Talk:2007 Texas Longhorns football team

2007 Texas Longhorns football team has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
April 28, 2007	Good article nominee	Not listed
August 13, 2007	Good article nominee	Not listed
March 12, 2008	Good article nominee	Listed

Current status: Good article

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Archives

Archive 1

February 9 GA Review

This review is for the GAC submitted on February 9, 2008. For the moment, the GAC is on hold.

GA review (see here for criteria)

This is a very nice piece of work, but there are a few minor changes I'd like to see before signing off on it. Once they're done, I'd suggest submitting the article for FAC.

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS):
The prose is good and does an excellent job of covering the subject in a clear and succinct fashion. It does, however, suffer from flow difficulties. These manifest themselves in short sentences that abruptly shift subject. For example, the first two sentences of the Arkansas State game summary could easily be merged into one: The game marked the first meeting between Texas and Arkansas State, a NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision team from the Sun Belt Conference. There are similar examples in the first two sentences of the Coaches and Practices subsections.

There are also minor MoS issues, mainly dealing with date format, punctuation, and not wikilinking or explaining unique terms. In the Texas A&M section, for example, there is a date given with the day first. Commas are also needed after most dates. "On October 11, 2008, such-and-such happened."

The first sentence in the preseason section needs to be fixed.

I'd suggest changing the first section's name to Preseason or something along those lines — it's simply quicker than "Leading into the 2007 season", even if "preseason" doesn't precisely align with what football fans consider it.

Be sure to wikilink common football terms and positions, such as quarterback, sack, kickoff return, etc. on first reference. I've had that impressed on me many times during FAC review, and I'd suggest doing it now.

You've got a lot of prose, that, while nice, doesn't really belong in an article about Texas football. I really don't need to know about Arkansas State's history — If I want to find out about it, there's always a link to it. Just cut it out and paste it in the Arkansas State history. If it's already there, just delete it. I know it's really tough to delete something that took you a while to write and source, but ask yourself this question: Does this fact contribute to my understanding of why Texas football did what it did during the 2007 season?

It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
Very good sourcing, but you may not need five sources for some of the Texas A&M information. Three is generally enough to establish that something is "common" or not, but that's personal preference.
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars etc.:
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
The pictures are fantastic, but I'd suggest removing the rainbow and Vince Young pictures. The rainbow picture is nice, but it doesn't help our understanding. The same goes for the Vince Young picture. It's only natural for him to want to come back to campus, since he's a famous alumnus — If he'd deliberately stayed away for some reason, it might be worth mentioning — but he's merely doing the expected. Removing that picture to the Commons file for this article will also let you close up that white space a bit.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:

Gimme a shout once you've fixed things, and I'll be happy to sign off on the article. I think the prose is a bit bulky, but the article is definitely worthy of a FAC once a few changes are made. JKBrooks85 (talk) 04:47, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi JKBrooks85, thanks so much for reviewing the article and for making several good suggestions. I will begin working on these right away. They will probably take me several days to address completely. I will reply here as I go. Best, Johntex\^talk 06:52, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

1.a. Prose
*"Leading into the season" heading: I am changing the "Leading into the 2007 season" to "Before the season". That is shorter and seems to now be the preferred format according to the Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Yearly team pages format. "Pre-season" is not preferred because it is not a pre-season as found in other sports, referring to games that do not count in the standings.
*Fix first sentence in 'pre-season' section: - Done. This should have said, "Mack Brown became the head coach of the Texas Longhorns for the 1998 season."
References: - the multiple Aggie references are only used one time each; therefore they do not need to each have their own separate footnote. I combined them into one reference for the first sentence, and a second reference for the second sentence. This takes the numbers out of the text while still leaving the references accessible if anyone thinks we are talking smack about the Aggie coach. Does that seem suitable?
5.b. I removed both the rainbow pic and the Vince Young pic. I was never really that happy with the rainbow pic myself. I think it was one of the earliest ones I added and then found better ones later. As to the Vince Young pic, I am just slightly sad to see it go. It was the only game he attended in 2007 so it is really not that normal for him to be at the game. Plus, I find it slightly ironic that UT lost that game, and lost it badly. Never-the-less, we do have a lot of pictures so I defer to your judgment and removed it.

