  • "A cash flow statement was leaked, showing that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million." Awkward passive. Leads to readers asking: "Was leaked by whom?"
  • Funding section is all over the place, chronologically.
  • Why does the Features section begin with a short and incomplete comparison between it and MySpace?
  • "Facebook has a number of features for users to interact with." "Over time, Facebook has added several new features to its website." Throw-away generic sentences. Note the presence yet again of the redundant "website".
  • "a News Feed was announced, which appears " Conflict between past (passive again, too) and present.
  • "while others were concerned [that would ease readers here] it made it too easy for other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users" Reader has to keep track of the relationships between the various "others".
  • "Marketplace has been compared to Craigslist by CNET, which points out..." Try reading this sentence out loud.
  • "Gifts, allowing users..." Isn't Gifts already explained earlier?
  • "when its growth had fallen " Why is the perfect used here? Why not the straightforward and stronger "its growth fell"? In fact, the prose uses perfect tense in odd spots throughout. "Application spam has been considered..." Unattributed passive. Source given for this sentence does not contain any of its claims. I hope this is just a random mistake.
  • "they asked him to build for them." Context? When? Were they fellow Harvard students at the time? First source does not match the title/author/publisher given. Again, I hope this is just a random mistake. I'm a bit concerned though...the two sources I randomly checked had errors.
  • "The Syrian government cited the ban was on the premise that..." BuddingJournalist 01:19, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Source checking Changing to strong oppose. I was concerned about the sources from my findings above, so I decided to do a more thorough check:

  • "More than 70 million people worldwide visited the website in April 2008." Does not match source.
  • "The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005" What is the source for this? The given "source" is just the homepage of "facebook.com" before it became the current Facebook.
  • "Press Room. Facebook (January 1, 2007)." Title and publication date are incorrect.
  • "This expansion continued from April to June when it opened to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University, and all Ivy League schools" Does not match given source.
  • "At the end of the school year, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California." Does not match source. Source says that Facebook moved its base of operations.
  • "Zuckerberg called it "the next logical step"" Source does not put this in quotation marks. A big no-no! You cannot attribute this to him in quotation marks when he did not say this. Source also says the high school version launched in September 2005. No exact date given.
  • "Initially, high school networks required an invitation to join, but this was changed fifteen days later to allow anyone to join." Given source says nothing about this.
  • "By the end of the year, more than 2,000 colleges and over 25,000 high schools throughout seven countries including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom had networks on Facebook" I could not find these statistics in either of the given sources.
  • "Facebook had expanded membership eligibility to employees of 10 preselected companies by April 26, 2006, including Amazon.com, Apple Inc., and Microsoft." Nothing this specific in the given source. Only states that: "Currently, to join Facebook, you have to be associated with...[a] recognized company such as Microsoft or Apple".

This is all from the lead and the first two paragraphs of the History section; this means that a majority of the references in this part of the text had issues. This is quite disconcerting, to say the least. BuddingJournalist 01:41, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't yet had a chance to check out all of the citation examples you've listed, but what I've seen so far concerns me. Majoreditor (talk) 17:00, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've started checking BuddingJournalist's concerns. Some of them, such as "More than 70 million people", have been resolved; others haven't. It will take some time to check through the references. Majoreditor (talk) 02:59, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, although what the current phrase in the article "visit regularly" means is anyone's guess and is far too unspecific for a good encyclopedic article. I fixed the "quotation" that was bugging me. BuddingJournalist 13:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note that someone has now gone ahead and changed the 70 million figure to 80 million, which certainly doesn't match the source. BuddingJournalist 15:24, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Whoops; thought the source still said 70. BuddingJournalist 16:03, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've got a different view on the whole thing as a web developer (specializing in Facebook Applications web development), so if there are any issues with references, I'll try my best to help. As I said below, though, I don't want to be attached to any other articles until I'm done with the one I'm working on, so I will just pitch in here and there when I can answer a question. Anyways, the source for "80 million people worldwide visit the website regularly." has the quote "More than 80 million active users". Perhaps it is not clear on the site, but what this means is that 80 million people visit the website in the past 30 day period. The term is explained more here on Mashable; however, that is a blog, so it cannot be used as a reference. But, it explains the term pretty clearly. Gary King (talk) 15:49, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
So "regularly" = at least once a month? This should be made clear and sourced, instead of just leaving it as the nebulous "regularly". BuddingJournalist 16:05, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It was "in April 2008" before, but I will change it to something else now. Also, do you mean you want another source for it? I don't know if I can find one in mainstream news because they don't usually go in as deep with definitions like this. Gary King (talk) 16:08, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what you mean by "it" in "source for it". It's not about what I want; the article's text should match what its sources say. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics has nothing about people visiting "once a month". I would not rely on that page anyway, since it is quite unclear what "80 million active users" means from that webpage (timescale, definition of "active"). I highly doubt that there isn't a third-party reliable source for Facebook's web traffic. BuddingJournalist 01:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Changed. Gary King (talk) 01:48, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delist. Too many references cite Facebook.com. There's enough independent sources which are more trustworthy and reliable. For example, rather than citing a Facebook source for web traffic, why not use comScore data published by a third party (NYT, AdWeek, etc.)? This has the makings of a Good Article but the editors must use better quality sources. Majoreditor (talk) 03:08, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the help; however, I am trying to focus on working on only one article at a time these days (I haven't done major article work in the past week or two at all.) I still hope to bring the article to FAC again one day, which shouldn't be too far from now, but it needs a lot of work so I will do it when the article(s) that I am currently working on are done. Gary King (talk) 15:39, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Things should be better now. Gary King (talk) 20:47, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. There have been no further comments here and this GAR has been on the books for some time, so it is time to revisit and close if possible. I have checked out the use of Facebook itself as a source, per Majoreditor's concern. This seems to be better now: although there are quite a few citations to Facebook, only the following conflict with GA requirements in my view:
    • [36] for One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. Analysis and/or opinion.
    • [39] for Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while others were concerned it made it too easy for other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users). Commentary, analysis and opinion. Even though this is critical of Facebook, it should not be sourced to Facebook.
    • [40] for Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent friends from seeing updates about different types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends. Would be much better to have an independent viewpoint.
    • Privacy proponents have criticized the site's privacy agreement, which states: "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."[77] Another clause that received criticism concerned Facebook's right to sell a user's data to private companies, stating: "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." Here [77] is only sourcing the what the privacy agreement says. The fact that these points have been criticised requires another source. The last paragraph of the Privacy section also requires a better independent source for the issue and the criticism.
    • Facebook has more than 80 million active users worldwide.[81][82]... The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.[81] This is entirely sourced to facebook: [82] is not an independent source, because it is simply quoting a Facebook platform manager.
That's all! Geometry guy 17:08, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
All done Gary King (talk) 19:46, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That looks better. The last paragraph of "Privacy" could still use another citation, but I'm ready to close this GAR as keep/no action, unless objections are raised in the next 2-3 days. Geometry guy 20:06, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's better. I'll move from weak delist to neutral. Majoreditor (talk) 00:02, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Woohoo! Gary King (talk) 20:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Movieland

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delist. As I write this there is some copyediting taking place (slowly) but there is still a lot that needs to be done, as noted below. —Giggy 08:50, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Page has been tagged as needing to be updated for 2 months.
  2. Page contains no infobox.
  3. Page references fail to use appropriate templates (e.g. {{cite web}}

Jclemens (talk) 17:29, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: Infoboxes and citation templates are not mandatory. I don't see how it fails the GA-criteria. Granted, the references are missing pertinent information (publisher, date, etc), and it does seem to be out of date, but that should be easy enough to fix. Have the main contributors been contacted? María (habla conmigo) 19:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I must have missed that in the list of steps. I've left a note for the main contributor. Jclemens (talk) 19:53, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Sorry, I have been remiss on this. I've had an update on my to-do list since the case settled out of court back in August. Perhaps I've been bummed out because (IMO) the settlement didn't really force them to change the way they do business, only to limit the number and frequency of their popup demands for payment. I'll try to get an update done over the next week. I did see the update-needed notice on the talk page two months back, thanks for giving me a poke. --CliffC (talk) 20:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist per the following:
    • 1A and 1B: Inappropriate and/or editorial prose (e.g. "In summary,...") Lead does not fully summarize article; list incorporation issues in "Pre-trial stipulations" and 'Alleged violations" sections (could be more effectively and succinctly presented as prose - see also 3B).
    • 2B: "Product status" section contains uncited data (i.e. "statistics", per the criterion).
    • 3A and 3B: Article is insufficiently broad. Article purports to be about the movie download service (per title and lead sentence), yet precious little information about the service itself, the underlying corporate entities, etc. is presented. The article, as it is, would almost be better titled "Movieland Litigation", as the vast majority of the discussion pertains solely to the two complaints. Additionally, listing of all defendants seems unnecessary detail; choosing the "big players" and an "et al" would be more appropriate, concise and combat WP:TLDR.
    • 6A: Both images have incorrect licenses. The images are derivative works of Digital Enterprises, Inc. (Movieland) software. Appearing in an FTC complaint does not make them works of the federal government. These images would need to claim fair use and meet the criteria therefor. ЭLСОВВОLД talk 14:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist per Elcobbola. There are numerous issues. The article has short, choppy, list-like sections. The lead is deficient. However, my biggest concern is the quality of the citations. Too many refer to legal and government documents. It's far better to utilize coverage from reliable media sources, legal reviews and the like. Majoreditor (talk) 05:50, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Egypt

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delist. —Giggy 08:54, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delist I have nominated this article for reassessment because it was promoted on November 27, 2006 and I believe has changed significantly in the 1.5 years since its original GA list. Currently, I do not believe it meets GA standards as entire paragraphs as well as complete sections are left entirely without citations. The most flagrant problems are in the History, Foreign Relations, Economy, and Culture sections. Best, Epicadam (talk) 04:45, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have added citation requests. Hopefully some editors can help to better reference the article. Majoreditor (talk) 05:30, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rhode Island

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delisted. —Giggy 09:08, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deslist I have nominated this article because I do not believe it still qualifies for GA status under WP:GACR. There are {{fact}} tags remaining on the page and entire sections (such as the "Colonial era" and "Revolution and industrialization") are left almost entirely without citations. There seems to be a great deal of OR, especially in the "Food" section. Best, Epicadam (talk) 15:46, 19 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delist. The article has numerous problems. These include, but may not be limited to:
    • The lead is stubby and doesn't provide a well-rounded summary of the article
    • The Culture section is a shambles. It's underreferenced, poorly written and strangely structured with its choice of coverage.
    • The Sports section is a glorified list.

