Talk:Elton John/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Ritchie333 (talk · contribs) 18:12, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

I've got mixed views on Elton. I think "Funeral For A Friend" / "Love Lies Bleeding" is one of my favourite songs of all time, while if I ever hear Candle in the Wind '97 played again I think I might kill someone. Since I've started tinkering with the article, I might as well carry on. I think my initial concern is the sources seem to be a bit of a mix of things, rather than biographies that you really need for articles of this importance. Only Bernardin / Stanton is mined to any great depth. Keith Hayward's biography could also be used for substance. I don't know if this'll be a showstopper for GA, but if you were planning to take this to FAC afterwards; this is essential.

I tend to copyedit as I go and raise issues as and when they arise. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 18:12, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Lead

• Why do we need three citations to verify his date of birth? It's not particularly contentious, given the publicity some of his birthday parties have had.
  • @Ritchie333: I removed two of the sources about his birthday.
• "He has more than fifty Top 40 hits" - where is this mentioned in the body?
• Is ownership of Watford FC important enough to go in the opening paragraph?
  • @Ritchie333: I removed that info from the opening paragraph.

Life and Career

Early life

• I can't find where all the birth and death dates of Elton's parents are verified. Two sources didn't seem to mention much at all, while the other one mentioned his father's date of birth but nothing else. The citation to Hayward just mentioned "p.2 onwards" which isn't very helpful.
• "and was raised in a council house by his maternal grandparents, in Pinner" - this information isn't in the next citation along. The next sentence says "when the family moved to a nearby semi-detached house". Was he raised in a council house or a semi-detached house?
• "His parents married in 1945" - this source isn't very helpful. Surely a biography somewhere has it?
• "until the age of 17, when he left just prior to his A-Level examinations to pursue a career in the music industry." - this sentence could do with being later on in this section; later paragraphs talk about events as a child aged 7 and 11, so to mention what he did at 17 seems in the wrong place.
• "tried to steer him toward a more conventional career, such as banking" - the citation to this (Phillip Norman) needs a page number
• "John has stated that his wild stage costumes and performances were his way of letting go after such a restrictive childhood" - as above, and same issue for next sentence
• The citations Rosenthal's biography in this section all need page numbers.

Summary

I'm going to pause the review at this point, as this article does not appear to meet criteria 2b of the good article criteria, and there has been no attempt to check any of the article's references in the improvement to GA. All book citations must have page numbers that verify the information, and I have already spotted several claims that doesn't appear to be in the sources given. Please can you address this ASAP or I'm afraid I'll have to quick-fail this :-( Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 18:36, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: I think you should fail my nomination.MagicatthemovieS (talk) 21:46, 13 November 2018 (UTC)MagicatthemovieS

You really should make a more active effort to check your article before you nominate one like this. Ritchie333, I believe the user is familiar with the GA process, but I wonder if maybe their plan was to fix the issues during nomination period and they are astonished with the rapid review? It would be a forgivable mistake, I've done it before (though it was less severe and it ended up passing). As for you, MagicatthemovieS, you should take special care to make it much closer to matching the GA criteria for an icon like Elton John before you nominate just because of how big an icon he is, as he will draw attention on the backlog and likely pull a review pretty quickly in comparison to others, as is the case here.

"Daniel my brother, you are, older than me..." Love that song, for the record. You can guess why dannymusiceditor ^oops 03:56, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, Danny, I was expecting to work with @Ritchie333: more before he suggested to end the review. I was also foolish not to clean up the article further before nominating it for GA. I am still very willing to work alongside Ritchie to fix the article's issues.MagicatthemovieS (talk) 04:06, 14 November 2018 (UTC)MagicatthemovieS

I certainly don't mind working with a nominator to get an article towards GA, as I did for Talk:The Rolling Stones/GA1 and Talk:Chinese Democracy/GA3, both of which had referencing / sourcing issues, but I thought I would give them a week to see if they were up to the challenge (which they were). However, in this case, the issue of questionable factual accuracy was just too severe to continue. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:49, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Okay, I'll close the review for now per the issues above. What I would recommend doing is reading this guide which explains one way of tackling core biographies to get up to GA / FA status. FWIW, I have a long-term plan to get Aretha Franklin to GA, but it will involve reading several biographies first. I'd imagine a similar level of work is required for Elton, even for GA. If there's a LGBT pride week or editathon, that might be a time to get a bunch of people to give this a go (as I did with Graham Chapman some years back). Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:41, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Possible Harley Davidson 100th anniversary performance criticism irony

Referencing the first sentence in third paragraph of the Billy Elliot the Musical and 60th birthday (2000–2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elton_John&gettingStartedReturn=true#Billy_Elliot_the_Musical_and_60th_birthday_(2000%E2%80%932009) section of this article, would it be worth mentioning an ironic element, namely that: Contained in the lyrics of one of Elton's biggest hits 'Saturday Night's Alright' is the verse that goes... "A couple of sounds that I really like are the sound of a switchblade and a motorbike"*, which is in opposition to the disappointment of the 'biker' crowd and Elton's own quoted comments to the contrary... "I'd play you a song about motorcycles, but I don't have any." as referenced in the 'further reading article' cited as reference (119)?

• http://www.metrolyrics.com/saturday-nights-alright-for-fighting-lyrics-elton-john.html

--Milkkefir (talk) 01:39, 23 June 2019 (UTC)