Talk:Development of Spore/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: -ΖαππερΝαππερ ^Babel_Alexandria 02:24, 17 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Preliminary review:

- Well-written - i'm noting inconsistencies with tense and perspective, there's even a couple cases of the article referring to "you" the reader. Also, if a subsection only has 1-3 sentences it needs to be merged or expanded. "procedural generation" needs to be clearly defined very early in this article since you mention it a lot. and jargon in general is kind of unneccessarily heavy throughout without being adequately defined - a wikilink is not a replacement for explaining jargon (e.g. demoscene, SIGGRAPH should have one or two descriptive words paired with them)
  Reply Okay, I'm going to go over all the "you"s and replace them with "the player", and sort out the sections. Harry Blue5 (talk) 10:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - I did the "you"s. There were only about two of them the rest come from quotes (which I left unchanged for now) and the site YouTube. Harry Blue5 (talk) 10:58, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Accurate and verifiable - nothing stood out as an extraordinary claim, i'll check refs on my complete review
- Broad in coverage - you seem to have hit all the main points i'd want to know about, i wondered why you started to talk about follow-up content, but didn't mention any of the creature creator content... prolly not needed though
- Neutral - seems squeaky clean
- Stable - appears to be stable with no recent warring, of course i haven't looked that closely yet
- Suitable images - there are several sourced references to the changes in artwork, and yet for some reason you don't feel justified in a fair-use image? This is ironic because the images you do have seem little more than placeholders, you actually have no fair-use argument for either of them being in this article (maybe you could stretch it because you're talking about how the visual style changed from 2005 to 2006, but these pictures don't actually show that b/c they don't show gameplay). Lose the two you have and put screen captures of the "cute" factor you referenced, along with any other referenced visual aspects you talked about (and there's a lot). Additionally, there is a reference in Gameplay changes to some image on the right - but there's no image. i'd say just take out the reference because we don't really need comparative pictures of a bar - that's the one change i can actually visualize just fine.

so, tense, perspective, jargon, and images and i think this will def be passable

Comments from Teancum - second opinion

I apologize for jumping in, but I noticed several other things that definitely need update/repair before passing GAN. I've included the criteria again plus additional comments below:

Is it reasonably well written?
A. Prose quality:

B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:
Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
A. References to sources:

B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

C. No original research:
Is it broad in its coverage?
A. Major aspects:

B. Focused:
Is it neutral?
Fair representation without bias:
Is it stable?
No edit wars, etc:
Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
Overall:
Pass or Fail: (my recommendation only)

The MOS dictates small paragraphs should be merged whenever possible, with any necessary changes made to the prose to allow it to flow. There are several 1-2 line paragraphs in the article.
The reference format is all over the place (likely something the main reviewer would have caught later). A

large portion of refs do not have anything in the publisher field, and some that are listed are italicized when they should not be. (such as 1UP.com and Joystiq). Only use the work= parameter if it's a online or print magazine or newspaper. I take a look at Template:Video game reviews when I'm not sure.
Several of the refs also have no accessdate, date, nor author.
Only the first instance of a publisher (such as 1UP.com) should be wikilinked; all others should not be.
There are inconsistencies with publishers. For example Joystiq is sometimes listed as Joystiq, other times as Joystiq.com. A good rule of thumb is to wikilink by the name of the site, if when previewing your edits it's a redlink it's not a big deal to either delink it and leave it as is, or add ".com" to the end and delink it.
References always go after punctuation, so either a comma, semicolon or period, but never in-line with a word unless it has one of those after it.

There should not be references in the lead. WP:LEADCITE states that you only need references in the lead if it that information does not exist in the article, however WP:LEAD states that the lead should be a summary of the article, meaning that information should already be there (thus there's no need to have refs in the lead).
External links should not exist in the prose (there's a link to the official site, as well as others)
The MOS dictates small sections should be merged. The sections for Spore Creature Creator and Spore Comic Creator are very small, and so should either be expanded or merged.
I would strongly recommend a level 2 heading called "Release" before "Release date delays", which can simply be "delays"
There is a "citation needed" tag in the "Flight" section
The main heading of "History and development" does not flow well. It seems to be a chronology, but it mostly covers promotion, so when you get statements like "The New York Times reported a projected development cost of twenty million United States dollars on October 10, 2006." in the middle of it the flow of the section stops dead in its tracks.
The second paragraph of the "Swimming" section is unreferenced.
"appearing prominently in the game's first trailer.^[65])." in the "Procedural generation" section looks very odd. The reference should be moved outside the parenthesis unless it's supporting the fact that the fans nicknamed the character; if it's not the entire parenthesis section should be removed as there is no reference to support the fans naming the character.
The fifth paragraph in the "Procedural generation" section is unreferenced.
I agree that the current images do nothing for the reader, have poor fair-use rationales, and could be replaced with better non-free images which demonstrate development. Additionally, captions could be stronger than the old "this is what the image is" per WP:CAPTION.
There are a few minor violations of WP:WORDS as well.
There is a disambig link
There are multiple dead or forbidden links

That's all I found in a first run-through, but as you can see there are quite a few issues. A more in-depth run-through of the prose would likely find more issues. I strongly recommend to the reviewer to take these into consideration. My recommendation is to quick-fail the article with a recommendation for a Peer review which will allow these issues to be fixed. Given the customary time of 1 week to fix issues I just don't see this article being done by then. A peer review will also further refine the prose which may need work. Given the issues and the possibility of a merge I would be extremely wary of passing the article at this time. No offense to the contributors - the article is good, it just needs a more polish before becoming a GA. --Teancum (talk) 13:50, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

my prelim assessments tend to be very superficial, and only mark things that are glaringly obvious. when i've made suggestions that prose get looked over, i assume a lot of other things will get addressed (like bad/broken/red/dab links), and if not i bring them up in the main review. running a few bots can fix many of these sorts of problems, and i'm usually bold enough to do it myself. that said, i admittedly go easy in my prelim especially when i've identified prose as a problem because sometimes the changes editors make can remove those nitty-gritty ones.

i disagree about applying a hard rule about refs in the lead, specifically pertaining to potentially controversial info and direct quotes. i shouldn't have to scan the entire article to verify the accuracy of something potentially seriously false or libellous. WP:LEADCITE actually supports this view (in line with WP:V so i'm confused why Teancum is suggesting otherwise).

while some editors like to put GAN in a 1-week timeframe, i like to balance this with the practicality that we're all volunteers who have real lives, and there's no rush.

i'd like to thank Teancum for pointing out some things to start with, and i hope the main contributors to this article take an MOS refresher and do some good work BEFORE my next review. --ΖαππερΝαππερ ^Babel_Alexandria 03:50, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note

The article has already been quick-failed by a second GAN review at Talk:Development of Spore/GA2. Below is the transclusion, which is added here only for historical purposes.

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Development of Spore/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Mûĸĸâĸûĸâĸû (blah?) 01:47, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am going to quick-fail this GA nomination because the article contains an unresolved {{merge to}} tag. This indicates some form of conflict between editors, and it counts as an unresolved, valid cleanup banner (quick-fail #3). --Mûĸĸâĸûĸâĸû (blah?) 01:50, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

wow.... ok... why didn't i see the merge tag before? didn't think i was that blind... --ΖαππερΝαππερ ^Babel_Alexandria 04:03, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]