This article should be de-listed with little debate. Majoreditor (talk) 17:54, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delist, along with the above issues, I'd like to add:
    • Cleanup banners and citation needed tags
    • MoS problems
    • Poor writing in some areas. Example: the beginning of the Colonial Era is a glorified timeline with poor sentence variety.
    • Breadth: There has to be more info that can go into Great Depression to present: 1929-. Has nothing happened worth mentioning in 80 years?
    • Lots of short and stubby paragraphs.
    • Famous firsts in Rhode Island is nothing but trivia
    • Quite a few refs need to be correctly formatted.
    • A couple of the external links look questionable and should probably be removed.
    • Also, it seems odd that the show/hide box for state symbols is not in the State symbols section of the article.

And there you have it. Nikki311 20:15, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

United States

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Kept. That said, thanks epicadam for bringing it up here; I think some more improvement will take place as a result, which is always good. —Giggy 09:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have nominated this article for reassessment because it has been a year since the article has undergone any sort of nomination, peer review, or detailed assessment. There are currently sections and paragraphs which go entire unreferenced and I feel like the article may have changed substantially since its last review. Best, epicadam (talk) 15:05, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the article isn't ideal in its current form. My main axegrinding is over the length and WP:SUMMARY issues and I've pointed this out on the talk page. As someone pointed out there, GA/FA review of this article will run into questions of "pet facts": is the geography or the military more important? Is Prohibition a critical period in American history or just an item to cover in the main history article? I would urge any reviewer to be extremely cautious before recommending adding more material. Somedumbyankee (talk) 16:50, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. There's only one section lacking in-line citations, namely, the section on "States", which is a short summary of another main article. At first glance I see no content in the States section which requires in-line citations. There is no requirement that each paragraph requires in-line citations. Are there specific statements you have in mind which need citations? The concern on article length is interesting. No doubt, this one is a whopper. Yet certain topics require longer-than-normal articles in order to be reasonably complete. Take, for example United Kingdom, which is also lengthy. I'd suggest that too short a an article on a major topic does the encyclopedia's readers a disservice. Perhaps Somedumbyankee can provide some additional information on the Summary concerns. In the meanwhile I'll try to take a closer look at the article. Cheers, Majoreditor (talk) 17:48, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't really make a determination about whether to recommend delisting the article, as it is true that not every place needs citations. I just wanted to put the article up for GAR because as important as it is, it hasn't undergone any sort of reassessment for at least a year. Having said that, I think there are some things that should and could be cited, such as the population of the American colonies in 1770, and other hard-number figures that should have citations. And then there are things about the 2008 election in the history section? What? How can that already be history and in the whole grand scheme of American history, the 2008 election is the one to be highlighted on the main page? There are just a number of things like that where I feel like people added things just to get their two-cents in, or to highlight whatever the current topic du jour. epicAdam (talk) 18:01, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This diff is an example of some of my concerns about level of detail in the article. Somedumbyankee (talk) 18:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for providing some specific examples, Somedumbyankee. I'd tend to agree that several of them don't need to be in the article. My hope is that these sort of content issues can be resolved through discussion on the article's talk page or Peer Review rather than through GAR. Frankly, those may be better forums for tuning up this article than GAR. What are your thoughts? Majoreditor (talk) 02:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see a problem with leaving it as a GA (keep), it just needs some disciplined slash and burn. Somedumbyankee (talk) 01:23, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • Note. This page seems to have been hacked in such a way that all links to this page are redirected to something else unless the user is logged in. This needs to be fixed or the page should be flagged. User:StageCraftColin

Windows Vista

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delist for multiple failings of the criteria. Geometry guy 21:09, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delist - The Reception section seems to be written by a Mac user, showing an obvious bias against Vista. According to Microsoft, Vista has sold over 100 million copies, far ahead of Mac OS X Leopard. This is a clear violation of section 4 of the GA criteria. ANDROS1337 18:11, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delist. The Reception section includes synthesis, such as Many computer manufacturers are shipping Windows XP restore disks along with new computers with Vista Business and Ultimate editions pre-installed, possibly to help small to mid-sized businesses[108] for a limited time[109], as well as new computers with XP or Linux pre-installed. Really. Footnote #109 refers only to Lenovo, not to "Many manufacturers". Other in-line citations refer to relatively weak sources, such as ChangeWave, which is, IMO, marginally reliable. The articles editors can - and should - do better, considering the sheer amount of coverage the topic has received. Majoreditor (talk) 19:31, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The person proposing the delisting appears to want us to go against the preponderance of reliable sources available on the topic because 100+ million sounds like a very large number compared to its competitor. A fair assessment, sure, but the reality is that the overall reception of Vista has been fairly poor, and the article covers this. Sure, the wording can be just a little bit better but that's why this is a "good" article, not a "featured" article. Warren -talk- 00:22, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not according to Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer states that Vista sales are good, and there is no denying that. The article is very selective in only using sources that negatively review Vista. A clear violation of WP:NPOV. It seems that you only want to keep it as a GA because you are a Mac user. ANDROS1337 16:59, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Comment - In regards to the sales figures, the 100 million number includes mostly consumer sales of new computers. What the Balmer quote leaves out is that upgrade versions and corporate sales have been lackluster at best, according to most computer tech sites and magazines. Additionally, the company includes sales of PCs that were downgraded to XP from Vista as Vista sales, even if they were never used as Vista machines. His quote is a classic example of "there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics." made by Mark Twain. BTW, I am a A+ certified computer tech and work on and build PCs as a hobby and am neither here nor there on Macs. Vista has serious issues that will not be addressed until the next version of Windows in 2009-2010, these need to be included in the article.--Jeremy ( Blah blah...) 20:45, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • However, from what I have learned, Mac OS X Leopard has sold 10 million copies total. Do you SERIOUSLY think there are fewer than 10 million Vista users? Sounds like clear anti-Vista bias to me, which is a violation of WP:NPOV. ANDROS1337 21:46, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
          • Comparing sales figures for the two doesn't make sense. Mac OS X, due to its licensing restrictions, is limited to specific hardware sold by a single vendor, and has been on sale since the end of October, 2007, whereas Microsoft started selling Windows Vista almost a full year earlier -- in November, 2006. Apple also doesn't sell into the corporate market, which is where Microsoft is getting a large percentage of their sales numbers from, particularly related to Software Assurance customers who automatically get Vista, whether they asked for it or not. Those numbers are included in Microsoft's sales figures, by the way.
There isn't a level playing field with which to do a simple numbers comparison. Satisfaction surveys are much more relevant, and the Windows Vista article covers this angle.
I suggest you stop arguing in favour giving undue weight to Mac OS X in the Windows Vista article, and I suggest you review WP:AGF before making comments like "You want it to stay a GA because you're a Mac user". That's a really fucking stupid comment to make, and you know it's not going to get you anywhere. I think the article deserves GA status, which it has had for almost two years, because it's one of the better articles Wikipedia has in terms of prose, sourcing, neutrality, completeness, and focus. Warren -talk- 23:39, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong keep - The "Reception" section does need to be revised, but the rest of the article is very well-written and well-deserving of the Good Article mark. Cedars (talk) 14:24, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps someone could take a crack at revising the "Reception" section. Anyone up to the challenge? Majoreditor (talk) 14:08, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I agree the reception section can use some tweaking in Vista favor. To say Vista is a bad OS because you do not know how to use it or configure it is very bad analysis. I personally have used the OS for 1.5 years and it has not given one problem, not even spyware that plagued XP. Vista has had major improvements in security. Windows XP when first released was a target of major viruses such as blaster and sassir. Vista has had no major viruses and it has been out much longer than XP when it was attacked. The reason for the negative tilt is because most major news editors use Mac computers and there is a general popularity spike for Macs because of the huge success of iPods. Since many people buy iPods, kids will in many times buy Macs just to pair up with their iPod. Look, this does not really need to be mentioned in a Vista article. Put it in the Mac article that it has had a boost because of iPods --- get it? Vista is doing very well, but one reason it is not doing even better is because of the requirements. Corporate PCs have low-end graphics hardware and Vista has a 3D interface. Corporate IT admins know this and are not going to deploy Vista unless they order new computers. Another reason some business downgrade to XP is not because Vista is bad but because XP does the job and they want their users to have a familiar look and feel. Believe me, Vista is going to come around and it does not have to wait for the next version of Windows as so many say. It is more powerful, more stable, and performance does not degrade over time due to spyware. All of these things will cause Vista to become the standard OS, if not already considered standard. WinCEB (talk) 23:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for presenting facts in an honest, unbiased matter. ANDROS1337 19:28, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep While I agree with the problem that the article has, this would have been more suited to an effort and discussion that article. Revoking GA status is an overreach in this case As for all this argument about what vista is and isn't what it will become, just knock it off, please. The truth is it is not our job here to decide what will happen, only what is currently verifiable.--Oni Ookami AlfadorTalk|@ 17:49, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ideally the problems would be worked out on the article's talk pages. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. I've pointed out the synthesis issue, which is no small matter. In addition to that, several of the citations refer to less-than-reliable blogs. I've seen little action to resolve these issues during the last two weeks. It's time to delist the article. I hope that editors can work together to fix matters and then re-submit the article to GAN. Cheers, Majoreditor (talk) 12:37, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The majority of the article still meets the GA criteria. I agree that the Reception section has issues and I am attempting to fix them. As for ChangeWave, it appears in a Computerworld article, which is a reasonably reliable source; it is the first result in a Google search for "vista satisfaction survery". I have already removed the Lenovo reference and added a reference to Microsoft. — Wenli (reply here) 20:10, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist per numerous cleanup tags, [citation needed] tags, citations that fail to give full attribution, and fair-use images that exceed the 300-pixel rule of thumb. As for content disputes, this is not the place to address and argue those issues: that's what the talk page is for. However, please note that those disputes did not precipitate my delist vote; there's other outstanding issues (mentioned above) that lead to my vote. Drewcifer (talk) 22:34, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist. There is too material much uncited, the various cleanup tags haven't been dealt with, and I think the structure of the article is wanting. I'm not altogether eneamoured of the listy nature of this article, but I would at least have liked to see the various lists consistently formatted. I also think that the material covered could have been more selectively chosen—my eyes started to glaze over while reading the seemingly End-user features subsection. Most importantly though, I'm deeply unhappy about the neutrality of the Criticism and Reception sections. I'd like to see the critical material integrated into the appropriate places in the article, instead of gathered together for what looks like a parting shot. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 21:32, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist. I can forgive 400 × 300 fair use images, but not 949 × 720. The heavy use of bulleted lists fails WP:EMBED. The lead does not summarize the article per WP:LEAD. Neutrality issues seem to have distracted editors from the basics. I suggest they forget about whether Vista or Leopard is best and switch to Ubuntu, which is updated every 6 months (not once in 5 years) and is completely free (in all senses of the word).</plug> :-) Geometry guy 22:13, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist per the reception section; I see one short paragraph of positive commentary (from video gamers!) complete with 1 ref (except for the stuff that was followed by "XP did better"). I agree Vista sucks, but it can't be that bad (and for the record I'm a satisfied XP user). —Giggy 09:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist: On its face, this is NOT a Good Article. Apparent by the 5 paragraph. Writing is a hodgepodge of styles, and has lots of grammar problems. Thanks to whoever for including the 'needs citations' and 'neutrality' templates; I'm not sure I needed these to see Big Examples of citationless, POV content, but don't these sort of provide a red-flag for a GAR? I'm afraid that a lot of the criticism above is about Vista, not the article itself, and I suggest that editors stick the Good Article Criteria for their assessments, and not start counting the number of Vista users to make a point. --Nemonoman (talk) 14:17, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cyclone

