Talk:Harap Alb/GA1

GA Review

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

Reviewer: Xover (talk) 19:10, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Overall an interesting treatment of a little known (outside Romania) fairy-tale that I found quite informative.

Miscellaneous

If the full title is “Povestea lui Harap Alb” then that should probably be the first bolded word in the lede, and possibly the article should even be moved to that name. Using just “Harap Alb” makes it sound like this is an article just about the title character.
The convention for referring to the title of a work of fiction is to use italics rather than quoting it. The article uses "Harap Alb" throughout where it should use Harap Alb.
When a direct quotation employs italics, it's not necessary to insert «… [italics in source]». The emphasis is presumed to be in the source unless otherwise specified. Only use such constructs (including «[sic]» for misspellings) if there is a reason to expect it to cause confusion.

Images

The article is a little sparse with images. If this story has had the cultural impact the article suggests I would expect there to be more paintings and other depictions over the years.
The image in the lede seems ok, but the fair use rationale for File:Spanul & harap, sandu florea.JPG seems iffy to me. As best I understand this—and I'll grant fair use is a tricky thing—fair use for an image from the comic book would only apply for an article discussing the comic book itself, or the character as depicted in the comic, and not for an article on the story that inspired the comic book.

References

I don't speak Romanian, and I'm not a subject-matter expert, so I'll have to take it on faith that the references comply with the policies on reliable sources and verifiability.
The references in general seem ok, but there appears to be a slight over-reliance on just a few sources (Bădărău and Braga).
The article's extensive use of direct quotations (see also below) is not properly referenced. All direct quotes should be immediately followed by a reference.
The sources are predominately in Romanian, but all the direct quotes are in English. Who translated the text?

Structure and completeness

The lede does not adequately summarize the article. It looks like it was written more like the first section of the article and later expanded to add some summary of the rest of it. I might suggest restructuring the current lede as a new section called something like “History” or “Origins”, and possibly also combining it with the current section called “Name”, before writing a new lede from scratch. The new “History” (or whatever you choose to call it) section would also typically come after the “Plot” section (another reason why it's good for the plot synopsis to be succinct; see below). See the Manual of Style for Lead sections for help with writing good a lede.
The plot summary is way way too comprehensive, bordering on a play-by-play of the entire story. The plot summary is currently three entire sections, while it should be 3 or at most 4 paragraphs in a single section. I would suggest starting from the concise summary of the plot given in the lede and expanding from there (starting from the existing summary and cutting it down could be quite challenging I imagine). See the Manual of Style for writing about fiction, and in particular the guideline on how to write a plot summary.
The article lacks a discussion of the origins of the story, who wrote/created it, how was it transmitted, what variants or traditions exists, and where it originated. Some of this is mentioned in passing elsewhere in the article, but this information should appear clearly and early on in the article. As it stands I had quite a bit of difficulty following the later parts of the article.

Prose

The prose is generally good, but there were some quite awkward sentences and a few grammatical errors here and there. For instance “The tale's narrative setting of has itself …”, where I suspect, the words “of” and “has” have been transposed? I think a good copy-edit is called for.
The prose is also quite dense and hard to follow in places, but that may be influenced by my familiarity of the topic.
There is quite extensive use of verbing that possibly stems from a language issue? Examples: «"Harap Alb" continued to impact on political and social discourse …» and «He evidences the manner …».
However the greatest issue is the excessive use of direct quotations in the body text. Here's a particularly egregious example where I've bolded the quoted parts for illustration:

The animals themselves behave as he they supposed to, changing their behavior for the benefit of the plot: "the extraordinary horse will not be able to prevent getting lost in the forest" and "is not able to prevent the Bald Man's ruse", but "he will lead [the prince], without straying, to Holy Sunday's house" and "shall become the one to kill [the Bald Man]."

This excessive use of direct quotes creates several problems:
- It makes the text extremely hard to read, and I had trouble following the prose in the denser sections.
- It makes me suspect that the writer has not sufficiently digested the source and feels compelled to use the source's author's words directly to compensate; rather than explaining or describing the relevant subject in his own words. Apart from the sentences made up of clippings of quotes, the text from the source outside of its context is not the best for a encyclopedic treatment of the topic.
- As an exercise to illustrate the sheer number of direct quotes I suggest trying to put each of them in a blockquote, or possibly just bolding them (in a sandbox of course, not in the actual article ;D).

Summary

I am going to leave this review open (on hold) for a day or two to give the nominator a chance to respond, but I'm inclined to fail this article now, as I don't think the issues with the lede, plot summary, or the prose (particularly the quotes) can be addressed in a reasonable timeframe. Please note that a failed GA nomination is not a condemnation of the article as a whole, just an expression that right now (at the time of review) it does not meet the GA criteria. Renominating the article once the listed issues have been addressed is encouraged. HTH, --Xover (talk) 20:29, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]