Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Game of Thrones/archive1

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 Laser brain via FACBot (talk) 14:51, 9 November 2016 [1].

Game of Thrones

Nominator(s): AffeL (talk) 21:45, 2 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the hugely popular HBO show Game of Thrones. The article has passed for Good Article(that I nominated) not so long ago and have also had a Peer Review not long after that. At the time of the Peer review the article was copy edited by an admin when I nominated it for Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors. I believe that this article deserve the Feature statues as it is very well written. AffeL (talk) 21:45, 2 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Way too much detail, poor sourcing and a lack of readability.

Lead: third paragraph is mainly an orgy of award names. Really, the focus should be on what makes the show unique and great—what's skipped over ever so briefly in the first two sentences of that paragraph.
There is no plot synopsis of the show!
The Background section is weirdly inadequate; combined with the lack of a plot synopsis this article seems to offer no way for somebody who's never seen the show to figure out what it's about.
Cast and characters begins, "Game of Thrones has an ensemble cast estimated as the largest on television", and then seems to individually name a large number of said cast and the characters they play. The result is an unreadable sea-of-blue links.
Many of the fifteen Production subsections are short and stubby, featuring little more information than names of the crew and the awards they won. Chief culprits are the likes of Make up, which names a couple of people, but lacks any information whatsoever about the actual make-up work on the show!
This above point is basically true of the article as a whole—way too many details (names of cast, crew and awards, of viewership statistics and aggregated critics' ratings) but very little description and analysis.
Awards and nominations: another sea of blue, this one featuring the word outstanding 30 times.
Sources: not a single book has been referred, not even obvious ones. I also think scholarly works that analyse the GRRM books should be checked; they might have a chapter or two on the HBO series. On the other hand, references to quasi-tabloids like Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter abound (in their dozens).
Reference formatting: when you include archived links in the ref, there's no need of the retrieved date. Having three dates in every ref is overwrought and silly, and makes the References section look unnecessarily bloated.

This is what this article looked like just before the nominator made their first edit to it. Like any other article of similar popularity, it's a hodgepodge; information had just been tacked on by many, many driveby editors. The problem is, the article is basically still the same as that version. Bringing an article to FAC means a dedicated editor (or group of editors) rewrites the article from the top down keeping in mind coherence, readability, and comprehensiveness, while using the best scholarly sources available. Until that is done here, this article doesn't belong at FAC.—indopug (talk) 18:12, 4 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Initial comments from Jim

I wouldn't normally review an article on this topic since I have no expertise in this area and don't even watch the series, but I'm commenting because you've asked me to. I appreciate the effort needed to bring an article here, and I can see you have made considerable strides towards improvement. I'm not going to oppose, but I share some of indopug's concerns about listiness and the lack of high quality sources. There are also glaring infelicities like an article title in block capitals. For now, I'm going to see what you have to say to the previous reviewer before I go through in detail. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:33, 5 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Coordinator note: There appears to be considerable work to be done on this article before it is ready for FAC, so I am archiving the nomination. @AffeL: I suggest taking a look at our mentoring program at Wikipedia:Mentoring for FAC before renomination so you have a smoother experience with this process. --Laser brain (talk) 14:51, 9 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. --Laser brain (talk) 14:51, 9 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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