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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by Ucucha 19:41, 20 January 2012 [1].

Bulgaria

[edit]

Bulgaria (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): - ☣Tourbillon A ? 09:17, 19 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have been maintaining this article for a while now, and for a few months I've been working to make it meet the Featured Article criteria. It has been GA promoted, and recently received a very useful peer review. I made some of the photos and asked for permissions for others, so I hope readers will find it well-illustrated at the very least. This is my first FAC nomination, and I will be very glad to receive any feedback. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 09:17, 19 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There appears to be a few dead links in the references (Example Reference 127). I will attempt to repair the links, or retrieve archived copies. Alpha_Quadrant (talk) 23:54, 19 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I was able to repair all of the dead links, with the exception of references 101, 123, and 132. It appears that these urls do not have relevant archived copies either. Alpha_Quadrant (talk) 01:36, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed all three links. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 09:04, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - I disagree with the assertion by the above two reviewers that all the FA criteria are met. Here are some specific concerns:

  • WP:ENGVAR requires consistency in the variety of English used - for example, you have both "neighbour" and "neighbor"
Working on it. Done, converted to British English.
  • Citation formatting needs to be much more consistent - currently have mixed templated and untemplated citations, print sources missing publishers or page numbers, etc
Working on it. Thought some sources with less information on them wouldn't need templates, but I'll process them too. Done. Please be aware that one or two print sources do not have an ISBN. I have tried hard to find one, but some books seem to have been published without such a number. I've specifically checked ISBNs for all print sources used, and if it is missing someplace - it is because I have not been able to find one.
Still inconsistencies here. Compare FNs 134 and 133, 13 vs 15, etc. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:00, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Multiple WP:MOS issues - bracketed ellipses, italicized quotes, etc
Those are in source quotes. "[...]" signifies that a part of the original text is dropped out. Italicized quotes are in footnotes too (working to put them all in a template). Done.
Ellipses should only include brackets if there was also an ellipsis in the source - see WP:ELLIPSIS. Also, don't need ellipses at the beginning and end of quotes. Also note that these were examples only of issues - on a quick look, I also see unconverted metric measurements, and likely others. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:00, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't noticed that recommendation in MoS (and frankly, wasn't aware of this rule in English). Removed all brackets. Also added conversions for metric units where they were lacking (only in Geography, as far as I noticed).- ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:24, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • File:Campaigns_of_Ivan_Assen_II.png: on what source(s) was this image based?
Source is Essential History of Bulgaria in Seven Pages. I've added it to the image description in Commons.
The architects of the Sofia University and National Assembly building have died more than 70 years ago. The wind turbines are (arguably) machines, not habitable structures, I don't know if that will be a problem.
Okay, but you also include a picture of Sofia. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:00, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There is an image of several banknotes, would that be more appropriate ? - ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:24, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Don't duplicate cited sources in External links
Fixed.
  • Some uncited material - for example, "Rainfall varies between 500 and 800 millimeters (19.7 and 31.5 in) in the lowlands and between 1,000 and 2,500 millimeters (39.4 and 98.4 in) in the mountains"
Fixed, info was in LoC source but improperly cited.
  • Bibliography-only attribution tags claiming material from PD sources
Should I remove the tags or restructure the Citations/Sources section ?
Tags removed.
  • Spell out numbers and ordinals under 10
Fixed.
  • Article needs a thorough copy-edit for readability, clarity and grammatical issues - for example, "higher education consists of a 4-year bachelor degree and a 1-year Master's degree's degree"
Working on minor errors such as the one pointed out. Done, please notify me if there is anything I've missed. Does it really have readability and clarity issues ? Apart from the few mistakes I have not noticed, I seriously don't think there are major problems with the flow of this article...
Yes, really - it is mostly free of grammatical errors, but FA requires a higher prose standard than basic correctness. Another example would be "North of the Danube, where a significant number of Bulgarian nobility and common folk remained, the population was under the jurisdiction of various autonomous, predominately Wallachian-led Christian principalities, where the Bulgarian alphabet continued to be used[29] and many cities, like the Wallachian capital of Targovishte, kept their Bulgarian names." Nikkimaria (talk) 22:00, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hm, alright, I'll list it for copyediting at the Guild of Copyeditors. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:24, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Humanitarian, scientific or sports profiles. I believe these exist in most educational establishments around the world, maybe a bit of rewording would be useful but one does not have to be a "specialist" in order to understand. Fixed.- ☣Tourbillon A ? 22:33, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, perhaps it just needs to be better explained, as I still don't understand what you're saying. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:00, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've changed it to simply "specialised in a certain discipline". - ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:24, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments (briefly for now) from Carcharoth (talk) 01:13, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • There are a large number of sources and text that needs to be spot-checked. To help with that, can the nominator(s) say which text they personally worked on and which text is earlier material added by other editors? Another way of putting this is asking when the nominator(s) began work on the article and how much checking of the article content present at that point was done before the push for GA and FA status?
A vast portion of the text in this article has been re-written or newly added by me in the last year or so. That is, the original text which existed during the GA nomination remains, but some words were changed and new figures and statements were added. The content in general is not changed. I kept the sources used by previous contributors, but many of them were improperly cited and I had to search for new ones. Most of the currently used sources have been added or updated less than 3 months ago, as many of the links were dead.
Thank-you for giving some of the background here. That helps those reviewing the article. Carcharoth (talk) 05:42, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Care should be taken with US Library of Congress sources in terms of linking. The links often expire and this one (currently reference 64) is a query URL as indicated by the 'cgi-bin/query' bit. As that page says: "Do NOT bookmark these search results. Search results are stored in a TEMPORARY file for display purposes. The temporary file will be purged from our system in a few hours." You've either worked out a way around that, or the temporary files have yet to be purged. On the other hand, the LoC itself uses these search URLs as links from the content page here. At the least, I think you should cite that contents page as the 'real' source, and link to it, even if you provide the direct link as a courtesy. In the bibliography, you (or someone) does cite 'Bulgaria Library of Congress Country Study' as a pdf. This is the same thing, so some rationalisation of the citations is needed there. I count 25 separate references to the LoC Bulgaria country study, and the formatting and citation style is different in nearly every case.

