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The Wire (TV series)

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Opark 77 and East718 have done an enormous amount of work expanding, organizing, and referencing this article; I have helped mainly by tightening the prose and re-organizing the sections. I especially want people who are not familiar with The Wire to offer their opinions on whether they find the article informative on its subject, but of course we also welcome comments from those who've seen the show and think the information could be better presented. Article size is 58k largely due to its markup; the actual text size (not counting references) is about 42k. Also, we have already done the automated peer review and acted on it. Andrew Levine 12:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For the results and discussion of the automated peer review please see the section on the article talk page.--Opark 77 15:56, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments/suggestions.
    • Comma after "series" in first sentence.
    • I'd remove links to dictionary terms such as "police". Catholic Church is a trivial link, too.
    • Needs copy-editing throughout to make the prose neater and, in some places, correct; e.g., "The cast is large and consists"—"The large cast consists". " it has failed to draw an audience commensurate with its press"—"the size of its audience has not matched critical enthusiasm". "thematically very different, forebears"—Remove comma. "twelve or thirteen full-hour episodes in length"—"12 or 13 ... [remove last two words, too]"
    • "Discussing his aims for the show, Simon is realistic about its lack of potential to change the situations it portrays, but says that he hopes it can change the opinions of some of its viewers." Will this date (present tense)?
    • I wonder whether the stubby sections under "Themes" could be merged, by removing the subtitles. Might make it flow better? Unsure.
    • Principal cast: VERY blue. Can you delink some things, like the ones that all go to "list of characters ..."?
    • Em dashes without spaces better than hyphens for punctuation.
  • Season numbers—use Arabic numerals, don't spell out.

Yeah, it's got potential, but needs polishing throughout, particularly the prose. You're up against a lot of TV articles that aren't featured. Look at "Six Feet Under" and "24".

Tony 15:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the feedback. I've struck through some of the suggestions made that I have acted upon, I hope that's Ok. I'm familiar with the Six Feet Under article and have now read the 24 (TV series) one. I see that both are more list heavy than The Wire article currently is and cover the same broad sections, was there anything in particular you wanted us to emulate/learn from in suggesting these articles?
The section about Simon's aims would not date well. I will look at rewording it. I suggested merging the Themes subsections on the discussion page after the automated peer review suggested that the TOC was too large, myself and Andrew Levine thought it best to wait and see if anyone else thought so. I'm interested to see if others point this out as well.
The cast section is quite blue, but I think it needs to be as the characters and actors are an integral part of the show and anyone interested may want to read more about them. Perhaps the actors could be de-linked because the character pages all link to them anyway (or vice versa). Does anyone else have any thoughts about this?
The last two formatting issues are valuable suggestions that I hope to address when I'm more motivated for a slightly tedious job!
--Opark 77 00:14, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In terms of the cast sections links again. I notice now that the starring cast are all linked in the infobox so these links are repeated in the cast section, does anyone think this is reason enough to take the links out?--Opark 77 01:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the comments! I've removed all "List of characters..." links in the principal cast section, and also changed all hyphens to emdashes.
Both 24 and SFU are very list-heavy, and we tacitly agreed to go with prose over lists. Is this the direction you wanted to take the article?
I also though about replacing the lead's last sentence with this: "However, its success at drawing an audience has been significantly less than its critical success." Is that a little less awkward to you? east.718 02:37, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To me that would be considerably more awkward, especially with the repetition of "success." I don't see what the problem is with "commensurate with..." May this be a difference between American and Australian English? Andrew Levine 07:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Also, if the cast section has too many links, I would recommend taking out the major cast members already in infobox) rather than the more valuable links to the individual characters (which contain a lot more information than can be presented in the main page). Andrew Levine 07:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I removed the links in the cast section that were duplicated in the infobox.--Opark 77 09:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As for merging the small, one-paragraph subsections in "Themes", I tried doing that a week ago, but never submitted the results as an edit, because the section headers served a purpose that would otherwise be taken up by an additional lead-in sentence in each paragraph. There are many FAs that have similar one-paragraph subsections. Andrew Levine 10:18, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, AZ t 01:33, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article really looks fantastic, Opark77, East718 and whomever else have really outdone themselves. A nice thing about the article is that everything looks neat and organized and the large list of references is a plus. Other than some minor grammar wording which should be fixed, I think it is a very impressive article. I would also advise taking a look at The West Wing (TV series) article which happens to be a "featured article" which could provide some insights or ideas for what you would like to accomplish in the future for this article. Sfufan2005 01:46, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thank you for your comments. In building up this article we looked at all the featured articles for TV series, particularly The West Wing as it is the only drama with an ensemble cast on FA. We ended up using elements from most of the TV FAs in the article as suited for The Wire. What grammatical fixes should be made? Andrew Levine 10:18, 9 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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