Wikipedia:Featured article review/Poetry/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was kept 19:41, 24 March 2007.

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Poetry

Note on closing—already listed at WP:FFA as re-promoted; if demoted, does not get added to tally, rather moved.

Review commentary

Messages left at A Musing and Poetry. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:14, 6 February 2007 (UTC) Also at Logologist. Sam 22:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I was rather surprised to find this as a featured article. For once, this is an article with a large number of cites, but this article has a few problems. It fails the following FA criteria"

• 1(a) - The prose is awful in some place. The prose is choppy, there are numerous single sentence paragraphs and the entire article lacks coherency.

Many choppy bits eliminated and some prose polished. Further and more specific critiques on this score would be appreciated. Sam 21:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

• 1(b) - The article is skewed towards Western poetry and marginalizes Asian poetry. Poetry among the native cultures of North and South America, Africa and Australia apparently don't figure into this definition of poetry as they are not mentioned.

I, at least, have worked quite hard to incorporate a fair bit of discussion of poetry of China, Japan, India and the Arabic and Persian speaking world, and have continued to add to this, though obviously it is difficult to simultaneously write about both tonal and atonal poetry given their fundamental linguistic differences. As to native cultures of the Americas, Africa and Australia, I'd love to get some sources (ditto for Tamil and Southeast Asian), there is very little out there in English on these poetries, and what there is is not overwhelmingly useful. Please note discussions you think have issues. (FYI: this has to be continually policed on this issue - all the editors who add their favorite poet/poem inevitably add Western ones). Sam 21:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

• 1(c) - There are quotes and other items that lack citation. Apparently these may have been added while it has been a FA.

Quotes are now taken care of, and other citations are continuing to go in. I've marked some places I think need some; please mark additional ones. Sam 21:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

• 1(d) - See 1(b).
• 2(c) - An overwhelming table of contents.

I disagree with this one -- it strikes me as appropriate given the breadth of the topic; what would you pull out?Sam

It appears this article needs a serious overhaul. *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 19:50, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I've made some comments above - input from anyone on the identified issues would be welcomed! Sam 21:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I have only just realized the turbulent history this article has had. Here is the first time it was demoted on FARC First demotion, here's the second FAC Second promotion. *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 21:18, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

FYI: The first Featured Article and the second are essentially entirely different articles; while the first was short, brilliant, and even poetic, it was anything but comprenhensive or NPOV and was fully Euro-centric; only small bits of it survived, and many of them were deleted in the Feature Article process. Sam 22:20, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

That took me an hour; in the interim, it was delisted when it was not actually delisted. I requested Yomangani to reconstruct the peer review archive. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:22, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it is time for a check up on this article; I've been quite busy of late and don't have much time, but would like to see the quality maintained here. Another editor, User:Logologist has been quite active in editing of late, and I'll notify them of this process. This is a very heavily edited article; the entire section on "Genre" is of recent vintage and needs some work, but has developed fairly rapidly. The layout has also been significantly changed of late. I've spent a lot of time on this over the last year, and if someone has history questions, I may be able to answer them. However, if folks have critiques, I would really appreciate making them as clear and actionable as possible: it is fundamentally difficult to work from a "the writing is bad" comment without a more specific critique or examples, and while there are certainly places where I think work is needed, others may disagree and focus on different areas. Thanks! Sam 22:33, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Sam, wondering why you indicated notification of WikiProject Poetry twice (above)? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, thought your notice of Poetry was posted on the article, not the Wikiproject. Fixed. Sam 15:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are prose (1a), comprehensiveness (1b), citations (1c), TOC (2a). Marskell 10:23, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure why this has been moved to FARC. There were two editors who were responsive to comments at the beginning of the review process, but no follow up from the people who raised questions and no response to my requests for more input (the last of which has now gone 16 days without response). While I'd be happy to work on this one more, and would have even been eager to get an active critique and review, it seemed to me the critics lost interest in this one. No one suggested it should be moved on to FARC; if there is interest in giving this more of a review, I'd suggest restarting the review process with critics interested in engaging in improving the article. Sam 21:16, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It has almost been two weeks; I'm obviously a keep. Sam 16:15, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Late note: Unless there is definite consensus in the review section, things get moved down. It's the "least harm" option. Marskell 08:59, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest to those who frequent these reviews that it would be better policy to only move on through the process where there is interest from someone in pursuing it; it's not very helpful to have a process open but nothing happening! Sam 13:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comments Sorry to see this review has gone neglected; no literary folk round these parts? Pls see WP:DASH. En-dashes are not used on any of the dates (they have hyphens), and spaces should not surround the em-dashes; fixing these sorts of MOS errors is tedious and time-consuming, there is a lot of it to do, but there is time. References and External links are very long; are all of those references used in the article, and can External links be pruned per WP:EL, WP:NOT? There are numerous bluelinks in footnotes which should be expanded to include publisher, author and date when available, and access date on websites (see WP:CITE/ES). The article is over-wikilinked (see WP:MOS-L) and WP:CONTEXT. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:12, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

