Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/George Washington/archive3

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) 00:20, 24 June 2018 [1].

George Washington

The article has been a GA for several years now, and after months of work has greatly improved in its scope and comprehensiveness. — Gwillhickers (talk) 20:01, 20 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the biography of George Washington. Gwillhickers (talk) 20:01, 20 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose and I suggest this nomination should be withdrawn. The prose throughout is well below FA standard and is often completely unintelligible. I constantly had to re-read sentences. For example, "The British government had ordered Dinwiddie to guard British territorial claims in the Ohio River basin as protection for entrepreneurial interest there in settlements and Indian trade." I have read this sentence several times and I still can't understand it. Graham Beards (talk) 06:55, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to agree with what Graham says, and there are other issues. When this was peer-reviewed six years ago it had 9,500 words; it now has over 16,000, so a great deal of unreviewed text has been added. I wondering, too, why an article with so many subarticles (some extremely lengthy) needs to be this long? There seems to be plenty of scope for summarising and eliminating unimportant detail, to get this article down to a more reasonable length. I don't think the necessary reconstruction and prose rewrites can take place within the timescale of an FAC. A new peer review, with contributions from some of our experienced presidential biographers, might be the appropriate forum. Brianboulton (talk) 16:17, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also in agreement on this. Certainly there needs to be some serious editing, and I found enough confusion of text (in addition to that which Graham Beards mentions, to warrant a significant revision. Although I'm not a US presidential biographer (I've done mostly European biographies), I do have a background in US history and could probably help. If not, I'll revisit the revised article at GA/FA. auntieruth (talk) 16:27, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanx for your prompt comments. The sentence Graham Beards refers to makes perfect sense to me, so I'm not clear about what the issue there is, but I went ahead and simplified it. In any case, each topic is presented in summary form, while still presenting it in "context". FA criteria, as you know, maintains that the subject "overlooks no major details" and present the subjects (sections) in context. Many major details were missing several months ago. Dedicated articles are for in depth coverage of specific topics, which doesn't mean we present a given topic here in outline form. A healthy amount of textual overlap should be welcomed between this article and any given dedicated article.

There are several other FA presidential articles that are lengthy because the subject covered is very involved. — In this case we have Washington, his early years, his years before the American Revolution, as a surveyor, as a soldier during the French and Indian War, and of course his iconic role during the American Revolution. Then there is his two terms as president and final years. To cover all of these topics/chapters, comprehensively, even in summary form, requires space, length. This is not to say there are no improvements needed anywhere. Generic claims that the article is "..often completely unintelligible"(?) and should be rewritten, after it has been authored and/or peer reviewed by several editors very knowledgeable in the subject, along with a professional editor, isn't very helpful. We'll be happy to accommodate any specific issues. Meanwhile, I'll see if I can make improvements in the prose. Thanx again. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 18:24, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I'll get to the review in due course if this nom remains (I'll hold off for now) but I did read the legacy and I think it could use some material on how the public (and academic) view of Washington has changed over the years. Anyway, I'll get out of the way for now. Ping me when you want me to loo at the article. Good luck.--Wehwalt (talk) 22:48, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Wehwalt:, Thanks for your comments. You are not in the way at all. If you see something that could use improvement, or modification, by all means have at it! I'm currently looking for examples of the text being "completely unintelligible", and haven't found anything, but am still looking for ways to improve and simplify any text that may need it. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 23:18, 21 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, then I'll look through as I get time.--Wehwalt (talk) 05:04, 22 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose by Squeamish Ossifrage

As usual, I'm primarily looking at references and reference formatting, and not at the prose at all. I rarely outright oppose on these grounds because, frankly, formatting problems are generally minor and easily corrected. That's not the case here. This referencing is a mess. All comments based on this version:

§References, general problems:

Fixed — You have harv template errors in References 7, 33, 41, 63, and 85.
Both book-format and online sources are covered in §Bibliography. So... why are some sources exclusively inlined in §References?
Fixed — You are not consistent about whether page ranges are given in short form (such as 258–72) or not (such as 283–284). I'd prefer the latter, but consistency is the most important part here.
Fixed — A considerable number of referenced page ranges use hyphens in place of en dashes. The easiest way to highlight these is to use the browser find function and type a hyphen, then look at the reference section. Reference 10 is the first of these, but there are many. A few of them (including references 275, 289, etc.) use equally-incorrect em dashes.