As Nikkimaria points out, there is lots of work that needs doing on the citation formatting. You are unlikely to get further reviews here before that is addressed. Carcharoth (talk) 01:13, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The LoC links used do not expire. These are permanent links, and I have been using them on numerous articles for a very long time now. They do not disappear, and will not become dead links if that is the main concern here. As for the .PDF country study, it is a newer, 2006 edition with updated figures. The other LoC source is from 1992, but contains more comprehensive information on history and geography. I wouldn't push it for FAC with sources that would become impossible to check only after a few hours, and as I already mentioned, the article has received a peer review. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 06:05, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate that you think the links won't expire, and that the LoC use the links internally themselves, and that you have used them for a long time on other articles, but I do think that it would pay to be cautious here and provide two links: one to the contents page (which is clearly stable) and one to the individual sections (as you do at the moment). Thank-you for clarifying the use of the 2006 pdf, though it is still not clear which LoC sources are used where - there are other issues with citation formats as well. Currently "{{cite web|url=[[s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bulgaria/History]]|title=History of Bulgaria|publisher=Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911|accessdate=9 December 2011}}" is not producing anything useful (this reference occurs twice). I'm sure it is possible to fix that, but in addition to doing that you could also name in your citation the author of that EB1911 article: James David Bourchier. And please just do a search in the article for "Library of Congress" and you will see what I mean when I say that it is not clear which citations are to which versions of the country study, and it will also be clear what I mean by the citation formatting being inconsistent. It is relatively easy to fix this, and if this is done I will likely then review the rest of the article, which I think is well-written, but I want to be able to check sources as I go and as currently formatted I can't do that rigorously. Carcharoth (talk) 05:42, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for those remarks, I am currently working on it. Since I'm not certain how to link to Wikisource material, would it be a problem if I use the "cite web" template and simply link the URL ? - ☣Tourbillon A ? 08:21, 23 December 2011 (UTC) everything is fixed. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 10:33, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've looked again (thanks for the work on the citations) and there is one stray LoC citation still: currently number 88 "Bulgaria Library of Congress Country Study, Judicial Branch, p.17". That should be formatted like the other ones. Five more points: (i) In the bibliography, you link both the 2006 'Profile' and the 1992 'Country Study', though you may have been trying to link the online contents of the 'Profile' - please check the changes I made here; (ii) You could rejig each reference to a chapter in the 1992 Country Study to link to the entry in the bibliography, like you do for the 2006 Profile, but that's up to you; (iii) Looking at the Country Study table of contents, I followed the link to the LoC Call Number, and that seemed to say it was published in 1993 with the research conducted in 1992 - could you clarify this? (iv) The 2006 'Profile' isn't a full update of the 'Country Study' if I'm reading the LoC pages right - the 2006 profile is linked from the 1992 'Country Study' table of contents (the 'Visit updated Profile (PDF)' bit) and is also mentioned here. Is there any way of knowing whether the Bulgaria 'Profile' was created in 2006 or just most recently updated then? Some of this could be clarified further (for example, making clearer the difference between a 'Profile' and a 'Study'). (v) Back at the 'Country Study' table of contents, there are four authors named: Glenn E. Curtis, Pamela Mitova, William Marsteller, and Karl Wheeler Soper - I would personally name authors where they are known, but not sure what the standard is at FAC for this. The distinction between the 'Country Study' (named authors, paper publication and online) and the 'Profile' (anonymous(?) updates by LoC staff, published online) is worth drawing, I think. Carcharoth (talk) 13:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(i) and (ii) have been fixed, I hope this rearrangement will make the sources easier to verify; (iii) and (v) were hopefully fixed - I wrote that it's a 1992 research, but a 1993 publication and all names have been mentioned; (iv) I would regard the PDF profile as a more concise and up-to-date version of the country study - as a matter of fact, several countries that are not among the listed in the 1992 edition of the country studies, such as Mali, have their new, own profiles. I think the difference is quite obvious when we have names added to the Country Study and only a publisher to the Country Profile. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 17:31, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note - I hope to have time to do a more in-depth review at some point over the next week. Because this is such a broad country-level article, that will take time. If any other reviewers would like to split the review up by section (the article has seven main section), that might help. Carcharoth (talk) 13:25, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Text copied verbatim from public domain sources needs checking - Above, Nikkimaria correctly pointed out that the bibliography contained "attribution tags claiming material from PD sources". You removed the tags here (they were a {{Loc}} and a {{1911}} tag). Such attribution tag removal should only be done if the original text, copied verbatim, has been rewritten. If verbatim text remains, the tags should also stay. You will need to see what other FAC reviewers think of this (I would suggest asking at WT:FAC). I've done one spot check of the material cited to page 17 of the 2006 pdf (the citation that I pointed out previously wasn't in the same format as the other citations - this was the one I was looking at so it was the most convenient one to spot-check). Comparing the source and the current version of the article, I found the following bits were text copied verbatim (or almost verbatim) from the (presumably public domain) Library of Congress (LoC) source, page 17 of which is currently cited three times (as footnote number 84):