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Keep. Article was much improved and no further objections are outstanding. Geometry guy 21:19, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going over all of the "Meteorology and atmospheric sciences" articles for GA sweeps. I am not sure if this article meets the criteria to remain a GA and would like others to take a look to get their opinions. The article seems a bit brief for the topic, and I'm not sure if it meets the broad requirements. Much of the article is also not sourced, but it links to the main article mentioning most of the same information (even though it may not be sourced on those articles as well). The images are all fine, and are currently free. The lead is also somewhat limited, but the article is short, so that should be fine. I am just concerned over the length and sourcing. What do you guys think? --Nehrams2020 (talk) 02:08, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delist Although it's a nice little article with some good content, I've thought for a while that it doesn't meet the GA criteria. The first thing that pops out at me is the short lead. The article may be short, but the article itself should be expanded, as it currently contains minimum information. There are also several unsourced statements. Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 02:36, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep You may want to hold off for a couple days. I'm making substantial improvements to the article at this time, including adding more content and references. Thegreatdr (talk) 02:55, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good, an expansion of the article would be great. Let us know when you've completed work so we can take another look. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 02:58, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thegreatdr is working hard to improve the article. Let's give him time. Majoreditor (talk) 03:28, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think the major editing has been accomplished. The article is now double its original size, and it is much better referenced than it once was. Let me know what else needs to be done for this article to remain at GA status. Thegreatdr (talk) 06:39, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Wow! I've never seen an article improve so much overnight. Looks much better than it was. The only thing I can think of would be to remove the bolding from the body of the article. Cheers, Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 12:04, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Juliancolton. I'm most impressed by the rapid improvements Thegreatdr made. Majoreditor (talk) 18:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I nominated this, and am impressed with the massive improvement of the article. If anybody wants to close this, that would be fine by me. Good work Thegreadr, and thank you for your efforts on the other articles that were on hold during sweeps. --Nehrams2020 (talk) 23:09, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, I didn't see the nominated version of the article, but it looks pretty good now. Nikki311 20:01, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delist. Based on the above comments I intended to close this as a keep, but then I looked at the article. Please do not be seduced by tremendous improvements, even though these are much appreciated. The cyclone is one of the most important weather phenomena there is and this tiny (25K) article barely touches upon the issues. It does not explain warm, cold and occluded fronts; the explanation of the origins of cyclones is completely opaque and does not make contact with the common ways in which they occur, nor the life cycle of (say) a tropical cyclone that becomes a low pressure system. And even though the article is lacking, the lead fails to summarise it, and is certainly lacking as an introduction to the topic. Geometry guy 22:55, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • As for delving into frontal theory, that shouldn't be the point of this article and really wouldn't get into the formation of cyclones. I'll make sure related wikilinks are included for the various fronts. However, it appears you're looking for more detail concerning cyclogenesis. That has been done. The addition of these details brings the article size up to 30k. There has been some additions and reorganization of the lead. See what you think. Thegreatdr (talk) 13:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      These are definite improvements. Re frontal theory, of course it shouldn't be the point of the article, but the article has many summary style sections, so why not a summary style section on fronts? And the article still does not address the development of one type of cyclone into another. I also think the article (and especially the lead) is more technical in some places than is strictly necessary. I know I'm giving you a tough time, but I also know that meteorology articles can be much better than this! :-) Geometry guy 22:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      I could add a section on fronts into the extratropical section, as well as conversion of one type of cyclone into the other. I'm guessing you're looking for conversion of extratropical cyclones to/from tropical? Thegreatdr (talk) 22:10, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes. "From" is what matters to the Eastern US and Europe, but if "to" is important as well, then by all means describe it, assuming, as always, that you have reliable sources to hand :-) Geometry guy 22:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      Information regarding fronts and conversion of TCs/STs/XTs back and forth has been added into the article. Related information has been added into the lead, which needed to be slightly reorganized. Article size is up to 35 kb. Thegreatdr (talk) 22:41, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      This looks much better, thanks, and is probably broad enough for GA now, so I've struck my objection. If I have time, I will look at the article again more carefully, especially the lead. Geometry guy 07:55, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Regardless, somebody give Thegrader a barnstar! That said, the article still needs expansion prior to GA; anyone up to it? —Giggy 09:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Meher Baba

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Keep. The article has certainly received a detailed review now! It has much improved and meets the criteria. Geometry guy 08:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See Talk:Meher Baba#GA review - significant issues with a lack of sourcing (many unsourced paragraphs) and general need of cleanup (eg. an image without a caption) and prose that needs spiffing up. Passed GA at Talk:Meher Baba/Archive 3#GA. giggy (:O) 04:13, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment is this Talk:Meher Baba/Archive 3#GA a GA Nomination? Does not seem like one. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. It doesn't look like this article received a proper GA review. After reading through it I agree with Giggy's assesssment that it misses the mark in a few areas. I've added a couple of {{fact}} tags for direct quotes. The prose is weak in spots and some sections are stubby. However, the article could be brought up to GA standards with a little work. Majoreditor (talk) 15:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The article sorely lacks third-party sources. I have compiled an initial list of sources at Talk:Meher_Baba#Third_party_sources that could be looked into to have additional viewpoints presented, besides primary sources or sources closely related to the subject. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist – Article never received a valid GAR.
I have no prior knowledge of this article or even its subject, but come here because of the question raised about the article's GA listing. I, too, think the GA listing is "dubious". Sharnak nominated the article for GAR on Jan 2, 2007 and Da54 picked up the Review and passed the article on Jan 17, 2007. Apparently, no detailed Review was provided, simply the Talk page post: "I see no reason not to pass this article for GA status. It meets all requirements. Passed. Da54 23:21, 17 January 2007 (UTC)." Not necessarily a problem except for the experience and edit history of the Reviewer, Da54, and the state of the article at the time of the GAR.
The Da54 identity was created on Jan 17, 2007, and existed for six days. Certainly, this doesn't preclude the possibility that the user behind the identity is an experienced WP editor, but a look at Da54's Talk page shows that the user's experience and knowledge were called into question immediately. During this week-long life Da54 completed eight GARs, passing all articles. In fact, GARs is the only activity Da54 did, not making a single article edit under that username. Again, it's possible Da54 may be a legitimate avatar of another user or could be a sockpuppet (it might be interesting to see if there's a common contributor to those eight articles). No matter. Three discussions were immediately initiated on Da54's Talk page in which no fewer than five editors raised serious questions and complaints about Da54's GARs. Da54's single response was to laugh off the concerns. In fact, these are the only posts on the page.
This certainly raises a question about the quality of those GARs. In fact, it appears some were apparently delisted. I looked quickly at the quality of a few of the other six articles (at the time of the GARs) and they appear to have obvious issues that would impede – if not prevent — listing (sourcing seems to be the most significant issue). This article was not specifically addressed by any of the five editors who criticized Da54's review, so it has remained GA. Given the questions and activity surrounding Da54, it is certainly appropriate to question this article's status. I also looked at this article's state at the time of the review and it, too, appears to suffer from similar, serious problems with sourcing; if I had performed the review I would not have listed this article. It's clear this article did not undergo a valid GAR.
Consequently, this article should be delisted and if an editor truly believes it currently meets GA criteria, then it should be renominated for a valid review. A quick look at the article as it stands now show sizable passages with no apparent sourcing; that alone shows more work needs to be done to bring the quality up to GA level.
Jim Dunning | talk 17:21, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: Asked to review the article, and comment on this GAR, I'll put my comments here:

  • The lead is not in accord in WP:LEAD. Long, with a stubby paragraph and a problematic structure.
  • As I see the MoS problems persist. For instance, single years are still linked.
  • "He was known for his lightning wit and universal knowledge, embracing both commerce and the arts. He claimed that all major established religions are essentially different beads on the same string, quoting freely from those traditions." Citation needed. And this "lightning wit and universal knowledge" does not seem very encyclopedical to me.
  • "Meher Baba explained that Hazrat Babajan was a perfect master, whose kiss unveiled him spiritually to his state of God-consciousness or God-realization. Subsequently, he reportedly went without food or drink for nine months, frequently beating his head against a stone to maintain contact with the physical world. Later he contacted the sadgurus Sai Baba of Shirdi and Upasni Maharaj of Sakori, who he said helped him to integrate this experience with normal consciousness, thus enabling him to function in the world without diminishing his experience of God-realization." Uncited. And aren't there any authors disputing the course of events as presented here?
  • "Meher Baba said that his silence" You probably mean he wrote, since he was silent!
  • "When they returned home, many newspapers treated their journey as an occasion for scandal." I would elaborate a bit on that. What did they accuse him exactly of?
  • "Discourses" is undercited.
  • "in a life of complete hopelessness, helplessness and aimlessness." ??? Meaning? This is an encyclopedic article; not a literary presentation of his life.
  • Are the events in "The New Life" widely accepted as presented in the article?
  • The picture in "1950s" has no caption.
  • "Meher Baba returned to India and began more periods of fasting, meditation, and seclusion. This seclusion work was draining and exhausting. Meher Baba said he was doing work on behalf of the spiritual welfare of all humanity." Uncited, and again the prose in uncyclopedic.
  • In general, an important or maybe the most important problem of the article is the lack of any reference to any criticisms towards Baba, except for a very brief reference to a "scandal" with no further details provided.

