Talk:1911–12 North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:1911–12 North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Twooeight (talk · contribs) 22:39, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

@user talk:Disc Wheel, I have begun the review of the 1911–12 North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team article. Some thing I noticed quickly was that the article’s grammar and stuff isn’t good enough to be a GA. It is also very repetitive about the games and the schedule. It is in the opening section, the “schedule” section and the “regular season” section where the same stuff is just repeated. There is also only one picture. I understand that it is difficult to get pictures for something that happened over 100 years ago so that isn’t much of an issue, but if there is a way you could find more that would be welcome. If these issues are resolved I will pass the article. Twooeight (talk) 22:39, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Twooeight, the entire boilerplate opening section of the review was missing—it should be part of the initial page when you use the "start review" link to open a review in the editor, so be sure next time not to remove it, since the bot that creates the GAN page needs the information in that section. The intro section (also called the lede) is expected to summarize the rest of the article, so a certain amount of duplication there is expected (and at two paragraphs it is the correct size for an article of under 15000 prose characters per MOS:LEADLENGTH, part of the GA criteria), but there should be minimal duplication within sections in the body of the article. It would help if you could give at least a couple of examples of the problematic grammar. One thing I noticed was that while en dashes were correctly used for just about all of the scores, i.e., "17–16", the en dashes used in words should typically be hyphens, i.e., "mid-December" and "back-and-forth" rather than "mid–December" and "back–and–forth". On my screen, at least, the roster and schedule tables are side by side, and they should be placed one above the other; the Schedule is too wide to be adjacent to another table.

I do agree that the article needs some work; it seems to me that a lot of information is missing. There's a big deal made in Roster and schedule about the initial schedule being 17 games, but nowhere is the final number actually stated (9). This kind of basic information should be in prose, not merely inferred from tables. As a general matter, I think the tale of Marvin Ritch in that section would be clearer if the date of his employment as Congressman Webb's secretary was included in the body of the article, since it helps clarify that Ritch left in early January, and the season started in February. In general, the Regular season section needs more dates. Just because the Schedule table is there doesn't mean that the prose shouldn't at least give the opening and closing dates of the season. That's basic information, and again needs to be in prose. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:35, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

@Twooeight: @BlueMoonset:. Thanks for the input! I will make some adjustments to the prose of the season summary with dates, the use of dashes,and explicitly stating Ritch got the position in January in the coming days as I'm a little busy at the moment. In regards to the "information is missing" comment, I wrote the article solely with the articles that I was able to find that covered the Tar Heels and before, during, and after their basketball season, while the written texts offer minimal detail. So what was covered by the news reporters has been included, so I'm unable to add much more. But please feel free to elaborate on your comment if I misinterpreted it.

With respect to the schedule change from 17 to 9 games, there was no coverage in any of The Tar Heel pages regarding why the schedule was reduced, but I modify the sentence where I discuss the "final slate of games" to say that it was nine games. Disc Wheel (T + C) 20:40, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

@Twooeight: @BlueMoonset:. Made several grammar fixes and also included the dates above. Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you both! Disc Wheel (T + C) 17:02, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Disc Wheel, I've just done a copyedit of the Guilford section of the second paragraph under Regular season to show what I think needs to be done (and also capitalized the first word in the first paragraph—when you make fixes, it's very important that you don't introduce new errors like this one; there are a few other new ones elsewhere, like missing spaces or extra letters). The Well-written portion of the GA criteria requires that the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct, and the article isn't there yet. I'd like to suggest that you request a copyedit from the Guild of Copy Editors; it's the conciseness and spelling/grammar/punctuation that still needs work—in the copyedit I did, I removed one of two instances of the phrase "The Tar Heels played good defense" referring to the same game; the first of them had no space before the beginning of the sentence. A bit more care needs to be taken with the interpretation of the source material: in the Guilford game, the source says that the players "threw" fouls, which doesn't necessarily mean that they sank all the shots, which to me is implied by "make", so I changed it to "took". (The source gives no information on how many points came from free throws.) Also, you are putting an inline source citation after every sentence, even when the source is the same for several sentences running, which seems excessive. A citation is assumed to cover everything that comes before it in the current paragraph up to the previous cite; the one exception is that you should always have a citation at the end of any sentence that contains a quote even if it is the same source that covers the following sentence(s). I hope this is helpful as you continue working on the article, and I do recommend that Guild copyedit. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:40, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

@BlueMoonset: Before I spend time waiting for a CE by the guild, I would like to give the article a rewrite to see if its up to your standards. I will get started this weekend as I have some free time. I've never encountered an issue regarding the inline citations with my previous nominations. If anything I've encountered issues when they haven't been placed for each sentence. I've often checked sources when reviewing an article's content for GAN/FAC, only to find that the sentences without inline citations did not have any reference in the trailing citation, so I will keep those. Disc Wheel (T + C) 01:35, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

@BlueMoonset: @Twooeight: I've finished a CE of the prose. Please let me know what you all think. Disc Wheel (T + C) 05:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@user talk:Disc Wheel, the prose is much better now, thank you. I made a few edits so check those out. Another problem I found while reviewing it again is that it is still kind of repetitive, but less than it was before. My main issue now is that there is a lot of unimportant information in the “regular season” section. It names random things newspapers said about the game. If those are important comments then that’s ok, but some of them are just random comments. It also just says people’s last names and then stats. This is very confusing because no one knows who “Smith” and “Metcalf” are and makes it look like someone just looked at a box score and wrote stats they saw, which probably shouldn’t be on the page. Remember a GA is supposed to be the top articles on Wikipedia, so this article will need to improve more before I approve it. Twooeight (talk) 22:37, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@Twooeight: I appreciate the comments and I made some adjustments. I'm still a little busy IRL, so please bear with me. As for the use of names, such as Smith in particular I mention Junius Smith earlier in the article and its commonplace to continue to refer to the person by just their surname when referring to them later. I will comb through the regular season section and try to cut out superfluous portions. I just tried to include most relevant information from the articles that covered their season to give a comprehensive summary. Thanks for the continued critiques.

One last thing. I noticed you changed uncapitalized the A in Auditorium. In the papers that talk of the venue where the game was played they all capitalize the A, which seems to me that it was a proper name for the arena at the time. What do you think? Best, Disc Wheel (T + C) 03:44, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@user talk:Disc Wheel. Yeah it’s okay you can just work on it when you get a chance. I must’ve missed the previous reference to Smith so that’s my bad, and I assumed it was a typo with auditorium, but if that’s a proper noun then change it back. Twooeight (talk) 21:04, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@Twooeight: Apologies for the delay. The more I read the prose and go over the sources. I feel like I did a solid job of summarizing what the articles even covered based on the game since coverage was so limited back then. I realize it sounds like a box score, but that is how the writers described the games. I'm afraid I don't see any further changes I can make on it. I think the minor details the writers included in their articles that I have referenced here give the regular season section more information and break up the monotony of the prose. Disc Wheel (T + C) 17:01, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

@user talk:Disc Wheel. Alright looks good. I’ll approve it. Good job. Twooeight (talk) 15:51, 22 March 2020 (UTC)