  • (i) Source: "Bulgaria has universal suffrage for citizens 18 years of age and older. Elections are supervised by an independent Central Election Commission that includes members from all major political parties. Parties must register with the commission prior to participating in a national election."

    Article: "universal suffrage for citizens 18 years of age and older. Elections are supervised by an independent Central Election Commission that includes members from all major political parties. Parties must register with the commission prior to participating in a national election."

  • (ii) Source: "The Supreme Administrative Court and Supreme Court of Cassation, the highest courts of appeal, rule on the application of laws in lower courts. The Supreme Judicial Council manages the system and appoints judges."

    Article: "...the highest courts of appeal—the Supreme Administrative Court and Supreme Court of Cassation—rule on the application of laws in lower courts. The Supreme Judicial Council manages the system and appoints judges."

  • (iii) Source: "Regional governors are named by the national Council of Ministers, providing for a highly centralized state. Municipalities are run by mayors, who are elected to four-year terms, and by municipal councils, which are directly elected legislative bodies. Subnational jurisdictions are heavily dependent on the central government for funding"

    Article: "Regional governors are named by the national Council of Ministers, providing for a highly centralised state. Municipalities are run by mayors, who are elected to four-year terms, and by municipal councils, which are directly elected legislative bodies. Subnational jurisdictions are heavily dependent on the central government for funding."