The article is at a better status since my previous review, but I am not absolutely sure it is at GA status.--Yannismarou (talk) 10:15, 26 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this very helpful critique. I don't care if the article is GA, but I do want to clean it up. Some points where I could use advice:
  • And aren't there any authors disputing the course of events as presented here?
--Well, mostly no, which is a problem. There is one source Paul Brunton's A search in secret india with 2 chapters where Brunton meets Meher Baba. He speculates -- based on zero credentials -- that following the meeting with Babajan, Baba "fell into a condition of semi-idiocy and behaved like a human robot, but it is not so obvious now that he has recovered sanity." Brunton also makes observations like this: "...he really is an irresolute man, influenced by others. His small pointed chin is eloquent on this point." Etc, etc., etc. 40 pages or so. That's basically it for critiques during the 30s. Brunton is such a pompous blowhard, it seems to me his POV adds little other than to say: surprise, some people didn't think Baba was so hot.
--Also, and more to the point, I can't find any way to weave this into the narrative.
  • Are the events in "The New Life" widely accepted as presented in the article?
-Yes, completely. But I will add citations and refs; thanks for the pointer.
  • a very brief reference to a "scandal" with no further details provided
-I have read newspaper articles from London in the 30s. These exist in hard copy at the Meher Center Library in Myrtle Beach. Can't get there now, and can't find copies on line. So I'll give you my synopsis: The 'scandal' is not stated overtly, but clearly implied...White Women! Following a svengali-like 'god-man'! to live with him in India. In a group! In scanty clothes! And probably no corsets! The articles add quotes from some of the women that are clearly meant to make them look Naive and probably Loose. Get the Picture? The articles say. But they don't accuse anybody of anything.
-I think it's right to acknowledge that there was a public scandal, as described to me personally by some of these women. Now I come to think of it, some of them may have described this in their published memoirs. I'll look.
  • In general, an important or maybe the most important problem of the article is the lack of any reference to any criticisms towards Baba
-OK, but not for lack of looking. So far as I can tell, no one has published exposes similar to those associated with other charismatic spiritual figures like Rajneesh, Maharaji, Muktananda, etc. Baba is more in the Nice Guy category: not a lot of criticisms about Mother Theresa, Ramanamaharshi, Ramakrishna, etc.
-Brunton is such a windbag, it's pitiful, and his criticism seems highly personal and not a little prejudiced.
-Rachel Brown published a fictionalized memoir of her childhood in Baba's ashram, All the fishes come home to roost. She lived there after Baba's death, and didn't like it very much, and has plenty of nasty comments about the people she lived with. But I don't know how to turn her fictionalized narrative of how badly she was treated by Baba's old mandali into a criticism of Meher Baba.
-I agree that absence of criticism diminishes the article, but I can't find good scholarly sources to add.

--Nemonoman (talk) 14:14, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mother Teresa has some notable critics, so does Ramakrishna. There are newspaper/magazine accounts with some material that could be useful, but I would not categorize these as "criticism" besides one specific article that may not be useful as it is op-ed material rather than facts. I agree with Yannismarou that some passages need to be re-written in an encyclopedic tone. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 17:29, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm working on that.--Nemonoman (talk) 18:33, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

CLEANUP: I've done some cleanup of the biography. I don't feel comfortable messing with philosophy. If anyone wants to comment after a second look, I'd appreciate it. `

NOTE: The article has been gone over pretty seriously in the past week. I invite a re-review by anyone concerned. --Nemonoman (talk) 14:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FINAL NOTE: The article has been heavily reworked, and I believe that most if not all of Yannismarou's concern have been addressed. I no longer have much faith in the GA/GAR process, following my experiencs with the Taj Mahal GAR. So I don't intend to nominate this article for GA. In its present form, it meets or exceeds GA criteria as I understand them (although clearly NOT FA), and so a GA delisting is unneeded and frankly counterproductive. --Nemonoman (talk) 22:49, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep: I vote to keep in light of above comments. I don't see any reason why this article should be demoted to B even if its original status procedure was flawed. It is apparently a very different article now. Just-watch (talk) 22:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update

[edit]

It's been two weeks:

Score so far:

  • Keep - 1
  • Delist - 1
  • Endless unproductive discussion about the GA process, whether someone who listed this article as a GA had authority to list it as a GA, whether an old version of this article is the same as the current version of this article, etc., etc. - Lots and lots.

End result: a reasonably good article is now in limbo as to its status, and unlikely ever to be settled. Not a lot different than being an "enemy combatant" in Guantanamo. Once the "process" has been initiated, there's no clear way to resolve it.

Note to Wiki editors. The GA process is essentially broken. --Nemonoman (talk) 20:40, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Er, no, it's just that I've been pre-occupied with other issues. :-) My pronouncements will follow.
Meanwhile, you broke the review page by using a level 3 section heading. Don't do it again. :-) Geometry guy 23:26, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I am very pleased to see that a final authority on good exists. PS If a particularly heading causes a page to be broken, some sort of instructions would be useful. PPS If you have any question about whether the GAR process is broken, see this edit, and the 2 comments that follow it: this and this. Editors running around scrambling to find a GA article to delist so that they can try out a new template. Swearing when they can't find one fast enough. Inspiring. --Nemonoman (talk) 23:53, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Eye of the beholder. You see them scrambling to delist, I see them trying to do a good job and reassess good articles, and not wanting to waste editors' time by reassessing good articles that meet the criteria. Many reassessments result in the article being improved and kept as a GA. Reassessing does not equal delisting. Geometry guy 00:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Gosh, you are so right. My apologies. GA assessment and reassessment is a GREAT process! Thanks! --Nemonoman (talk) 00:32, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

