Talk:A Ben Rector Christmas/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: SNUGGUMS (talk · contribs) 03:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Auto-fail: There's no mention of reviews, songwriting credits, or album sales, which are essential components for album pages, plus "Track listing" and "Personnel" don't have any citations. Such glaring issues with verifiability and breadth of coverage mean the article has a long way to go before it can qualify for GA. These things should be the main thing to fix before any renomination. On another note, the infobox neglects to list "The Thanksgiving Song" as a single and a month for recording (it seems safe to add August based on text saying "The songs were recorded August 2020"). Looking at the prose, I have other comments:

• You should focus on giving an overall album count for this instead of beating around the bush with "a compilation studio album" in the opening sentence (and yes Christmas albums DO count).
• "Recognizing a lack of attention toward Thanksgiving" needs a comma after "Thanksgiving"
• I'm not convinced the tone of "unique" from "the unique style of singing", "unique jazz instrumentation and unique vocal performance", or "come up with anything unique" is appropriate when that tends to have a positive connotation and Wikipedia pages should be neutral with descriptions
• "to reflect how good the original versions are" is a blatant POV violation
• You should use straight quotation marks (') instead of curly ones (’) for "they’re so good" per MOS:CURLY
• "he didn't know of any existing songs based on Thanksgiving besides a comedic song by Adam Sandler"..... avoid contractions unless part of a quote or title, and The Thanksgiving Song shouldn't have its title hidden per WP:EASTEREGG
• The second paragraph of "Production" uses "he" excessively. Try alternating these with some uses of Rector's name to avoid monotony.
• "He made the song sound classic, pulling sonically from the Billy Joel era" is vague with time period, and "sound classic" doesn't sound neutral either

While it seems safe to say File:Ben Rector Performing a Live Performance at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.jpg is in fact the uploader's own work, I'm not sure how it's particularly relevant to this specific album when taken from 2016. You'd be better off with something closer to the time of album release. Regardless, the "External links" shouldn't just list lyric videos for every track. Almost all of the references use date formats of YYYY-MM-DD even when the last one (ref#17) has a preferred MDY format. It's best to use the latter for pages for consistency (especially for articles pertaining to American citizens), or perhaps change every citation to DMY style.

Once you've resolved the above points, feel free to take the article to peer review before attempting another GAN. Sorry for failing this one, but I wish you luck for expansions and other revisions. SNUGGUMS (talk / edits) 03:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Hey @SNUGGUMS, long time no see. All valid reasons; thanks for the review! You know your policy quite well.

Just out of curiosity, the reason for a lack of critical reception and album sales is just because there isn't information available to make full sections for them. No reviews exist, and sales info does not either. Would the lack of this information permanently keep this article from becoming a good article (I assume per criteria a)? If so, that's fine by me.

Other quick thoughts and questions just in case you would like to comment on them:

• Regarding the "compilation album" stuff: I was not familiar enough on what I should classify this as per a lack of example; do you have any good suggestions for high quality Christmas albums that follow your first bullet point?
• I've removed the personnel list since this info can't be sourced to anything (anything high quality, anyway).
• My ability to write in an encyclopedic tone is not the best, and frequent my frequent grammar mistakes are no help either. I should always run my articles through GOCE from now on.

• Although with neutrality, Ben is a storyteller kind of guy that doesn't really get into the technics, or even the music all too often; it's about the feelings for him. Which stinks, since it's hard to interpret feelings in a neutral way.

• I didn't know track listings need sources, since it's kind of along the lines of WP:PLOTCITE. I looked at album FAs and it doesn't seem to be common practice, unless if there's a way they source it that's beyond simple inline citations?

I'll go through the article and rectify the mistakes you have noted, but it seems that I've done all I can with this article. Just a small collection of Christmas songs with little, albeit passable, fanfare. Regardless, thanks for the thoughts! Panini! • 🥪 04:24, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Looking through the used citations, it turns out they're either filled with artist commentary from interviews (thus constituting primary sources) or just contain brief passing mentions from secondary sources that total up to less than a cumulative paragraph, so unfortunately I'm not convinced the album even has enough coverage independent of Rector/his label/any collaborators to meet WP:GNG. It's never a good sign and would explain why you previously couldn't locate the things I pointed out. That would render broadness concerns moot as nothing that fails to meet WP:GNG standards could hope to qualify as GA, though either way I've often seen pages use album liners/booklets for personnel and track listing credits. While it's a perfectly valid practice for citing them, this definitely wouldn't count towards establishing notability when it isn't an third-party source. SNUGGUMS (talk / edits) 21:02, 17 March 2024 (UTC)