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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) 28 February 2024 [1].

Thomas Carlyle

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Nominator(s): Sinopecynic (talk) 21:10, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the most influential English prose writer of the 19th century. Sinopecynic (talk) 21:10, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Suggest adding alt text
  • Avoid sandwiching text between images
  • File:Thomas_Carlyle_lm.jpg: missing US tag, source link is dead. Ditto File:Crayon_portrait_of_Thomas_Carlyle_by_Samuel_Laurence,_circa_1838.png
  • File:Signature_of_Thomas_Carlyle.svg is mistagged
  • File:Silhouettes_of_Thomas_Carlyle's_father_and_mother_made_by_Jane_Welsh_Carlyle_with_captions_in_Carlyle's_hand_2.jpg needs an author date of death
  • File:Jane_Baillie_Welsh,_Mrs_Thomas_Carlyle,_1801_-_1866._Wife_of_the_historian_Thomas_Carlyle.jpg needs a US tag. Ditto File:Carlyle_Maclise_Original.jpg, File:Thomas_Carlyle_Reading.jpg
  • File:Dr_John_Carlyle,_Thomas_Carlyle,_Miss_Mary_Aitken,_Provost_Swan_(Crop).jpg: when and where was this first published?
  • File:Mr._Carlyle_delivering_the_address_on_his_installation_as_Lord_Rector_of_Edinburgh_University,_April_2,_1866.jpg needs a UK tag. Ditto File:Carlyle's_Seal.png, File:Froude_besmirching_Carlyle.jpg

UC

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I may stop in and do a full review, but a few points:

  • Per MOS:QUOTEPOV, I would excise or paraphrase the many short quotations, which read as scare quotes. See in particular In the summer of 1818, following a "Tour" with Irving through "Peebles-Moffat moor country", Carlyle made his first attempt at publishing, forwarding an article "of a descriptive Tourist kind" to "some Magazine Editor in Edinburgh", which reads as if Carlyle was up to something sordid.
  • Per MOS:BIRTHDATE, generally don't include people's dates of birth and death after they are mentioned in the text.
  • Terar dum prosim is translated here as "May I be wasted so that I be of use". A better translation would be something like "May I be worn away, as long as I may be of use": terar means "wasted" in the sense of "worn away to nothing" (related to our word attrition), and dum means "so long as" rather than "so that" (which would be ut).

UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:43, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ffranc

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I'm going to oppose right away because the article needs quite a lot of work. It's definitely salvageable, but I don't think it can be done within the normal time frame of a FAC.

  • First of all, the article is unbalanced. There are separate articles about Carlyle's philosophy and prose style, which is a good way to keep the article size under control, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an appropriate amount of coverage of those things in this article too. The article has a lot of detail, probably too much, about meetings, letters, the publications of individual essays etc in the biography section, and then quickly checks off the main things Carlyle is known for, such as the great man theory, his approach to history, his impact on major novelists etc. Try to find a better balance where you don't remove actually important content to give room for more trivial details.
  • The article relies too much on illustrative quotations rather than straightforward information.
  • The Works section lacks sources for some statements.
  • The Legacy section contains a lot of quotations and name-dropping but little useful information. We get a long list of writers Carlyle influenced, but we learn almost nothing about what his influence consisted of.
  • There is a massive controversy section that needs to be removed. The content is relevant, but needs to be restructured per WP:CSECTION.
  • The bibliography is largely unsourced and has a lot of external links, which is not recommended per WP:ELBODY.
  • Some of the sources are very old, especially the ones that cover minor details that probably are irrelevant anyway. It should be possible to find more recent sources for almost everything that's relevant.

You've done a lot of good work with this and other Carlyle-related articles. I definitely think you can bring it to FA, but as I said, I don't think it's possible within the typical time frame of a nomination. Ffranc (talk) 13:52, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Coord note -- this nom seems to have stalled and is still a long way from consensus to promote so I'm going to archive and recommend peer review before another try here. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 11:26, 28 February 2024 (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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