With articles like this I think it is not so much the writing as the subject matter. See Jiddu Krishnamurti, Osho, Sathya Sai Baba, Sri Aurobindo, Ramakrishna, Meher Baba -- all rated B or C regardless of any effort. It is just very simple disbelief in Indian religion so there is no satisfying the skeptics that these people live as it is said and none are GA. Even when (such as with Sathya Sai Baba) there is great attention to criticism. Also no amount of references matter. They are not 'good' references. It does not matter. It is not American and cannot be true or something like this. You see? Check the rating of these aricles I listed and you will see the pattern of the English Wikipedia. Then check Dutch for Meher Baba and you see it is FA with much less. Just-watch (talk) 00:08, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gosh, Justwatch, you are a CYNIC! The en.wikipedia GA process and GAR process are the BEST. Just ask ANYONE (here). All that your examples reveal is the how Pitifully Ignorant and Behind the Curve those foreigners are. They need to Catch Up With GreatnessGoodness! Go GAR! --Nemonoman (talk) 00:35, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think that sarcasm is something appreciated in these pages. If there are people that do not believe in the GA process, why are they posting here? ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Why is this good article being "Reassessed" in the first place? and who is doing the "reassessing"? The criteria for reassessing is, to put it mildly, 'fluid'.
If it were possible simply to remove any mention of Good Article status or lack of status from the Meher Baba article, I would do so. I have no desire at all for this article to receive the treatment of editors who say: " Darn, can't find a "bad" GA article!" or "isn't GAR only appropriate if there's an objection to your decision to delist". The eagerness to find 'bad' articles...the idea that a GAR isn't even needed: Just delist on one editor's say so with no process.
I am one of the principal editors of this article, but nor the main one. Yet none of the main editors -- but some other editor, casually, without discussion, requested a GAR process. I don't know why, as the editor's request is skimpy as to reason. And after all, "isn't GAR only appropriate if there's an objection"?
I didn't ask for a GAR, and I didn't nominate for GA. But the GAR sweepers have thrown the article into Limbo by this action, and here it has stayed, with a great big "Oh, We are Re-assessing whether this article is any good!" template the discussion page, and apparently will stay so until someone (Geometry Guy?? Someone else?) doesn't happen to be Preoccupied with Other Issues.
It is not wrong for me to feel that my work is being judged, nor for me to view the bona fides of my judges with a an ironic eye...because MY WORK IS being judged. And what's the opposite of a Good Article? If an article isn't Good any more, what is it? And when I see comments like the ones above -- or the comment of Geometry Guy: My pronouncements will follow, I don't very much appreciate at all being dinged for my sarcasm. I didn't throw the first Sarcasm, thank you very much.
Where's the respect due the OTHERs among us who are "trying to do a good job... and not wanting to waste editors' time by reassessing good articles that meet the criteria." That would be me and other hardworking editors, INCLUDING YOU JOSSI. I am offended on your behalf as well.
Sarcasm not appreciated? In the face of this broken process, what other tools do I have left? How else do I focus those concerned on issues and attitudes and actions that deserve critical review. Why am I posting here? To paraphrase Thoreau, Jossi, why are you NOT posting here??? --Nemonoman (talk) 11:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
AND WHILE I'M on the subject...I very much appreciate the helpful critique of Yannismarou, which effort I have tried to honor by working on the concerns he raised. But why were those concerns raised HERE, on this page, rather than on the article's discussion page?
Jossi, that's where you raised YOUR concerns. YOU DID THE RIGHT THING. THAT is the right place to do so, IMO. The TALK PAGE is where respectful collaboration gets done by interested parties, and with luck, an article is improved.
On this page, however, and its many brothers, such criticisms take the form of indictments -- findings of fact to support delisting. Even the 'compliments' of these critics damn by their faint praise.
This page is a collaboration of Delisters, NOT a collaboration of article editors. And as such -- by MOVING this discussion OUT of the mainstream Talk Page -- this GAR and ALL GARs carry the smell of the Star Chamber, not the democratic ideal of WP.
Two weeks. Two votes. A mouthful of criticism and tsk-tsking. I did a large amount of work to answer Yannismarou's concerns; he or she has not had the remote courtesy to review my response or my work. I'm sure that may happen when he or she is not Occupied With Other Issues.
Why HERE, I ask again, and not on the talk page? Because this is not a collaboration, it's a witch hunt...and a process that deserves to be called out for its brokenness. --Nemonoman (talk) 12:02, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nemonoman, I don't think anything is directed at your writing. I don't think there is anything personal against the article. See again Jiddu Krishnamurti and its discussion. It is a very diligent well-cited article, but listed as B. Also I think that Wikipedia readers do not even know about the Discussion pages or understand what those templates mean. Last I looked the article itself looks very presentable, not unlike the Krishnamurti one, on its front. So I wouldn't worry. The article is in good shape, even if rated B. You yourself say that GAR process is silly. So just let it go. If you just leave it as a B then it does not have to go through this whole process again, which is likely if it receives GA. Just-watch (talk) 13:35, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I can't dispute your logic. It's clear that I am emotionally invested here, but not so much in the article under discussion, as in my naive hope that Wikipedia would live up to its collaborative, egalitarian, democratic ideals.
Some thoughts that might apply to me, and to this process -- from H.L.Mencken:
* The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
* All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
* The demagogue [in this case -- me...] is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
* After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
And now, to quote Elan Sleazebaggano: "I want to go home and rethink my life. "--Nemonoman (talk) 14:04, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as chaotic as it is, the net result of Wikipedia I think is very positive -- in a relative way. Even with its very flawed and changable process it is hard to ignore how good it winds up being in comparison to past internet experiments. None of the academic Wikis worked. They produced almost nothing. Before Wikipedia (or up to about 3 years ago) if you wanted to know who Meher Baba was for instance and did a Google hunt you found confusing eye candy sites that appeared to be selling baubles or something. Even now see how long it takes on line without looking up Wikipedia to figure out if Meher Baba is alive or dead. What you learn in a second on Wikipedia would take some intent searching and you would eventually find it somewhere in an eye candy advertisement looking promotional bio that sounds like its for the founder of a product line. There is no comparison. Painful as it is, until there's something else, there really was NOTHING before this. The new "kindle" from Amazon actually comes with Wikipedia link built in -- cause what else is there? This is where the information is -- where you start. Anyone who thinks you get the last word here just arrived on our planet. Thanks for the great Mencken lines. Just-watch (talk) 14:20, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For Golly sake, this "main Meher Baba portal" (number 2 behind Wikipedia) looks like an advertisement for Amway. I mean when I want to know about who a person I heard of is I just LOVE to come to a page that says, "What's NEW??" and then just underneith links me to a four year old promotional bio in Spanish. Just-watch (talk) 14:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh YEA, and the promotional bio in Spanish I get linked to still doesn't tell me he died. Just-watch (talk) 14:36, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You think the Wikipedia GA process is broken. Well I think the Meher Baba infrastructure is way way more broken. By comparison Wikipedia is a thousand times better at letting ordinary people know up front some basic information and where to get more. Just-watch (talk) 14:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not putting you down. You did a really good job so far on the article -- or you and others and Jossi. But don't lose site of the relative aspect -- what in the real world all this has to be compered against -- to see that is to see more of the forest for the trees. Compared to most other first links on most subjects, Wikipedia is just a tad better -- and that's why it ranks so high in Google. Most people are too close to their product, favorite music, etc. to write something balanced enough for everyone. And from what I've seen the Baba folk are no different. They are totally have a perception-reflection confusion melt-down of some sort I can't understand. One would indeed think his followers were psychotic if there wasn't Wikipedia to find out there was an actual person. As odd as Meher Baba might have been, from reading about him, he's a lot more normal than the people who make those God awful other sites. Just-watch (talk) 14:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is sad to see editors making themselves miserable by launching into rants. For the record I don't believe GAR is great, but I rarely take it seriously when Wikipedians go around saying "this is broken". Life is too short to do things you don't enjoy in your spare time. Like all of Wikipedia, GA is a volunteer process; it is very short of reviewers and often backlogged. Two weeks is quite brief for a typical GAR. This review wasn't going too badly until the editor concerned lost patience and declared "a reasonably good article is now in limbo as to its status, and unlikely ever to be settled. Not a lot different than being an "enemy combatant" in Guantanamo. Once the "process" has been initiated, there's no clear way to resolve it. Note to Wiki editors. The GA process is essentially broken."
Ironically, as a result, the review now truly has degenerated into "Endless unproductive discussion about the GA process." If I were the editor concerned, my annoyance would be directed at the initiator this reassessment, who has not commented beyond the initial two line nomination, not at volunteers coming here to give it a fair review in good faith.
In fact, the article looks pretty good to me, and I was going to review it this evening. Reviewing is a pretty thankless task at the best of times, and discussion like this is not encouraging. So I'm going to go and do something more enjoyable with my free time for now. Maybe another volunteer will step forward and contribute. I thank them in advance. Geometry guy 19:43, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your response. First, the discussion about the nature of the original GA approval process dominated the first of this review. No action followed for some time -- I waited for two weeks for anyone to bring the matter to a conclusion, and you only stepped in when I raised the issue.
Second, the fact that the GAR initiator acted seagull fashion is not my problem to fix. As you say 'the article looks pretty good to me'. But that a self-styled 'rouge [sic] editor' can initiate a GAR with no warning, no discussion, and no followup proves the point: this process itself is broken.
As to the initiator: Look at his record -- is this the first time he's done this exact stunt?? It is disingenuous of you to suggest that the initiating editor is the problem--or that I'm part of the problem for failing to go after him.
If the initiating editor could unmake his request, there might be some point in focusing on him. But can this editor unmake his request? No--once begun it is seen through to the end, or limbo, whichever comes first.
Can I push the process forward, somehow? Is it somehow MY fault that this GAR, once initiated, is then ignored? I have put comments here and on the talk page of the article. What next? Email additional editors?
You yourself said yesterday that you would resolve the issue, and you yourself said today that you are taking a break. I don't blame you for doing so. But your comments and your shrug-off only serve to prove my point that the process is broken.
Therefore I point to the process, and I regretfully -- because you seem a good person -- also point to all participants in that broken process, including you. If you're not part of the solution...
Third, you mention that I have stopped talking about the article, and moved to the process as a subject. Right. What do you think I should do? As you say: 'the article looks pretty good to me'. My comments stopped being about the article, and started being about the process, when and only when the article moved into Limbo/oblivion. 1 vote, and a bunch of comments about DA54. Clearly there was very little motivation to review, and no more specifics about the article to address.
I said before I have not much concern whether you list this article or delist it. I didn't nominate it, didn't ask for a GAR, and I won't renominate if it is delisted. It is only of a concern to me that the process be seen through to the end. I intend to fix any areas that the GAR finds wanting if I can do so, and I mean to do so promptly and and then retire back to my cave. So I want some input, please, and I think I may rightly say that some input on the article is at this point deserved.
It is not true that a watched pot never boils. I have found that boiling often commences when you turn up the heat.
The GAR process is relatively new in the WP lifecycle, and those want it to be more than a nuisance will work to improve it.
It would be a courtesy to me and to the many editors who worked on that article to finish the process that your workgroup initiated.

--Nemonoman (talk) 20:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you in turn for yours. I think we are getting back on track towards completing this review. I agree that the way the GAR was initiated is not your problem to fix, and I wasn't intending to be disingenuous about this. There is certainly no need for you or anyone to go after anyone. The opening of a GAR was not incorrect, as the article at the time did not meet the GA criteria. However, I am disappointed that the editor has not returned to comment on the improvements which have been made since then.
There is nothing you can do about this: I was only asking you not to redirect your frustration at good reviewers like Majoreditor; the thread you refer to is actually a discussion of an improvement in process which makes it harder for individuals to delist articles and then run away. That Majoreditor found no examples to test it on demonstrates his integrity; that he was frustrated enough to say "humph" (not a swear word) demonstrates his desire to ensure that this improvement in process is well designed.
When you say "I waited for two weeks for anyone to bring the matter to a conclusion, and you only stepped in when I raised the issue." I understand your perception. However, the first week was spent fixing genuine problems, thanks to a careful review and useful input from a couple of editors, together with your much-appreciated hard work. Concerning my intervention, I didn't actually step in because you raised the issue; I did so because I realised I had neglected GAR for over a week and was checking in to see if there were any discussions I could close, comment on, or review. This was just one of several.
I'm glad you intend to see this through. I also will, even though this is not "my" workgroup; I am but one of the volunteers. Although I firmly believe that contributing to Wikipedia should be a pleasure, I also find it is not a pleasure without personal integrity.
It will take at least another week to complete this reassessment, in my estimation, so I ask you not to have unrealistic expectations about how fast this process moves. Can I reassure you, however, that indefinite limbo does not occur at GAR. The longest delays there have been are about two months, and the process aims to deal with all articles within one month. When reviews fall silent, reviewers often do step in and try to resolve the issues. Geometry guy 21:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As I say on my userpage, I have met many fine persons while working on WP. I am grateful that you decided to call my answer 'conciliatory'; the least I can do is to try to live up to that characterization. I would've called it moderated in its pissiness -- but like I say, I have met many fine persons on WP, and it appears from your response like you mean to join that elite collection.
Except for finality, I most appreciate a deadline for finality. I'll go chew on my forepaws for a few days and see what you and your tribe come up with. --Nemonoman (talk) 22:58, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I intend to begin bringing this back on track tomorrow evening (UTC), but I don't want to discourage other reviewer's comments in the meanwhile. Geometry guy 22:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does this article now meet the GA criteria?

[edit]