More soon... Johntex\^talk 07:05, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If there's anything I can do to help you, just say the word. The only reason I've been reluctant to do more is because most of what I would recommend involves removing information from this article to a sibling article, and I know how much it hurts to have to remove something you've spent a lot of time researching and writing. As an aside, I've alternated the images in the "Before the season" section, in order to achieve balance on both sides of the page. JKBrooks85 (talk) 08:01, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

JK, the images alternation looks great, thank you! Thanks also for your sensitivity to removing information. It is somewhat painful - sometimes it is needed, but I like to cut carefully! Johntex\^talk 13:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update - I have edited the sections through TCU. I think I've improved the flow quite a bit. I also reworked the introduction; I realized that it did not adequately cover the entire season.

I've tried to be very careful to link the first occurrence of each football term, which has been a bit tedious. Hopefully now it will be going faster since I lot of the terms will have been used. I plan to pick up again tomorrow. Johntex\^talk 06:41, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I think I have now addressed all the points. FYI, the readable prose is now less than 77 kb.[1]Johntex\^talk 07:46, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

GA

Article has been passed. Excellent work and kudos to Johntex. JKBrooks85 (talk) 10:18, 12 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Working towards FA

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

The lead of this article may be too long, or may contain too many paragraphs. Please follow guidelines at WP:LEAD; be aware that the lead should adequately summarize the article.^[?]
The lead is for summarizing the rest of the article, and should not introduce new topics not discussed in the rest of the article, as per WP:LEAD. Please ensure that the lead adequately summarizes the article.^[?]
Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.^[?]
You may wish to consider adding an appropriate infobox for this article, if one exists relating to the topic of the article. ^[?] (Note that there might not be an applicable infobox; remember that these suggestions are not generated manually) Done There is a lead infobox that is not being detected by the script.
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), when doing conversions, please use standard abbreviations: for example, miles -> mi, kilometers squared -> km², and pounds -> lb.^[?]
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), avoid using special characters (ex: &+{}[]) in headings. Done - can't do anything about the name of "Texas A&M".
Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long – consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Wikipedia:Summary style.^[?]
The script has spotted the following contractions: isn't, won't, won't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded. Done - these only appear in quotations or reference titles
As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]^[?]
Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

Other suggestions:

Intro is a little choppy.
One of the KState photos is from 2006 and should be moved. Done
Need info on Longhorns taken in the 2008 NFL Draft Done
Search Flickr to see if any new photos available. Done - Added one new free image to Commons. The best non-free ones I have already tried to get relicensed, but with no luck.
Compare images from this article to the ones on Commons to ensure we are using the best available.

Johntex\^talk 19:33, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think we need to particularly focus on the article length ... I know the Jack Kemp article has been having big problems with that in its FAC process. There's some things that I think should be trimmed out and put into associate pages; I'll create some sort of trim page to include everything I take out when copyediting, and we can negotiate on that. Sound like a plan? JKBrooks85 (talk) 19:38, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree (if somewhat cautiously). As we've discussed before, it is difficult sometimes to want to remove text that took a lot of work to create. Sometimes it is needed though. I am absolutely willing to create more daughter articles, my only reservation being that sometimes they get targeted for deletion, which is a waste of time. I look forward to seeing your suggestions and working with you on them. I will also compare the total length and readable length of this article to 2005 Texas Longhorn football team, which passed with no objections to length. Best, Johntex\^talk 20:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here are some stats on article size for this article and for a few current FAs.

Article	As of	Previous month page views	Total size	Words	Readable text
Ronald Reagan (FA)	21:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)	317,612 [2]	132kb	9,157	56.4kb [3]
History of American football (FA)	21:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)	22,123 [4]	82kb	7,908	48.1 kb [5]
2005 Texas Longhorn football team (FA)	21:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)	3,600 [6]	142kb	7,684	46.1kb [7]
2007 Texas Longhorn football team	21:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)	4,198 [8]	195kb	12,460	73.6kb [9]

According to the guidelines at WP:SIZE, this article is in the 60-100kb range so the guideline suggests the article "Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time)". If we can get it below 60kb that should avoid any controversy. Of course, the prose has to be good. I'd rather read a well written 100kb article than a crappy 60kb one.