The inclusion of text like this is why the {{Loc}} tag was there in the first place. I realise that it is difficult to rephrase some of this material, but it shouldn't be used verbatim like this. This is why my first question here was about the history of the article and how much the text had been checked against sources and rewritten if needed (I've not looked at any of the other LoC citations or the EB1911 citations to see if there is similar verbatim text). If you disagree on whether this level of checking is needed, please ask at WT:FAC for someone else to take a look at this. Carcharoth (talk) 23:09, 24 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It has been there for some time now (like a couple of months), and the usage of text like this has been addressed at the peer review. All the information from non-PD sources has been rewritten so that there won't be any similarities between the article and the original source. Where a PD source is used, the text is mostly the same as in the source. I figured that the presence of tags was suggested as a problem, that is why I removed them - maybe I shouldn't have done it. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 07:11, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Since it was Nikkimaria who originally raised the issue of the tags, I'm going to ask her if she has time to come back here and look at this. That is probably the simplest way forward here. If the EB1911 tag is going to stay, someone needs to read the entirety of the EB1911 article and compare it to this article. If no verbatim text remains, the tag is not needed. I would normally suggest trying to find in the history when the EB and Loc tags were first added, but that may be difficult here with an article that has a page history going back to 2001 (I went forward from the early versions and gave up towards the end of 2006). FWIW, early versions of this article were heavily based on "the CIA World Factbook 2000 and the 2003 U.S. Department of State website", so it is nothing new to have Wikipedia country articles based on heavy churn of PD text from US government agencies. I'm just not sure if that is the standard that applies at FAC. I don't think it should be the standard, but others may disagree, hence me saying you should try and get others to comment. Carcharoth (talk) 20:47, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Agree on that, and that's why I raised the issue. Assuming it's been sufficiently rewritten (and that I haven't checked), it shouldn't be a problem. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:42, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
To avoid prolongued checking of information, the tags were actually added during the peer review last month. Along with that, I reworded some of the EB1911-based sentences therefore it's not really verbatim text used from this source. The only problem in this area is the material from LoC, and especially the Geography and Politics sections. Large portions of the statements there are directly copied from the country studies. I'll try to change the structure so as not to complicate the issue any further, it's not good to have copied text anyway. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 10:16, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Done, I did my best to rewrite the directly copied text. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 11:03, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • A quick look shows there's still some tidying up to do in the prose. I'll try to come back to this soon. Images could be rationalised to the right side in many cases, given that different window-widths produce unsatisfactory relationships with the text when the pics are on both sides. Is the "official" government website appropriate to cite at the bottom? It looks like the current PM's propaganda machine to me. Tony (talk) 08:38, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As I noted above, I'll list it for review at the Guild of Copyeditors. Image aligning is generally following MoS (left-right staggering), and I viewed the article from several different computers and resolutions precisely to check if problems occur on this issue. Placing all images on the right wouldn't really look good. And wow, I looked at the Council of Ministers' website just now. Didn't knew it has turned into a mouthpiece for a political party, I'll remove it. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:37, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I can provide a few more sources on this figure, but I decided to leave only this one (it is the most reliable) to avoid stacking too many cites on a single statement. And as absurd as it may sound, it's pretty much true... - ☣Tourbillon A ? 19:37, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That seemed questionable to me too, do you mean 97% of the adult population? Mark Arsten (talk) 21:57, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Just reviewed the source again, says that 97% of the population live in privately owned homes. I'll change it. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 08:29, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, that makes a lot more sense. Mark Arsten (talk) 22:46, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm sorry to be a bore, but this has a little way to go before it's of FA standard. The easy stuff is to get it copy-edited and MOSified (a 4-year bachelor degree and a 1-year Master's degree" ... please see MOSNUM). I removed (at someone's urging) the gobbledy at the opening; it's something I've never understood about articles on topics rooted in languages with non-roman scripts. "Bulgaria i/bʌlˈɡɛəriə/ (Bulgarian: България, tr. Bŭlgariya, IPA: [bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]), officially the Republic of Bulgaria (Република България, tr. Republika Bŭlgariya, IPA: [rɛˈpublikɐ bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]), is a ...". The readers' attention is at a peak right at the opening, and we clutter it with a tome of stuff they can't understand. If readers want cyrillic equivalents and phonetic thingemies (also understood by hardly anyone), let them go to the Bulgarian WP ... the link is just at the left.

    I've removed a few overlinkings. More remain: why is telephone linked? Could we have "bn" or "billion" rather than 000000000?

    The pics were rather small, and it's much better to prefer top-of-section placement, and right side, given the huge variation in window widths used by our readers.

    The capping of "Empire" and "State" ... it's not even consistent within the article, and I'm pretty sure these are now down cased on WP (there have been a few high-profile RMs to achieve this).

    Are you sure about all of the stats, given the mistake about the 97%?