Okay we had a bit of a digression. I would now ask all editors to get back on track, look at the current article, and check it against the GA criteria. It is too late now to worry about whether the article should never have been listed, and therefore should renominated. A decision at GAR is needed. In terms of other comments made, it seems to me that quite a few of Yannismarou's concerns have been address, but not all: the lead is much improved, but may need further work, and there may still be neutrality issues. I am only drawing attention to these possibilities, not expressing a view. I note Justwatch's support above, but this is not a vote: weight of argument is what matters, not weight of numbers. In that respect Justwatch has also made some substantial comments, which are worth reading. Geometry guy 22:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. I've read through the article, and have very few concerns: it is a nice piece of work and surely deserves to be a GA, no matter how complicated the route taken to get there! Here are my concerns.
    • There seems to be a lack of critical views. This has been noted above and at the peer review, with replies about the lack of neutral analysis. However, there is no objection to including biassed critical views, as long as they are attributed and Wikipedia does not endorse them. If this can be done in one or two places, without unbalancing the article, that would be helpful.
    • One example: masts. Minor point: what does "mu(st") mean? If there are multiple pronunciations, give both. More seriously, I find it hard to believe that no sources question Baba's interpretation that masts are enlightened individuals. It is clearly a personal view, and not one in accord with mainstream science, so comment is definitely needed here for balance.
    • The use of "the Avatar" and "God" needs clarification. The article seems to be translating concepts from a polytheistic religion into the monotheistic culture of the West. Mistranslation is easy. At one point the article suggests that Baba regarded himself as an incarnation of a specific God, Vishnu. I'm not convinced from the article that he regarded himself as "The Avatar of God" as much as "An Avatar of the divine". I am completely ignorent here, so I may be wrong, but cultural translation requires some care.
      (Another example: has any reliable source speculated about the relation between the first car accident and the "Avatarhood"?)
    • The section on "First contacts with the West" needs work. It has paragraphs on Associated Press articles and Time Magazine articles which get very tied up attributing every statement to the source. This needs to be cleaned up and balanced.
Otherwise, I like this article, and found it very interesting! Many thanks, Geometry guy 22:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks not only for your compliments, but for actually doing some fixes. I personally appreciate this.
Two facts[citation needed] that I will just state here are these:
  • Meher Baba used existing terms with his own unique and idiosyncratic definitions
  • As I have repeatedly stated, not a lot of persons argued his philosophy or use of terms. Practically none. So while he was culutrally influential, he was not particularly controversial.
As applied to your comments on musts. Nobody else idetifiably called musts musts except Meher Baba, so far as I can tell, and Meher Baba on his own say so would look at some crazy persons and decide, based on God Knows What Criteria that person A was Nuts and person B was 4th Plane Must. How one would know which is which is by writing down what Baba said. There were no other criteria. Baba's must-hunting disciples had a vague idea of who would pass Baba's smell-test, but they often found their guesses overruled. So far as I know, nobody ever looked at Baba's collection of musts and said, No these are Crazy People. In effect nobody cared, or at least nobody cared enough to record an objection.
As applied to your comments about the Avatar -- Avatar is for the most part a Vashnivite concept, and was to a degree subsumed by Meher Baba. So somebody of course wikilinked Avatar, and if you want a quick and dirty understanding, you could do worse than that article, even with its Vishnu bias.
Many of his Western followers forwent the term Avatar for The Christ, though Baba rarely referred to himself this way.
In answer to this (has any reliable source speculated about the relation between the first car accident and the "Avatarhood"?) No. Unreiiable sources -- I could quote dozens of late-night discussions between BLs. RELIABLE? Nada.
I don't know what to do about the quotes in first contacts with West. See my commments here. The quoted material, in tone and content, is So Distinctly Different from devotee literature of the time that I don't quite know how to reconcile. For example, Meher Baba rarely if ever used the word sin in recorded messages or discourses. Ever. Yet here's the AP quoting MB that his intention was to to convert thousands of Americans from sin. So maybe MB waited until an AP stringer got him in private, and then started saying things no one else ever heard him say. And how to NOT include this if NPOV is desired? And should one say == Yes, BUT... The reportage of stringers in the 30s was on a journalistic par with that of the Drudge Report today. How does one deal with this? Anyway, these doubtful interviews have been dutifully recorded, and the result is bloated mess, IMO. HOWEVER, is it right to take these OUT??? Or to put in some sort of disclaimers? The 'reported' phrases sure bloat the mix, but this sort of quote appears nowhere else.
ANYWAY is this, in your view Geometry Guy a Keep or Delist? --Nemonoman (talk) 23:10, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I hope it is heading for a keep, but I don't usually add a keep recommendation until I am satisfied that the article meets the criteria. That does not mean, I hasten to add, "Do as I say for me to recommend keeping the article"! I am often wrong, and often demand too much in some areas.
I forgot to mention one issue: it seems to me that footnote 11 on Irani should really provide a source.
I have done so. Adding a note to a note seems a stretch however. The principal reason why this note is here, by the way, is to address the view of an editorial consensus that Meher Baba is an INDIAN, not a Parsi, or an Irani, or a Persian. See this discussion in the archives. Changing MB's nationality to Persian or Iranian is a typical action of single-edit IP only drive-by editors. A recent big influx of Iranian pilgrims to Baba's tomb in Meherabad would indicate that interest in MB is growing in Iran, and likely an increasing temptation among those who wish to improve history by changing a few facts. --Nemonoman (talk) 21:01, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Your response contains a lot of helpful information. I will only respond on two matters.
  • The whole "sin" issue is perhaps another example of cultural (mis)translation: a positive "(only) do good" theology translated into "do no evil" theology of e.g. Catholic and related Christianity. It would almost certainly be OR to make this explicit, but it may help editors reconcile quotations in different sources.
I don't know how to reference this. You read enough of the literature, and after a while you start to notice that the word isn't used. It would be just as shocking as if the interview had quoted MB as saying 'Holy Bible'. That would be a rare utturance indeed. However, I don't know how to prove the negative, or even that it is provable. It's just not bloody likely.
There are very few direct quotes from Baba referencing sin, but those that there are are similar to this: Baba describes the opposite of God as "Nothing", and says

This law of the Nothing is not in God. It is in mental, subtle and gross forms. So Nothing means nothing – neither happiness nor misery, no birth, no death, no virtue, no sin. There is nothing such as sin![1]

I could probably do a dozen similar references in a few minutes, but what a bore. Anyway, reconcile that view with this statement from the AP:'...his intention was to to convert thousands of Americans from sin'--Nemonoman (talk) 21:11, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Meher Baba ... [would say] that person A was Nuts and person B was 4th Plane Must. How one would know which is which is by writing down what Baba said. There were no other criteria. Baba's must-hunting disciples had a vague idea of who would pass Baba's smell-test, but they often found their guesses overruled." This is the kind of information which is missing from the article: where did you get it? What is required here is not so much a criticism of what Meher Baba did, as a description of it along the lines you give (albeit with a more encyclopedic tone :).
Geometry guy 18:41, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well that tidbit comes from personal conversations with some of the mast-hunters, and conversations I've had with others who had similar accounts from other of Baba's close ones. The accounts are very consistent. I don't know that anybody has ever bothered to make this explicit let alone in a reputable source. There are many accounts, photos, movies, etc., of the masts that Baba identified. Those that didn't pass the smell test are forgotten now, except for some old mast-hunter's anecdote. How's that for non-encyclopedic? (PS I use the term 'smell-test' in hopes that it will be both clear and humorous. In actual fact, Baba would wave off a candidate for mast-work without any explicit test or action). --Nemonoman (talk) 20:24, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

SUMMARY: Except for his comments about Masts, which have no reliable sources to reference, I have made a number of changes to address all Geometry Guy's remaining concerns. --Nemonoman (talk) 13:39, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep as GA. Nemonoman has done a great job fixing this article. I fixed one further issue I raised, but almost all of my concerns have been addressed, and I don't see any remaining issues which are strong enough to delist this article. Unless objections are raised, I think this discussion should be closed (as keep) Geometry guy 20:04, 12 July 2008 (UTC) (PS. I'm removing a long statement which does not help to close this discussion.)[reply]
  • Keep GA Nemonoman has done excellent work here. I am happy to have this maintain GA status. —Giggy 02:34, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep GA - Now we have an article that is more encyclopedic and that have some third party sources. The only issue remaining is to remove duplicated sources that are listed in both the references section and the Biblio section. An easy fix. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 02:45, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Jossi for make those fixes to the references (and also for pointing out most of those 3rd party sources)--Nemonoman (talk) 03:38, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Roman Catholic Church

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Kept. GAR is not dispute resolution or the proper venue for continuation of the talk page disagreement which precipitated the GAR nomination. While there seems to be support for some trimming, the existing prose is not in such a state as to preclude GA status. Neutrality issues, if any, have not been sufficiently or adequately articulated. Please continue to work together to improve the article on its talk page. ЭLСОВВОLД talk 14:16, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]


Good article criteria 3-b is:

"it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style)"

Summary Style says:

"When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own article, that text can be summarized from the present article and a link provided to the more detailed article.... The length of a given Wikipedia article tends to grow as people add information to it. This cannot go on forever: very long articles would cause problems. So we must move information out of articles periodically."

Editors of Roman Catholic Church are refusing efforts to cut any detectable amounts of the largest section -- history-- even though

  • 1. a new article was created just to cover this topic-- History of the Roman Catholic Church
  • and 2. even with my good faith efforts to reduce this duplicate coverage-- the entire article still exceeded 155 KB when "Wikipedia:Article size" calls for articles to not exceed "30 to 50 KB of readable prose." While it is granted that a notable fraction of current 192 KB is footnotes and such, this 192 KB is still many times the best article size.

This violates Good article criteria 3-b

--Carlaude (talk) 14:14, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Keep a hugely WP:POINTY nomination from an editor with a long history of difficulty in collaborating. The main editor of the article is away on a long vacation, as Carlaude well knows, and the article has just had a very contentious FAC. This is an irrelevance. Carlaude admitted he had not even read the whole of the shortened history section when he substituted it! The editor who produced it, Karenacs, is very happy to discuss it first. The issue of the length of the section has been discussed at great length by many editors at FAC & the talk page. Personally I agree with some shortening, but like everything else about this article, careful discussion is needed. For the article length itself - see User:SandyGeorgia's comments on the FAC - pointed out previously to Carlaude - she cites several longer FACs, on much smaller topics. Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Where are you discussing it? Nowhere. Nor edited.
Sandy Georgia's comments are not relevant as they occurred before the History of the Roman Catholic Church page was made.
The "main editor" Johnbod refers too and most editors of the article have much difficulty in collaborating with others (unless you hold the Roman Catholic POV). Hence the article has failed the FAC a number of times. It is not just the length-- it is holding huge length without reason nor discussion nor compromise.
The article does not meet Good article criteria and they keep throwing up the excuse that they are trying (unsuccessfully) to make it meet Featured article criteria.--Carlaude (talk) 16:15, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good article criteria 4 is:

"It is neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without bias."

Note also the article is filled with bias.