WP:SIZE also suggests that articles be less than 10,000 words. That would imply about a 25% reduction. Johntex\^talk 21:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good stuff. Be sure to keep those arguments for when the article is ready for FAC — even when an article is below the 100k prose limit, I've seen people suggest splitting it because "it's too close to the limit." I don't mind the length, but I'd caution that many people do. In any event, I've created at trim page at 2007_Texas_Longhorn_football_team/trim. I'll be filling it with the stuff I remove from the main body of the article, and we can discuss what you think should remain and what would probably be best moved to a daughter article. JKBrooks85 (talk) 05:03, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's a few things I find myself changing repeatedly when copyediting:

Use past tense straight up - "played" instead of "had played"
Spell out numbers nine and under, unless decimal.
Pronoun agreement
If a caption isn't a complete sentence, don't put a period on it.
Use the dead link checker -- a lot of the Austin Statesman links are dead.
Unnecessary hyphenation: "half-time", "kick-off", etc. In general, if it's a noun, you probably don't need to hyphenate it.
There's a lot of jargon, but I think you've got everything wikilinked really well. Maybe get someone unfamiliar with American football to have a look?

I'm fixing most of these as I run across them, but the dead link checker really needs to be run. JKBrooks85 (talk) 07:40, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What is the dead link checker? I'm not familiar with that tool.

I created a new page for the OU game so we will be able to trim that section down without loosing anything. It is a draft right now at User:Johntex/2007_OU. I'll clean it up, move it to article space, and then trim that section here.

In terms of the captions, the MOS says they should be consistent: either all sentences or all phrases. We should probably go with all sentences. Johntex\^talk 16:21, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the link for the tool. [10] JKBrooks85 (talk) 18:47, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is a nifty tool, but we won't be able to do much about most of the links except mark them as dead. I just ran the tool and most of the problem links seem to be for the Fort Worth Star Telegram. A few are for the Austin American Statesmen and a few are the Houston Chronical. The FWST links expire after a certain period. I googled a couple of the titles but found no mirrors. We can mark them with {{dead link}}. Johntex\^talk 21:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Try a Google cache of the article, an Internet Archive link~~, or even just Googling the title of the article to see if it was cross-posted on another site that's still live.~~ JKBrooks85 (talk) 08:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another important note: For the ESPN game recaps, you need to put the author as the Associated Press -- ESPN merely publishes the AP game recaps; they didn't actually write any of them, unless it's otherwise said in the byline. I just noticed it while doing the Nebraska trims. JKBrooks85 (talk) 08:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was some discussion about authorship of AP articles a while back. Part of the discussion is at Template_talk:Cite_news#Associated_Press.3F. One of the things that has been said against listing AP as the author is that the newspapers who run the AP story do not necessarily do so verbatim. Also, using the AP as the author does not leave room to credit the actual human author, if they are known. I have never seen any consensus reached on this point, so I picked a method and tried to use it consistently. Do you know if any WP consensus or guideline has ever formed on this issue? As far as I know it is being left up to individual authors. Thanks, Johntex\^talk 18:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't familiar with that discussion. Good to know. It's not something someone would object to in an FAC; I'd just noticed it while doing trims. It's part of the reason why I don't use that template -- it's not flexible enough at times. JKBrooks85 (talk) 20:07, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My pre-FA review

I have quickly looked over this article, and when I have more time I will look closer.

First, this is a LONG article. I think the game-by-game analysis needs to be shorten. I would say two paragraphs (I pulled that number out of the air though). But for big games such as against A&M or OK, I think it would be ok to make those sections longer.
Their are a lot of photos. I think a few less photos would help clean up the clutter. Also, this photo, 2007 Texas Longhorns football team entry.jpg, should move from the intro. The intro section gets squeezed, and I believe the intro in general look best with just the infobox. -PG Pirate 12:42, 20 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]