    The longest river located solely in Bulgarian territory, the Iskar, has a length of 368 kilometres (229 mi)." -> "The longest river entirely within Bulgaria, the Iskar, is 368 kilometres (229 mi) long." ... Lots of clean-ups like that are needed. At random: "the European union average" (isn't it U?).

    Could you translate titles into English? What is this: "Еврокомисията наля 388 млн. лв. по сметките на фонд "Земеделие"" (in Bulgarian). Dnes.bg.

    There is just the faint scent of POV towards a slightly more positive view of Bulgaria than might be justified; I particularly worry about the stats. And some of the sources are certainly authoritative (CIA, etc); but sorry to be snobbish, do I believe a "Bulgarian National Investment Agency" report? I'm not sure I'd believe some government reports from my own country ... the type where the minister's office sees it first.

    But this could well become FA, either after continued efforts by the nominators or in a second nom. Tony (talk) 10:36, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll look into all of those. I can not promise whether all of this will be completed by the time this nomination expires as I'm having an exam week, but I will do my best to address all the issues. I've checked all statistical sources, the home ownership rate is a single mistake - I've simply misread the source. I'll fix all MoS issues in the next two days, though I can't be certain about the process of copyediting. There is one thing that bothers me, and that is the alignment of the images - the current positioning creates a lot of chaos, at least on the computers I use. For example, the current position of the feast at "First Bulgarian Empire" creates a huge gap - that certainly doesn't look good. Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 14:49, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Although the article is obviously imperfect, I think it meets the FA criteria. However, there are some good points above, which should be addressed. Consider this a support when the sourcechecks come out clear. I wouldn't rely on the guild for FA prose, that isn't their mission, and many won't be able to do it to the degree often asked for here. I disagree with the above reviewer about the aligned images. WP:MOSIMAGES encourages image staggering, and prevents what is (on my screen) a weird shifting of text widths, and also prevents pictures being forced out of their section. As in every article, watch out for short paragraphs (I notice a one liner in the lead, and a couple of two liners scattered throughout). If your checking sources, note that information usually doesn't require more than one source, and if two sources support separate parts of a sentence they should be placed after the information they source not the whole sentence (or situations like the list of classical composers occurs where a sentence is followed by four sources). Chipmunkdavis (talk) 15:09, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, per my comments above, and the fact that the opening is incomprehensible:

Bulgaria /bʌlˈɡɛəriə/ ⓘ (Bulgarian: България, IPA: [bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]), officially the Republic of Bulgaria (Република България, IPA: [rɛˈpublikɐ bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]), is a parliamentary republic ...".

Here it was, even worse, before I complained there:

Bulgaria /bʌlˈɡɛəriə/ ⓘ (Bulgarian: България, tr. Bŭlgariya, IPA: [bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]), officially the Republic of Bulgaria ([Република България, tr. Republika Bŭlgariya, IPA: [rɛˈpublikɐ bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ]] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), is a parliamentary republic ..."

User:Future Tense, who has a conflict of interest (look at the language user boxes on his user page) seems to have taken exception to opening an article on en.WP with language and symbols that our English-speaking readers can understand. So we're back 80% of the way, after I'd footnoted the gobbledy and produced a nice clean opening. Here is what the article had for a few days, which I believe is what our readers would far prefer:

Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria,[5] is a parliamentary republic in Southeast Europe. It borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east. ....

