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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 archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 12 January 2020 [1].

Freddie Mitchell

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Nominator(s): Eagles 24/7 (C) 16:51, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about an American football player who had a high pedigree at the time he was eligible to play professionally but flamed out in the National Football League. He was a key participant in one of the most notable plays in his franchise's history, played in the Super Bowl the next season, and ran his mouth out of town the following year. A decade later he was in prison finishing a three-year sentence for tax fraud.

I previously nominated this page for FA status in March 2012, but I became overwhelmed with work in my real life and had to withdraw the nomination. I believe all of the comments from the first nomination have now been addressed, and I look forward to addressing additional concerns. Thanks! Eagles 24/7 (C) 16:51, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Quick comment – I (unfortunately) don't have time for a full review during this holiday season, but I did peek at this article and thought that the Personal section looked the weakest. There's quite a few short, stubby paragraphs, and in general the section tends to float between topics. We go from family relations to media appearances to personal issues to more media appearances to the tax fraud stuff, without much rhyme or reason. Once the holidays are over, I'd focus on reorganizing these paragraphs by theme, and perhaps merging some of the smaller ones, to strengthen the section. Also, since most of the reference access dates are from around the time the article reached GA in 2011, it would be a good idea to run the article through the link-checker tool in the toolbox to seek out links that may have gone dead since the first FAC. Giants2008 (Talk) 02:16, 25 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for your feedback, I have reorganized the paragraphs per your suggestion. Before nominating, I ran the link-checker and replaced all bad links it showed, and it looks like Gog the Mild has also added 136 archive URLs to preserve the active URLs this morning as well. Thanks! Eagles 24/7 (C) 15:05, 25 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, suggest withdrawal: I noticed that this has been in the queue for quite a while, and had a quick look at it. I'm afraid in my view, it falls some way short of FA status. I looked closely at the lead and first section, and skimmed rest of the article. These are samples only, there are numerous other examples throughout, and I believe this article needs more work than is possible to accomplish in the timeframe of this FAC, and am inclined to suggest it should be withdrawn. Also, addressing these examples would not lead me to strike the oppose: I think the main editor needs to have some fresh eyes on this, and it needs a thorough polish and reworking from top to bottom. Sorry. Sarastro (talk) 12:40, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • Lead: Other than when I reviewed this at FAC years and years ago, I've never heard of Freddie Mitchell, and know nothing about him. Reading the lead, I still have no sense of who he is, or what his story might be. However, a quick internet search told me a little more, that he is famous for complaining and "trash talk", as well as not being quite as good as he thought he was. Yet none of this comes across in the lead. The first paragraph could literally be about any generic football player. It isn't until the FOURTH paragraph that I see what he's famous for. I'd be inclined to trim back this lead, and cut some of the listiness of his achievements and perhaps summarise these in one or two sentences. Because at the moment, as a reader, it's hard to see the wood for the trees.
  • Prose: Throughout (including the lead), we have some very repetitive prose which makes this a hard read. Almost all of the sentences follow the same structure: "Mitchell/He [verb] [some information]". Partly because of this, the sentences are very disjointed and there is no flow to the narrative. For example, in "Early Years", we have: Father - School - Sports - Baseball - Baseball Stats - Drafted for Tampa Bay - Negotiated with Tampa Bay but signed for college basketball - Basketball role and number of points and his team won - His performance in the final (and a hint of his temper, which seems huge in the context of what happened later, but is here downplayed totally) - Football roles - Football award (is it football? Not clear without following links) (New paragraph) Visited one university, signed for another - Reason he made his choice. Now, all these sentences are just lined up. There is nothing that pulls them together, or tells a story, or makes one flow into another. It reads just like a series of 13 unrelated facts placed next to each other. This is evident throughout the article and someone needs to have a very close look at this.
  • Sourcing:
  • I had a close look at "Early Years", and noticed that we are using a local newspaper to source most of this, and in the sources, Mitchell is not always the focus. Although the information is present and correct in the source, I wonder can we not find a better source than using a series of articles from the time. Are there no overview sources which summarise this a little better? This may also be a reason that the prose feels so disjointed and repetitive; the source contains just one fragment of information, so each sentence contains just one fragment of information. Perhaps some better sources are needed, if they exist. If not, we may need to look at how the information can be rearranged to make it flow better.
  • We may need to be alert for close paraphrasing. For example, we have "the son of a pastor" in both our article and Ref 3; "where he lettered in cross country, baseball, football, and basketball" (article) "who is lettering in four sports" (ref 4) [as written, it is hard to rephrase this, but could we not say it a different way instead of using "lettered"?]
  • The sentence "He had brief contract negotiations with the Devil Rays, but decided to attend college instead of signing with a professional team" is not supported by ref 8, which says that Tampa Bay took a look at him, but went with someone else, and does not say that he chose college as an alternative to signing for them (incidentally, ref 8 has some good material for expanding the detail in this section and making it flow); We have "He chose to play on the West Coast mainly because of the opportunities presented for his career after football", but looking at ref 15, it seems more like he was considering a career in TV/film, which explains his choice of location, rather than it offered opportunities for a general career.
  • This is just from that one section which makes me question how widespread the issue is throughout the article. I would recommend the main editors look carefully to see if everything in the article is attributable to the references given, and see if there are any other examples of close paraphrasing (where it is always better to be cautious).
  • Also, a more minor issue, we list him as a pinch hitter in baseball, when the reference simply says that he performed that role in one game; we need a better ref than this if we are going to say he was a pinch hitter.
  • Finally, the early life section is padded with lists of statistics and what he did. Some of these could be cut back and summarised in one or two sentences, and instead we could give more of a narrative of how and where he grew up, and how he came into sport. I wouldn't insist on this, but my personal preference would be to remove much of this information and replace it with something like "At Kathleen High School, he was a successful athlete who played several sports and was a cross country runner. Owing to his success in baseball, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays briefly considered signing him as part of the 1997 Major League Baseball Draft. As a guard in basketball, he was part of the team that won the 1997 Class 4A boys' high school basketball state championship. Following his performances on the football field in 1995, he was chosen for the Ledger's all-Lakeland second team."
  • We need to link Bruins in Early Life as they have not been mentioned in the main body previously.
  • There are various places where the prose needs a little more work as well, but I would recommend looking at the issues of sourcing, sentence structure and narrative cohesion before getting a copy-editor to take a look. Sarastro (talk) 12:40, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Coord note -- Sarastro's comments suggest this nom is somewhat premature; after acting on the above recommendations, you might consider Peer Review and/or the FAC mentoring scheme. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:27, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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