Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Dubai/1

Dubai

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted per general lack of improvement since reassessment was opened Snuggums (talk / edits) 14:45, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Two months ago a peer review was opened on this article. After listing an article of my own for peer review recently, I decided to take a look at this article as the requesting editor said he was interested in perhaps taking it to FAC and wanted to know what could be improved.

Since it's about a major city of the early 21st century, I felt our article on it should be high-quality. A first look over suggested it might be one of those that don't need too much work before an FA nom.

Printing it out and going through it with a red pen slowly disabused me of that notion, and by the time I was done I decided I had to take it here as, were it to be nominated for GA in its present form, I would fail it.

Background

The article was brought to GA status over six years ago by an editor who was a few months after that blocked as a sock of a notorious now-banned editor. Right afterward, it was unsuccessfully nominated for FA by another editor (still active, but not since June of this year, and hasn't worked on this article in over two years) and failed pretty quickly. Sandy reviewed it herself and found quite a few problems that had not been noted during the GA review, even after work had been done to bring it up to code per the GA reviewer's first critique. It was reassessed a couple of weeks later and kept as a GA.

There has been no evidence of any systematic effort to address those issues since then, and as is often the case when someone who develops an article to FA or GA status leaves or is banned without anyone coming in to take up their slack the article has continued to suffer from the same issues of a little drive-by editing here and there without any systematic oversight, bloating it to its current 130K size without really making it any better. I would say by now it's obvious that this article has gone to seed.

Issues

If there is any single issue that for me would warrant delisting this, it's the references. There are over 200 separately cited footnotes, yet in going through the article I found at least a dozen paragraphs that ended in uncited sentences. Inexcusable.

And this isn't even getting to the footnotes themselves (which should be under "references", not notes (other than note 1), with the "references" moved to "further reading". I can generously describe them as a hot mess. There are wild inconsistencies in style alone (some dates are given in the MDY format the article seems to have adopted as part of its (mostly) Commonwealth English style, but others are given in the now-deprecated ISO 8301 format), and many are missing essential information such as date, author's name, accessdate, page numbers. There are notes that use the {{cite}} templates but put the information in the wrong fields. It looks like a parody of Wikipedia rather than Wikipedia.

Beyond that, there's fragmentation of information (why does the lede graf have to mention the elevated political status of both Dubai and Abu Dhabi within the UAE?), passages that need to be updated because the events or data they refer to are now a few years in the past, and some passages with promotional language that needs to be toned down.

That last may be because I ran it through the copyvio detector and found some grafs copypasted in their entire from promotional sites.

I have advised the reviwer who requested the peer review that this step I am presently taking is necessary and that it will give him something to shoot for as he rebuilds the article (that's what the process of rewriting it will inevitably turn out to be). Daniel Case (talk) 04:12, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to start this GAR. What would you suggest is the best way to improve this article? You say that I will basically be rebuilding and rewriting it, so do you think I should start from scratch in the draft space? Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 17:57, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Wow! That's exactly what I was going to suggest. You might want to work section by section. That way you can take from the existing article what still works (It is properly laid out as prescribed at WP:CITIES—that does not need to be changed). Daniel Case (talk) 23:44, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

• Pinging Daniel Case and Emir of Wikipedia. It's been almost a month since either of you commented here. It looks like the draft has been abandoned, and there hasn't since been much improvement to the article since there was any input. Would either of you object to it being delisted at this point? Snuggums (talk / edits) 06:29, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't, actually. I always said it was going to take a while. Daniel Case (talk) 06:31, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Snuggums, I had looked at this a few hours ago, and thought that once it had been a full month since the Draft had been edited, I'd post that I thought it should be delisted. Now that you've brought this up, I don't think a day or two more will make a difference, so consider this a concurrence for delisting. Should the article eventually be improved to GA quality again, it can be submitted at GAN. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I accept the delisting and don't object, however I wonder what would be the best avenue to receive feedback from more experienced editors throughout my time improving the draft? Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 14:08, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I am then delisting this article. For improving the article, I recommend putting it up for peer review and notifying the WikiProjects this page belongs to. Snuggums (talk / edits) 14:45, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Rewrite

I am starting the rewrite at Draft:Dubai. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 13:05, 9 December 2016 (UTC)