The references were built out as part of the commentary during the original Featured Article process, in response to a comment there. I would just as soon leave them unless there is a strong consensus against them. On the external links, my vote would be to completely eliminate them - maintaining those external links by deleting the numerous linkspams that are added is a tedious and continuous process, and while they've been kept winnowed to useful ones, it would be far easier to just keep deleting the section as a whole. I will plug away on the other comments as time permits. Sam 13:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Pls let me know if you want help formatting refs; my time is limited, but I can plug away at some of them if needed. Also, spaces around em-dashes isn't the norm on most articles, but it is a matter of preference, so take your choice (the en-dashes should be fixed, though). If references were reviewed, that's fine; I was just inquiring. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:05, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

• I don't want to lodge a Remove here on things that can be fixed; please hold until issues can be addressed, since no reviewers here bothered to give feedback to Sam, who was inquiring all along and appears willing to maintain the article. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:08, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, sorry Sam that no one got back to you. I think this is very comprehensive and that the prose is good (at a top-level read). Sandy, is the ref formatting alright? Marskell 08:43, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

No, it's all over the map, inconsistent and incomplete, following no particular style. But since no one else has lodged any comments, I can't see entering a Remove based on sloppy formatting of footnotes and incorrect dashes. In case anyone ever decides to work on them, here are some examples only of the problems:

• Some footnotes have page numbers, many don't.
• I completed the first reference, to Heath, as an example of missing biblio information.
• Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning, needs publisher, location, date, and an ISBN would be nice. There's an ISBN finder on my userpage infobox that can be used to locate full info on book sources.
• "Many scholars, particularly those researching the Homeric tradition and the oral epics of the Balkans, suggest that ... " but no samples of these "many scholars" are given.
• Current note 6, Ahl and Goody, no info about the books, publisher, location, date. Pls see WP:CITE/ES or {{cite book}} for examples of reference formatting. Ditto for 7, 8, 9, and 10, although the ISBN is given on 9, and could be used to find the rest of the info on the ISBN finder.
• Skippping further down, we find another reference to Kant, but this time it does give the rest of the info which wasn't given in the previous Kant footnote. It would be more efficient to list all the references in the References section (with such a lengthy Reference section, why do footnotes contain books that aren't listed in References), and then just refer to them in the Notes with author, page no., not repeating info in Notes that is already in Refs. I stopped there, but almost none of the footnotes follow any sort of bibiliographic style, and most are missing information.
• For an example of the inconsisteny in the refs, search on Pinsky.
• Websources aren't fully formatted, including last access date, for example, the following reference gives no biblio info about the websource or last access dates — See the Text of the play in French as well as an English translation, Phaedra, available at Project Gutenberg.
• Almost none of the books listed in the lengthy References section have full biblio info on the book. There are very few publishers, and almost no ISBNs.

Also, the dashes are still wrong; I mentioned above that, per WP:DASH, dates use an ndash. They still have emdashes.

It would take someone a couple of hours to finish this work, using the ISBN finder on my user page. The missing page numbers don't allow a reader to locate the sourced info. All in all, the referencing just looks sloppy and unprofessional, which isn't what we expect of featured articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:43, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, and thanks for the ISBN finder; I'll fix up the dashes quickly, and will plug away at references when I'm near my books; to the degree some of these come from my bookshelves, many of the editions cited will be pre-ISBN, though there will likely be later editions that do have ISBNs. While many of the references (e.g., Pinsky, Dylan Thomas) are from me, there are many others that have been added since and a few that came from the original Filocht version; we'll see what we can do about that. Sam 14:34, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

It does appear that it's a problem resulting from piecemeal editing, where each editor added refs with a different style, some more complete than others. ISBNs aren't required, but they are helpful when there are questions about which version or edition, and they do help highlight "our best work". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:19, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

A small note: I think the repeated "dicussed below" in the refs is unneeded. Do you mean "discussed below" from the point it links from inline or discussed below in the ref section itself? I'd suggest just removing these, as they don't add much. Marskell 08:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree, and will remove those. I had the same thought in reading this through. (FYI, I've changed my signature some at the request of User:Sam to avoid confusion, but it's still me). A Musing (formerly Sam) 13:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I like to see more consistency in ref style, but there's nothing that rises to the level of a Remove - nice work ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:53, 24 March 2007 (UTC) Transposed from my talk Marskell 19:34, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.