Talk:Barry Sheene/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Nominator: Orsoni (talk · contribs) 19:42, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Reviewer: David Fuchs (talk · contribs) 19:10, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Doing. Look for a review here next week. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 19:10, 1 August 2024 (UTC) Sorry for the wait. Overall, a solid article. My feedback is as follows:

• General:
  • The prose is pretty rough throughout. There's a lot of run-on sentences that are hard to parse.
    • Examples: Sheene was born off the Gray's Inn Road,[8] Bloomsbury, London, the second child of parents Frank, who had been resident engineer at the Royal College of Surgeons, and was himself a former competitive rider who retired in 1956 and an experienced motorcycle mechanic.[9][10][11] and Iris. We've got a 43-word sentence when most manuals on writing suggest south of 20, and a random sentence fragment added for the mother, who is an afterthought and doesn't get any introduction.
    • A similar issue goes to its comprehensibility to a general audience. I'm not a motorcycle racing aficionado, and I was regularly left lost as lots of stuff was just assumed knowledge, like what "smaller capacity classes" means (presumably racing categories with smaller engines, but it's never made clear) or
  • Copyvio detector brings up a passage regarding the deadly 350 race and the aftermath that I think runs a bit too much towards close paraphrasing.
  • Some confusing lack/usage of wikilinking; for example Bultaco motorcycles are not wikilinked the first time it's referenced in the "First foray into racing" section, but is paragraphs later. Wikilinking technical terms isn't really a replacement for explaining them in-text so readers don't have to link away to grok the basic gist of the article, but it's better than nothing.
  • The post-racing career section feels a little haphazardly organized; for example his marriage is covered under television career, for some reason, and more personal details are in the death section.
• Lead:
  • If 500cc is important, it should at least be wikilinked, but it might be find just to leave out as well. (It needs to be introduced in the body, though.)
  • However, Sheene is still the last British champion in the premier class this presumably means Sheene is the latest British champion in the top echelon of the sport, but it's a bit confusing versus language like "Sheene is the most recent" or similar. Also, the explanation for what premier class is isn't in the lead.
  • Articulate and charismatic, Sheene was the first motorcycle racer to harness the power of mass media to transcend the sport to become the best-known face of British motorcycling during the 1970s, parlaying his fame to gain commercial endorsements from outside the sport including television advertisements for Brut cologne. This is a really long sentence, and it's also got a bit of repetitious phrasing "to harness... to transcend.. to become..." that would probably be better off simpler and broken into multiple sentences.
• Media:
  • Images appear appropriately licensed; no non-free content to evaluate.
• References:
  • References are inconsistently formatted throughout; some refs are missing fields (for example, the author and date of the Guardian obit), others are clearly done by hand versus templates and don't match. Some websites are italicized, some are not, some works are formatted differently such as MCN versus Motorcycle news, etc.
  • What makes Racingmemo.free.fr., visordown.com, iomtt.com, devittinsurance.com, cartersport.com, superbikeplanet.com, crash.net, classicracer.com, speedtv.com, motoamerica.com, royalautomobileclub.co.uk reliable?
  • Is there a reason the biographies written about Sheene are barely used? It seems like those would be a preference for major sourcing versus newspapers and magazines of the times or random websites.

--Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 21:20, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi David. Thank you for your review. I'll try to answer a few of your questions regarding the references. The article had numerous previous editors, hence the hodgepodge of reference formatting. Unfortunately, I do not have access to one of the subject's biographies, so I am unable to reference them. These were cited by previous editors, so I assuming good faith. Also unfortunately, the sport's governing body does not publish race results online, so that is the reason numerous enthusiast sites such as Racingmemo.free.fr. and crashnet are used. I will use your input to work on the prose and references however, I didn't realize there was a one-week time limit to get the article up to GA levels. I will give it my best shot.Orsoni (talk) 16:54, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

I have taken your advice regarding the lead section. I have also attempted to reduce the number of run-on sentences as well as aiding the comprehensibility to a general audience. I tried to organize the post-racing career section. I look forward to your further suggestions.Orsoni (talk) 18:18, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

David Fuchs, have your concerns about the prose and reference quality been sufficiently addressed such that the article may be passed, or should the nomination be closed so that more thorough work may be done? Fritzmann (message me) 21:19, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

@Fritzmann2002 I am still evaluating the improvements to the article. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 13:16, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

• On review, I'm still seeing most of the issues I identified remain. References remain inconsistently formatted. Whether or not the various enthusiast sites are the only sources for that info, that doesn't make them reliable sources, and they have to be demonstrated for each. Some of the organization is better, but the prose is still pretty choppy (the part I brought up from Earwig has been reworded but introduced grammatical errors in the process.) Having researched more into the sourcing available I'm not sure you can write a GA-level article without more heavily using the biographies as the best available sources. At this point I think it needs work outside the GA process and I am closing this nom. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 15:21, 26 September 2024 (UTC)