§References, specific entries:

Fixed — Reference 1 is a citation for the date of Washington's marriage. Surely you can do better than providing a 1000+ page range?
Fixed — Reference 26 is not formatted in the same style as the standard for the article. And lacks an ISBN.
Fixed — Is there a reason no page number is cited for refernece 35? Reference 59?
Fixed — No matter how you resolve the date range formatting problem, reference 86 has "68–7", which is simply incorrect.
Fixed — Reference 90 has formatting problems that break the harv linking, and make a mess of the text.
Fixed — Why do you give a chapter number in lieu of references to specific pages in reference 126? Reference 240?
Reference 129 has "pp." for a single page.
removed - item covered by following cite — Reference 142 is not formatted in the same manner as your other online references, and has insufficient bilbiographic information.
Fixed — Reference 150 has "p." for multiple pages. Also, these pages are not listed in order.
? This cite is for Van Doren — Reference 151 does something very nonstandard with the pages cited for Chernow 2010.
Fixed Reference 162 has "p." for multiple pages.
Something is wrong with reference 164.
Removed -- 2nd cite not needed Reference 180 is not formatted even a little like the standard for the article and lacks an ISBN. Also, this is a book-format reference, so will need a citation to a page or page range.
Fixed — Refernece 188 is not formatted correctly because there is a comma before the date. That aside, 2011 appears to be a retrieval date, not a publication date, so that's also wrong. The same thing applies to a different source at reference 251.
Fixed — Reference 189 is presumably missing an en dash entirely. I assume that you are citing pp. 178–179 rather than p. 17879.
My script isn't throwing a harv error for reference 197, but I think you have one. You're either missing a Bibliography entry for Henriques 2009, or this should reference Henriques 2006, in which case you should have a page number here.
Fixed Reference 250 is malformed.
Fixed Reference 253 is malformed.
Removed statement and questionable citation Reference 256 is incorrect. This National Portrait Gallery page about Stuart's Athenaeum portrait is not, itself, by Gilbert Stuart.
Reference 261 has a problem. This piece was originally published in a journal (The Riversdale Letter), which was reprinted at Americanrevolution.org. The citation given tries to have it both ways, attributing the work to the journal (and giving the journal publication date), but actually referencing the website. If you are able to cite the physical journal, you'll need additional information here (volume/issue, page range). If not, you need to cite the website. But I'm not 100% convinced the website constitutes a high-quality reliable source. In any case, I'm fairly confident that you can source this to something of higher quality.
Fixed — Not only does reference 265 cite a chapter instead of a page range, but it does so in a totally incorrect format.
Fixed — Reference 268 appears to be malformed.
Fixed — Reference 269 is better than some of these chapter references because it refers to a specific note, but that really needs to be cited to page number. Same with 302.
Fixed — Reference 278 doesn't match other book reference formatting.
Fixed — Reference 296 has "p." for multiple pages.
Fixed — Reference 306 cites Chernow 2010 without a page number; this one is particularly striking because reference 305 cites a page in the same work!
Harv linking is broken in reference 314, probably because it is not done in the same manner as the rest of the references. Also, page numbers. — Checked this, harv linking page numbers appear OK
More page/chapter shenanigans in reference 315.
Fixed — "Footnotes" is not a page reference, in reference 321.
Fixed — Reference 326 is malformed.
Fixed — Reference 329 is not a properly formatted reference to the US Code. That said, surely you can find a secondary source to support this?
Fixed — No page number in reference 333 or 344.
Fixed — Reference 334 is another citation to chapter.
There are a bunch of sources stuffed into references in the last 10 entries, and I'm pretty sure all of them have at least some formatting shortcoming, but to be honest I sort of glazed past them at this point.