I do believe the needs to bolded, by the way. The fact that almost no reader knows how bɤ̞ɫˈɡarijɐ and ʌ|l|ˈ|g|ɛər|i|ə are pronounced (it's weird to have this shoved in readers' faces before they get to the second word of the article), and that English-speaking readers should not be expected to know Bulgarian script, is good reason that this gobbledygook should be footnoted or relocated elsewhere so that the opening sentence is not interrupted by two and half lines of this stuff after the first word. This is a problem in terms of Criterion 2(a), which requires "a concise lead section". This is the opposite of concise. The impossible opening is in addition to issues concerning prose, and a potentially skewed angle (I could look into this more). Tony (talk) 12:20, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think a reasonable compromise would be to give the Cyrillic and a single IPA transcription of the short form ("Bulgaria"), while leaving the official form untranscripted. All country articles have the original name of the country at the beginning. Not having the Cyrillic name of the country is simply unacceptable. The prose isn't flawless, but when I asked some GOCE users to do some work on the article a while back, the results were not what I'd expect (orthography, even poorer prose, etc.). I'm working on these issues, but as I said, I'm occupied IRL this week and my time here is limited. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 14:54, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No one has provided a shred of reason as to why a foreign script should appear in the article at all, let alone intrude massively after the very first word, creating a mile-long hike to get to the second word. What exactly is the purpose? And why can't it be footnoted? Second, why has someone reverted my fixing of the strange double image in the Geography section? Could we have some reasons? Third, the prose is simply not good enough; I'm not concerned with who has done what—I just worry about the product. Tony (talk) 15:19, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Because all country articles have the local name in the introduction, and that is generally the standard in country introductions in Wikipedia and beyond ? Take FA examples such as India, Chad, Belarus, Germany and Japan, not to mention virtually any other article around here. The double image puts a huge weight to the right when outside its current frame and makes the third one, of the eagle, to go out of the Geography section. I don't see why that would be a problem, given that other FA articles, such as Peru, use this formula. Fixing the prose will take more time, though if GOCE editions later do not satisfy the standards, then it will be a problem of those who review FACs, not mine. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 16:15, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Other articles have other faults, too. That is no justification for making the opening of this article impenetrable. And here, the problem is dire given the double-barrelled bolded items. You still haven't given a single good reason for including this gobbledy right at the opening, beyond the copy-cat argument. Copy their bad grammar and image placement, too? Tony (talk) 05:36, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ref query—what makes this a reliable source? ""Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja" (in Russian). Vostlit - Eastern Literature Resources. Retrieved 4 December 2011. "В то время пока Владимир был юношей и правил на престоле своего отца, вышеупомянутый Самуил собрал большое войско и прибыл в далматинские окраины, в землю короля Владимира."" And what does the Russian text here say, since it's in the reference list? Could I remind you that this article is for English-speakers? The google translation of the linked page leaves open the reliability of this source; it looks like a wiki, with lots of fly-by comments. I can see "University of Ottava 1986" at the bottom, but ... it's used as justification for a claim about an important part of early Bulgarian history. Tony (talk) 06:28, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't deny other articles have faults. But if the number of articles using the original name + transcription formula is abour 300 for countries and several hundred thousand for biographies and settlements, then I would think twice before asking a question such as "Why would a foreign script appear in the article at all". If you still need a valid argument, consider starting with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names). This is Wikipedia in English, it's not a Wikipedia of the Anglosphere only, I hope you can make the difference.
Done on the source, replaced the previous Russian one with Encyclopaedia Britannica too. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 08:50, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that was just the first source I examined at random. The way this FAC is going, egregious errors in stats and highly unsatisfactory sources are pointed out as examples, you then "fix" them, one at a time, and we return to thinking everything's tickety-boo? This is why the article is not yet ready for promotion. Please withdraw it and thoroughly audit every aspect. The nomination was premature. Tony (talk) 15:35, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
On the peripheral matter I complained of, the appalling clutter of incomprehensible symbols and cyrillic lettering that wedges the first word of the article from the second, your response is odd. Could you tell me why the Bulgarian WP doesn't provide the roman-script, English-language Australia—perhaps even a transliteration of the English word, not to mention IPA symbols that hardly any reader would understand in any language—after the first word in its article on that country? Have a look here. Do you know why they don't do it? Because it's ugly and disruptive, just when the readers want to glide into an interesting article in the language they've chosen to read it in: Bulgarian. Tony (talk) 15:42, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
First thing is that the Bulgarian Wiki has no Manual of Style and distinct guidelines, and article formatting follows that of print encyclopaediae and academic works. Since I'm working on the Geography project there, I would mention that Australia is likely an exception; most quality country articles do mention the native name (Sweden, Germany, Japan, China and so on).
I've checked for other errors on stats, as most of the sources were added relatively recently, and I said the home ownership was an isolated case. I don't know whether my responses are odd, or your behaviour is - quite frankly it looks like trolling to me. I really do not understand what your problem is; if you will not review the article thoroughly to raise concrete issues, and not just pick "examples of egregious errors", then feel totally, completely, absolutely free not to review it. I considered withdrawing the nomination even earlier due to the apparently skewed and subjective criteria by which Featured Articles are promoted. I don't consider that getting an "oppose" vote for mixed English variations and brackets while another nomination gets a "support" with the same remarks mentioned as "minor issues", or generalisations on poor quality because of a handful of problematic fragments to be anywhere near fair. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 16:16, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]


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