  • Nearly every paragraph begins with something like "The Catholic Church..."
Catholic Church and Catholicism is a term properly meaning "general" or "universal"[2]—is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:
  • Church, (originally) whole body of Christians; ~, belonging to or in accord with (a) this, (b) the church before separation into Greek or Eastern and Latin or Western, (c) the Latin Church after that separation, (d) the part of the Latin Church that remained under the Roman obedience after the Reformation, (e) any church (as the Anglican) claiming continuity with (b)."[3]
  • The article says such Roman Catholic POV things (in the lead section) as
"With a 2,000 year history, the Church is the world's oldest and largest institution."
And then cites a Roman Catholic source[4] only.
  1. Few if any (non-Roman Catholic) church historian would claim 2,000 for the age of Roman Catholic Church-- this is either very bad scholarship or a claim to be the only church today that Christ did found.
  2. Eastern Orthodox sees were founded decades earlier than the church at Rome and for the first 1000 years more Christians lived under Eastern Orthodoxy than the Western Patriarch.--Carlaude (talk) 15:46, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I supsect that Malleus is spot-on correct. The article has been vastly improved during the course of recent collaborations and FA nominations. I'll take a closer look this weekend. Majoreditor (talk) 17:12, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I support Carlaude's proposal to trim the history section of the article. Details can reside in the daughter articles on church history. However, that doesn't merit de-listing. Nor is GAR the forum to settle this matter. Content disputes like this are best handled through talk page discussions.
I am unimpressed with Carlaude's example of supposed POV-pushing. Eastern Orthodox sees (properly known as eparchies) split several hundred years ago into those which remained in the Orthodox communion and those which re-established communion with the Catholic Church. These Eastern Catholic churches legitimately trace their roots back to the first century. A good example is the patriarchate of Antioch; what started as a single church divided over time into five separate churches, three of which are currently part of the Catholic Church (Maronite, Melkite, Syriac).
While the have presented some correct facts I question their relevance. E.g. -- We date the beginning of the United States to 1776-- more importantly-- we do not date the beginning of the United States to the founding of the earliest states (or parts) of what is now part of the United States-- something like 1610 with Jamestown (as far as I recall). --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Carlaude's assertion that it's POV for an article on the Catholic Church to refer to the church as "Catholic" is disturbing. Parsing a dictionary definition is original research; we don't do that here at Wikipedia. A better approach would be to produce reliable sources showing that the church and others use a different name.
You mean like this?
It is not clear what you found disturbing. The dictionary quote is right out of the lead of Catholicism. We don't post original research in articles. The Roman Catholic Church historically asserts it is the one true church. Are you going to claim that statement is also original research? --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I also wonder about his claim that Oxford University Press is a "Roman Catholic source"; I seem to remember that Oxford severed its ties with the papists around 500 years ago :} Majoreditor (talk) 07:30, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am unimpressed with Majoreditor's strawman argument. The Roman Catholic source is of course the author Gerald O'Collins, Jesuit Father, and a professor of Christology at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Keep - as per above concerns voiced by editors. I do agree that this seems to be more an issue of the editor going against WP:POINT rather than something being genuinely wrong with the article, which is very close to featured status, thanks to months of work and graft put in by numerous editors in the community over there. - Yorkshirian (talk) 12:17, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Yorkshirian (talk · contribs) is banned from Wikipedia for one year, effective July 14, by ArbCom decision for "a variety of unseemly conduct, including personal attacks, incivility and assumptions of bad faith; edit-warring; and attempts to use Wikipedia as a battleground along geographical, cultural, and ideological lines". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • Comment I see my name mentioned here. Below is the data on the readable prose size of this article, relative to the recommended guideline of a max 50KB readable prose and 10,000 words.
  • Roman Catholic Church – readable prose size
    • End of Feb FAC: 43KB, 7165 words
    • End of Mar FAC: 56KB, 9266 words
    • End of Jun FAC: 74KB, 12077 words
    • Current size  : 77KB, 12555 words

The last time it was checked, the average FA size was 25KB readable prose. To my knowledge, of the 6642 featured articles, the only FAs longer than Roman Catholic Church are Ketuanan Melayu and Bob Dylan. Islam, a featured article, has 41 kB (6736 words) of readable prose. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:14, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep - While it certainly could be improved, I'll note that a Good Article isn't actually named "perfect article". Well qualified for GA status, even if it could use some trimming, etc. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:34, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ramesses II

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page

Result: Delisted. Although this article has many good qualities, the lack of sourcing is a fatal flaw that has not been addressed. Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 18:10, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have left several lists of problems on the talk page as part of a GA Sweeps review that has been running since March (my fault for an unexpected Wikibreak). In that time periodic attempts have been made to clean up the article, but not have systematically addressed the problems with it. Short cuts have also been made, for example I tagged a lot of uncited material that was then simply hidden rather than sourced or deleted. Large parts of the article have also been cut out in an attempt to improve the prose, and so I am no longer sure that this article is comprehensive. An attempt to raise interest from people at Wikiproject:Ancient Egypt provoked comment but little action and as I have made edits to the article in an attempt to assist improvements, I am no longer sure if this passes or fails the criteria. Therefore I am listing this here to generate wider comment and consensus. I have no prejudice on whether the article is kept or delisted.--Jackyd101 (talk) 08:06, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I lean toward keep. While some material may be hidden, the article is still substantial and broad enough to merit GA status. Majoreditor (talk) 06:22, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I too lean towards keep; like Majoreditor I think the article is sufficiently broad to meet the GA criteria. I do think that there are a couple of things that ought to be attended to first though:
  • I've been through and done a quick copyedit, but some of the prose is unintelligible to me. For instance this: "Ramesses decided to eternalise himself in stone, so he ordered to change the way and the principle the stone was shaped. Previous pharaohs had carved across the images and words of their predecessors, and the elegant reliefs could have been easely transformed, so Ramesses insisted on a different style where the pictures were instead deeply engraved in stone. They showed and shined more clearly on the Egyptian sun reflecting his relationship with the sungod, Ra". I think I know what this is getting at, but I'm not confident enough to rewrite it.
  • I'd like to see the citations made consistent. Ref #63 uses "op. cit" (why?), ref #21 uses "pp. 253ff", ref #28 uses "p.223–224", and ref #15 uses "pp.170–172".

--Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 16:11, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's in the second paragraph of Building activity and monuments. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 11:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I like that part as it stands; it's quite poetic. Still, how about something like "As did his predecessors, Ramesses had Egypt's royal statuary and monuments altered to reflect his own likeness and accomplishments. However, he wished to prevent his successors doing the same, and in a bid to immortalise himself in stone, he ensured the carvings went deep and could not be easily undone." I can't think of how to work the Ra bit in (presumably it refers to polishing the stonework), but hopefully it's a start. EyeSerenetalk 18:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist. There's a lot of leaning going on here :-) which suggests to me an article which does not meet the criteria, but is getting an easy ride because it is quite a nice article on an interesting subject, and it would be a pity to delist it. The vague and opinionated nature of the hidden material (most of which I have removed) should sound alarm bells. Sure enough, reading the article reveals many GA problems. I will focus on unsourced statements of opinion.
    "Although the famous Battle of Kadesh often dominates the scholarly view of Ramesses II's military prowess and power, he nevertheless enjoyed more than a few outright victories over the enemies of Egypt." The second statement is arguably justified by the rest of the section; the first statement is unsourced.
    "There must have been a naval battle somewhere near the mouth of the Nile, as shortly afterwards many Sherden are seen in the Pharaoh's body-guard where they are conspicuous by their helmets with horns with a ball projecting from the middle, their round shields and the great Naue II swords with which they are depicted in inscriptions of the Battle of Kadesh.[20]" OR: [20] sources only the sword.
    "His records tell us that he was forced to fight a Palestinian prince who was mortally wounded by an Egyptian archer, and whose army was subsequently routed." Unencyclopedic; maybe the source at the end of the paragraph supports this, but that seems unlikely to me.
    "In a sense, however, the Battle of Kadesh was a personal triumph for Ramesses, as after blundering into a devastating Hittite ambush, the young king courageously rallied his scattered troops to fight on the battlefield while escaping death or capture." Unencyclopedic, unsourced, editorialized.
    "Canaanite princes, seemingly influenced by the Egyptian incapacity to impose their will, and goaded on by the Hittites, began revolts against Egypt." Seemingly influenced?
    "This demand precipitated a crisis in relations between Egypt and Hatti when Ramesses denied any knowledge of Mursili's whereabouts in his country, and the two Empires came dangerously close to war."
    "The Hittite king encouraged the Babylonian to oppose another enemy, which must have been the king of Assyria whose allies had killed the messenger of the Egyptian king." Must have been?
    "Although the exact events surrounding the foundation of the coastal forts and fortresses is not clear, some degree of political and military control must have been held over the region to allow their construction." Again!
    "By becoming a god, Ramesses dramatically changed not just his role as ruler of Egypt, but also the role of his firstborn son, Amun-her-khepsef."
    "In the third year of his reign Ramesses started the most ambitious building project after the pyramids, that were built 1,500 years earlier. The population was put to work on changing the face of Egypt." Just two sentences from two completely unsourced paragraphs in the same vein.
    "Ramesses II did become the legendary figure he so desperately wanted to be, but this was not enough to protect Egypt."
    "However, this is not surprising since few pharaohs wished to record natural disasters or military defeats in the same manner that their rivals documented these events (as in the Biblical narratives)."
Geometry guy 19:06, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's a fair observation. As the article stands right now it would really have to be delisted. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 19:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The article has been much improved, e.g. thanks to your edits, so I don't think we need to be too regretful. If there were a content expert with sources to hand improving the article now, then we could prolong this GAR, but as far as I can see that is not the case. Geometry guy 20:18, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I agree - the prose has greatly improved, but without some serious sourcing work we can't let this one through. EyeSerenetalk 10:24, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Stele of Sheikh Saad

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{{During the exploration of the Sheikh Saad Shrine by Orientalist Bedřich Hrozný, a memorial stele of Egyptian Pharaon Ramses II}} [5] --Kiss de Băbeni (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2019 (UTC) --Kiss de Băbeni (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2019 (UTC) --Kiss de Băbeni (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2019 (UTC) --Kiss de Băbeni (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Hustler (film)

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page

Result: Article listed as GA. Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 16:33, 20 July 2008 (UTC).[reply]

