Talk:Edgar Smith (pitcher/outfielder)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: JPxG (talk · contribs) 01:20, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'll do my best. jp×g 01:20, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Preliminary notes

Similar to Spider Clark (which I just reviewed), an article about a major league baseball player from the 19th century. Much like Clark, he is quite obscure and only mentioned in a handful of sources, but his presence on a major league team means that the article passes WP:NBASEBALL. And, like the other article, this one got a very large expansion (137 to 962 words) over the course of a couple days, which would have qualified it for a DYK nomination on any of the seven days afterward. That aside, if it's passed as a GA, it will also become eligible for DYK nomination. But enough yammering, let's start the review!

I will use the same scale as with my other reviews: Y means that the item is fine and needs no work, N means that a problem must be fixed, and means that something should be fixed or improved (but I won't hold up a pass based on it).

Copyvio

Y Earwig's copyvio detector says diddly-squat. It pops a whopping 1%, based on... sharing "the" with some random web page. This is about as clean as you can get, web-wise. Doesn't substantially copy from any of its sources.

Stability

Y Article has been quite stable over the course of... thirteen years? This is not the kind of article people get mad about, so I think it will likely continue to be stable for thirteen thousand more.

POV

Y The only POV I can detect in this article is the POV that a man named Edgar Smith played baseball professionaly in the 1880s. There is no editorial commentary.

Media

Y The only image in the article is public domain.
It isn't of him, though (I think?) This is a little confusing, and should probably be clarified. It's from 1879, so probably not of him... while it's great to have an image of something in an article that would otherwise be unillustrated, I sometimes this leads to weird things happening; websites (like Google) tend to automatically scrape the first image out of a Wikipedia article to populate search results for a person. I think that because of this, and for the sake of clarity to readers, it should say whether he's in the photo or not.

Focus / scope / coverage / completeness

Y Covers his early life, baseball career and (unfortunate lack of a) later life in adequate depth to get an understanding of how this guy was as an athlete. It would be nice if it were longer, but the sources seem quite sparse here (almost all the search results I can find for the 1883 Providence Grays are Wikipedia mirrors).

Prose / MoS

Y Generally quite well-written, explanatory, and concise. It says what it means and it means what it says. Wikilinking is good and in helpful places.
There are a couple things like taking the loss, on the mound, et cetera, that should probably be avoided.
N Fans feared that the team would struggle with an amateur on the mound, but Smith limited the team to nine hits and three runs Limited his own team? If this isn't what this is supposed to say, it should be edited to say otherwise.

Ref check

This one seems a litle iffy. There are only three sources for the whole article: baseball-reference.com, Cooperstown Chronicles, and retrosheet.org. While these all seem reliable enough to me, baseball-reference says on their site that they pull most of their statistics from retrosheet, so effectively this means our article has only two sources. I think a little additional sleuthing may be in order.

Y Was able to find a ref from the New York Times from August 6, 1885. What a pain in the ass that was. Anyway, it mentions him by name specifically, so that's something. jp×g 02:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Y Ref 1 (Baseball-Reference) is legit, checks out, and backs up what's in the article.
Y Ref 2 (Cooperstown Chronicles) is legit and checks out. Unlike Spider Clark, I was actually able to get Google Books to cough up the page with this guy's stuff on it.
Y Ref 3, the New York Times article I found from 1885, really does say what it was claimed to say by the other book.
Ref 4 (retrosheet), while a credible source, says basically the same thing as Ref 1, so it doesn't lend more credence to the article from being there, but it does provide another way to get the information, so whatever.

Conclusion

One thing I think might warrant attention is the name, specifically having a slash in it: is this standard practice for articles about baseballers? My impression is that article titles generally don't have slashes in them unless they really need to. Might it be better located at Edgar Eugene Smith?

@Sanfranciscogiants17: A good article, a fun read. Would love to pass this article as soon as the one issue is clarified. jp×g 02:30, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @JPxG: Thanks for another review, and I believe I have fixed that issue. Thought it would be obvious that I meant the other team, but it probably would have been moreso had I not just referred to "the team" as Smith's. Should be fixed now. Sanfranciscogiants17 (talk) 03:18, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - Based. Passing now! jp×g 03:25, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]