§Bibliography, general problems:

Books without assigned ISBNs ideally need OCLCs.
ISBNs should ideally be presented as properly hyphenated ISBN-13s.
Fixed —The book source list is not in alphabetical order (Bassett > Haworth > Bell; Carp > Carlson; and so on). The online source section is worse, and in no evident order whatsoever.
Fixed — Publication locations are optional, but they're all or nothing. Sometimes you give them. Sometimes you don't.
Fixed — Also, there's no consistency about how you're formatting publication locations. I see "Whitefish, MT", "Madison, Wis", "Lanham, Md" (this one is simply incorrect), "Princeton, New Jersey". In the first column of sources, I see "New York", "New York City", and "New York, New York".
Books don't generally need retrieval dates; links to online copies of print material are considered convenience links. The print itself, obviously, isn't subject to change. That said, some people seem to disagree with me on this point, and I would likely not hold this against you if it were the only problem.
Not all of these are book sources. If you're going to break the bibliography up by media, the journal articles need to be pulled out separately, I think. Publishers aren't generally required for scholarly journals unless needed to clearly identify the periodical in question.
I'm not sure I understand your criteria for the "Primary sources" breakout, when you cite Washington's journal in the books...

§Bibliography, specific entries:

Is Banning's contribution to the Vann-edited work titled separately? I bet it is, which will warrant a chapter title here.
Betts (2013) is a self-published book and not a reliable source.
Fixed — Because not everything in this bibliography is templated for harv references correctly, it's not always obvious when a title is unused, and there's enough problems here that I'm simply not going to audit that for you right now. At a minimum, Burt (1906) doesn't appear to be cited in the text.
Fixed — Carlson (2016) probably doesn't need a chapter title, as the chapters don't have individual authorship. However, what is given here is not how any of the chapters are actually titled, and so is incorrect.
The source cited as Croll (1911) is a mess. Notwithstanding that it isn't formatted correctly, it also isn't cited correctly. It isn't by Croll, even as an editor. It also isn't a book. It's a bound edition of a periodical, scanned by Google and treated by Google Books as if it were a book. Everything about this citation is wrong, and that's even assuming you consider the history article written by the pseudonymous "Pennsylvania Dutchman" to be a reliable source.
Fixed — The editorial note in the Elkins reference is probably not helpful here.
Engber (2006) is listed in the book-format sources, but is an online article.

...and to be entirely honest, that's simply the point at which I stopped taking notes and concluded that I needed to oppose. That's not a comprehensive list of problems. Just looking back at the article to eyeball-scan the other sources, there are two editions of Hindle in the bibliography, but only one is referenced. And so on. I didn't even get to the "online sources" section, where I'm sure even more significant problems would await. I have no idea of the condition of the prose; I haven't even read this article. But there's enough wrong in the references at a fundamental level that I just can't support this article being ready for FAC much less for the bronze star itself. I'm very sorry. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:34, 22 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Squeamish Ossifrage: I am thoroughly impressed with your in depth review, and your patience. I've spent much time removing templates and url adresses, and trying to bring a single citation convention to the article, but obviously there's much more work to be done. I am considering withdrawing the nomination but will discuss the mater first on the Washington Talk page. Many thanks for your arduous effort. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 02:59, 23 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Squeamish Ossifrage: Many thanks for your in-depth review. Greatly appreciated. Shearonink (talk) 11:17, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Coord note

I wanted to give this nom a few days to gather initial comments but I think we should call a halt now and work on improvements away from the pressures of FAC. I agree with Brian that another Peer Review should be the next stop on the way to a future nom. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 00:20, 24 June 2018 (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. Ian Rose (talk) 00:20, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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