I'm sorry, but this GA fail was ridiculous. It appears to me that AnmaFinotera failed it as a punishment because I disagreed with the mistaken trivial copy edits made by Malleus Fatuorum about where some punctuation should go. I have all of the original sources and I'm guessing that Malleus does not, and I placed all punctuation properly in accordance with WP:PUNC. The concerns of the nominator were addressed and to fail an article because of a disagreement about where a few periods and commas ought to go is foolish. Otto4711 (talk) 01:37, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • No, I failed because of prose issues. The article was being copy edited to fix this, but you got into an argument over it. Quite honestly, yes, I was appalled at your reaction to some someone who was doing you a favor to fix the one big issue before the article could be passed. I also felt it was extremely rude of you to keep reverting him in the middle of the copyedit rather than leave a note on his talk page to discuss. You chased off not one, but two copyeditors with such actions. As such, the prose issues remained unfixed, and one of the biggest concerned left unaddressed. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 03:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've gone over this extensively on Malleus's talk page so I'm not going to go too deeply into it again here. All I'm going to say is that if I find that someone is editing an article in good faith and introducing spelling mistakes or any other kind of errors, I'm going to fix them whether the editor is still actively introducing the errors or not. I see this as no different. The editor was introducing punctuation "fixes" that were incorrect per the original sources, all of which I have in my possession. I did leave a message on his talk page. I can't quite see how I can be held responsible for another editor's feelings being bruised by an innocuous edit summary like "punctuation is correct per original source."
  • As for the second copy editor I supposedly "chased off," I posted exactly one comment in which I quoted part of a style guideline and explained that in numerous previous GA discussions I have been advised to title the sections "Notes" and "References." Again, the message strikes me as pretty innocuous and straightforward and I am baffled by the editor's extreme reaction to it.
  • I still think the GA fail was punitive and am quite frankly getting a little tired of this article being used as a punching bag over triviality. It was failed the first time because the reviewer didn't like the format of the cast list. It was failed the second time because of where some commas and periods were placed. Otto4711 (talk) 12:40, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. As long as quotations are punctuated in a clear and consistent manner, the precise method can hardly be considered a GA requirement, especially as the MoS is unclear on what "logical quotation" actually means. Although I don't consider it relevant to this reassessment, I have made an enquiry there.
Are there any other prose issues? Geometry guy 09:21, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • As per my GA review "There are a few places where the article jumps a bit from topic to topic with no transition. For example, in Production, the second paragraph opens with "Paul Newman was originally unavailable to play Fast Eddie...", but nothing in the first paragraph mentions him being considered or desired for the part. After noting someone else was hired, it notes that Newman was freed from his previous obligation and took the part. Was Darin simply fired when Newman became available? There are also a few places where sentences are worded awkwardly, causing problems with flow, such as three paragraphs in a row starting the same way. Has the article been copyedited?" The specific examples were mostly fixed, though the first still seems to jump without any clue it is coming. The punctuation issue wasn't even one I looked at (I'm not an expert in that area), but the problems with the prose itself lead me to ask for a copyedit. I wouldn't have a clue about mispaced commas and periods beyond blatantly obvious ones like a period placed midsentence or missing or something. So despite Otto's beliefs, I failed it purely on the actual prose of the piece, the flow, tone, etc. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 14:05, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The second paragraph now begins with the information that Newman's agent turned down the part. It seems to me that this includes the implication that the studio was interested in Newman's playing the part, else why would he have been offered it to turn down? I fixed the issue of multiple consecutive paragraphs, as you noted, and you also commented in the review - at least I took your comment in the review to mean, and forgive me if I misinterpreted - that you felt that the additional material in the production section addressed your concerns but you still wanted another set of eyes to look at it. If there are specific sentences that you believe are worded awkwardly, why not just say which sentences they are? I'm not Kreskin; I can't tell what sentences you like and what sentences you don't if you don't tell me which ones they are. Otto4711 (talk) 19:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Those were only a few instances. I felt the entire thing needed review by a copyeditor to fix up such sentences, and to spot ones I might have missed as I am not a grammar expert. When you've written almost the entire article, it is very hard to see such issues. A copyeditor who is not tied to the article can see such things and fix them relatively quickly, which is usually why a CE is a good idea before any GA nom. Also, while the implication is there, it still reads oddly to just jump straight to choice two. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 19:16, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Request for clarification. I'm a little confused by "punctuation is correct per original source". If it were direct quotations being altered, I'd absolutely agree that they shouldn't be touched. However, the article text should be the expression of unoriginal research in an original way that we strive for. Why then must the punctuation follow the source? EyeSerenetalk 18:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • For instance, when Sarah rejects Eddie initially, she says "You're too hungry." The article has the period inside the quotation marks because the quote is the end of a sentence of dialog. Similarly, other instances of punctuation being moved outside the quotes are instances in which the quote is the end of the sentence. Putting the period inside the quotes indicates that it's the end of the sentence in the original source. Putting it outside the quotes creates the possible impression that it is not the end of the sentence, which may lead the reader to erroneously believe that there is more to the sentence and perhaps wonder what has been omitted and why. I don't see how placing the punctuation where it is in the directly quoted source implicates the concept of research, original or unoriginal. Otto4711 (talk) 18:22, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Clarification from me: the issue mainly concerns direct quotations of sentence fragments from the end of a sentence in the source. WP:PUNC (part of MoS) says "When a sentence fragment is quoted, the period is outside." Consequently Malleus tried to copyedit the article to move periods outside direct quotations of sentence fragments. Otto objected, because the period was in the source, hence part of the quote. This would certainly be in the spirit of WP:Logical quotation, which is the principle MoS is using. Furthermore, WP:PUNC, bless it, goes on to contradict its own injunction. In short, a perfect demonstration of why the finer details of MoS are not required for GA. Lets concentrate on other issues shall we? Geometry guy 19:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks both for that. I agree, it's trivial. The reason for my initial concern was that the "punctuation is correct per original source" sentence could be read as implying sections of the article had been lifted verbatim from the sources, although I very much doubted that was really the case, or it was what Otto4711 meant to imply. With that put to rest, I don't see any real reason why this shouldn't be a GA. The prose isn't perfect, but it's by no means bad, and it ticks all the criteria boxes for me. The only slight nitpick is that the image used should have a descriptive filename, but that's minor. EyeSerenetalk 20:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The tagged sentence is I believe supported by the sentences that follow it, Rossen's assessment of his work and Ebert's review, both of which discuss the theme of humanity, winning and losing. Otto4711 (talk) 22:41, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I provided a ham-fisted way to cover this, but there may be a better way to restructure the sentences/paragraph to make clear that the given sentence is a summary of reliably sourced material. For now, though, I have no further concerns and recommend listing as GA. Geometry guy 22:49, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the duplicate sourcing is a fine solution. I'm continuing to poke around for thematic material for what I hope may be a FAC push at some point so with a little luck I'll turn up something a little better. Thanks. Otto4711 (talk) 22:57, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. As I have been mentioned here, I think it only appropriate to comment. As it happens, I think the article is just about good enough to meet the GA criteria, although a long way from being a credible FA candidate. And I made at least a couple more changes other than just moving a few fullstops around. But take this sentence for example: "Sarah pleads with Eddie to leave with her, saying that the world he's living in and its inhabitants are 'perverted, twisted and crippled,' but he refuses." The punctuation is clearly wrong, don't you think? Not a GA fail I agree, but when someone offers to help correct errors like that perhaps it would be as well to be a little more gracious in refusing such help? That's all I have to say. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 00:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • As I've already said, I am sorry about how this whole situation went down. I had no intention of belittling your efforts or making you feel like you were not appreciated or in any way dissing your contributions. I was 100% in "this seems wrong to me, I'll fix it" mode. There was absolutely no intention on my part to imply that your actions were not undertaken in good faith. Otto4711 (talk) 05:10, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • You know what? I was totally ready to let this die, but seeing as how you've back-handed me not once, not twice, but three times over this, I really now feel the need to point out that it's time for you to get the hell over it. One more snide remark about it and I will pursue the matter of your incivility further. Otto4711 (talk) 23:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks Malleus: I went through last night and fixed a few examples of commas at the ends of quotations similar to the one you quote, but I missed that one. Punctuation is needed outside the quote here, I agree; this is even more clear if one decides to use a semicolon instead of a comma, as I have suggested in my fix. I remain agnostic about the periods, and have left them inside. Geometry guy 07:24, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's more of a grey area when the quotation is at the end of the sentence and is itself the end of a sentence (if you see what I mean), I agree. The rule seems clear enough to me though that if the quotation is not a complete sentence, then as a matter of definition the punctuation at its end is not part of the quotation, but part of the sentence in which it's quoted ... I'm starting to confuse myself now, and this is not really relevant to this GAR anyway. :-) My feeling is that on balance the article should be listed as a GA. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 13:42, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I might have changed some myself too, but my query has so far led to more heat than light at WT:MoS, sigh :-) Geometry guy 23:22, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Heh, well everyone knows the MoS is only a guideline... EyeSerenetalk 07:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: delisted. A consensus was reached that the article fails Criterion 2(b)—it has too few inline citations. Ruslik (talk) 12:35, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Criteria 2(b): the requirement for inline citations seems to have increased over the last year with more seeming to be required. Tom (talk) 23:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. Are there particular statements which you feel need the support of a citation? For example, direct quotations, statistics, or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged? Though the article has only thirteen in-line citations I don't find it to be terribly deficient. I found only a couple of statements which I thought need citations which don't currently have them; I have added the appropriate tags.

The article suffers from some other minor problems:

  • While the prose is generally good, there are some randomly horrid exceptions; for example: Their 18 man contingent did manage to earn Piedmont a position at the Peace Congress in Paris where Cavour was able to make some HUGE complaints about the condition of non-Piedmont sections of Italy which lead them into war againt prussia. when this happened italy was defeated and could no longer exist which is why today there is howeke japan instead!?
  • The "Legacy" section is very short; I wonder if it's as complete as it should be.
  • The lead should contain additional information on his role in Italian expansion/unification.

Overall, this is an interesting, well-composed article which can be brought up to GA standards> Majoreditor (talk) 02:10, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

thanks, published opion also needs to be in-lined as well. Good suggestions hopefully someone will find to address Tom (talk) 09:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Some of the issues have been fixed. However, there's still a couple of {{fact}} tags. Majoreditor (talk) 22:43, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Suggest a delist at this point. There are still quite a few unsourced paragraphs/statements, and I don't have access to the sources to help out this regard. I don't think it should be GA until someone goes through and inline cites it. —Giggy 08:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist, with regrets. Majoreditor (talk) 12:54, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist. Actually inline citation requirements for GA are lower than a year ago: there is, for example, no requirement that every paragraph has a citation. Instead the focus is on requiring citations where they are essential to comply with policy. For instance the first paragraph of "Early life" has no citation, and probably doesn't need one, unless editors consider "fair amount" is likely to be challenged. On the other hand, in the next paragraph, "Cavour frequently ran afoul of the authorities in the academy, as he was too headstrong to deal with the rigid military discipline" is opinion and analysis, which needs to be cited. The article has many more such examples, but I don't think I need to list them, given the consensus forming here. Geometry guy 21:05, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Triarii

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Removed. Since you improved the article after failed nomination, it should go through the normal Good article nomination process. Ruslik (talk) 18:59, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article failed GA review by all criteria except neutrality, and I was told it wouldn't even make B class. I think it is worthy of GA status, I've referenced everything, and I don't think there's anything I haven't covered. I'm fairly sure it's neutral, and the stability issues have been resolved. I haven't been able to find any images.--Serviam (talk) 16:48, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's stable for now because I don't have to nerve to see every edit reverted. While it may look good on a superficial look, a glance at the sources shows that the article contradicts some of the newer material. Another issue is that the article is largely based on sources from the 19th century. Wandalstouring (talk) 14:30, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ Kalchuri (1986) p.4198
  2. ^ Liddell and Scott The word is associated with the adverb καθόλου (or καθ' ὅλου), meaning "on the whole", "in general", "completely", "entirely" (Liddell and Scott)
  3. ^ The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th edition (1982)
  4. ^ O'Collins, Gerald (2003). Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity. Oxford University Press. 019925995X. Retrieved 2008-06-26. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed%C5%99ich_Hrozn%C3%BD#Biografie
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