Talk:Peter Parker (Marvel Cinematic Universe)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Adamstom.97 (talk · contribs) 03:34, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I am planning to review this article per the request at my talk page. Hoping to get to this within the next week. - adamstom97 (talk) 03:34, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Probably coincidental, but I actually plan on (re)watching Homecoming today. Looking forward to your comments, Adam. — SirDot (talk) 04:36, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

My thoughts on the article are below, there are quite a few changes that I would like to see happen before promoting it to GA.

Overall structure

I have some suggestions for restructuring the article in a few ways, happy to discuss these but I do think the current structure does not necessarily make the most sense.

• Generally speaking, an article shouldn't need both "Fictional character biography" and "Appearances" as they are redundant. The intention of these sections is to provide context to the reader for all of the real-world info (per MOS:PLOT). For the same reason, the section that you do stick with really should come first in the article so new readers have an understanding of the character before they learn about the background and reception info. This is the same reason that we put plot summaries at the top of the article for films and TV shows. My suggestion is you move "Fictional character biography" to be the first section and merge the "Appearances" section with the "Casting" subsection (more on that later).

 Done

• I think "Design" and "Characterization" should be around the other way, "Design" more logically falls under "Concept and creation" while "Characterization" makes a bit more sense being separate because it does not need to be limited to the creative teams (more on that later).

 Done

• I don't think "Future" is correct here, we use that for films and TV shows because those projects are done and we are talking about the next project(s), but that is not the case for the character. If he has more appearances, we would not be creating a separate article for those, we will be adding them above. I think the "Future" information belongs in the "Casting and appearances" section.

 Done

Lead

• Linking "alias" feels like WP:OVERLINKing

 Done

• I don't think all of the plot information is needed in the lead, you should be able to cut this down to a much more brief introduction for the character. The key points are that he is a superhero with spider-like abilities, he starts out as a high school student, and maybe that he has various superhero mentors. Anything more can be left for the "Fictional character biography" section. Think of how the film and TV articles only have one short line of plot in their leads.
• The second two paragraphs do not give a good summary of the rest of the article. Once you have addressed the rest of my points in this review, you should re-write the lead to give a summary of all the sections (a good rule of thumb is to give at least one sentence to each section of the article, but adjust that to make sure you are giving WP:DUEWEIGHT to all sections). For instance, you could have one paragraph for "Concept and creation", "Characterization", and "Alternate versions", and another paragraph for "Reception" and "In other media". You can see examples of how to write this kind of summary at the MCU film and TV articles.

Infobox

"In-universe information" can be a bit of a minefield, and I'm going to be a little bit harsh about what I think should be here.

• Occupation: I don't think "Avenger" is an occupation, and though student is sometimes treated as an occupation I don't think it necessarily belongs here. Intern is also iffy, especially because I don't think he actually was an intern (wasn't he just pretending to have an internship but was actually being Spider-Man?). I think this one should just say superhero and/or vigilante.

 Done. Left it as just vigilante for now.

• Affiliation: Link Avengers, iffy on Stark Industries per previous point.

 Done

• Weapon: "Technological glasses" feels like a WP:EGG link to me, I think it would be better to just say "E.D.I.T.H." or "E.D.I.T.H. glasses" with a link to more info.

 Done

• Relatives: I'm going to question the inclusion of Uncle Ben here. More on this later, but the sources you have for him existing in the MCU barely support that and I'm pretty sure the only suggestion that Peter has any relationship with Uncle Ben comes from What If...?, which obviously doesn't apply. Even if there was proof that he knew his Uncle Ben, I don't think he has enough of a role in the films to justify being included in the infobox.

 Done

• Abilities: Some of these don't apply to the film version. I think we need to get some reliable sources to support what his actual abilities in the films are and include those in the body somewhere, then cut this list down to match. Lean towards having less stuff here rather than cramming every possible thing in.

Fictional character biography

• Plot sections like this are generally allowed to be attributed to the media that they are summarising without the need for additional sources, but that is because they are usually on an article that includes all of the reference information in the infobox already. That is not the case for character articles, so this section is almost entirely unsourced. You should be using {{cite film}} and {{cite episode}} to source any plot information that is not covered by a third party source.
• Another major issue with these sorts of character plot summaries is that they are rife with potential to get overlong. This page is not the worst that I have seen, but it still does have some issues. I won't go through the whole thing right now, I would rather you have another go at getting the summary right before I get too nitpicky. What you should be watching out for is anything that feels like a scene-by-scene breakdown or too in-universy, stuff that we wouldn't allow in a film or TV summary. For instance, "Parker is a fan of Rogers despite them being on opposing sides, Rogers respecting Parker's bravery; They briefly exchange where in New York they are from upon fighting." is a very detailed breakdown of a jokey scene that is not relevant to the summary of Parker's life. You should also cut down anything that isn't directly relevant to Peter, such as lists of other characters fighting Thanos which could easily be summarised as "The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy". See what you can do.
• Remove bolding per MOS:BOLD

 Done

• Everything in the "Early life" subsection can't really be sourced to the movies and should have third party sources instead, including the details that can be briefly seen on his passport which I don't think is good enough to say that someone watching Far From Home could easily verify it.
• Per my concerns with the infobox, I don't think we can include Uncle Ben here. The sources you have only support that there may be a vague reference to him in the films, they definitely don't support the idea that he raised Peter. Especially when it is pretty clear in the films that he is raised by May and she is a bit of an Uncle Ben replacement for the MCU.
• "Aunt" should be capitalised when used as a noun in "aunt May"

 Done

Concept and creation

First section

• It is generally discouraged to have sub-sections with no heading, and it is not necessary in this case. I would recommend "Background and development" or something like that.

 Done

• The first sentence is sourced to the original comic book, but I think it would be better to have a third party source supporting that issue as the first appearance. If one of the next two sources don't cover this then it should not be difficult to find a more recent source that does.
• "as an influence and an inspiration" can just be "as inspiration", or you could say "and was influenced by pulp magazine crime fighter the Spider. He also took inspiration from seeing a spider climb up a wall."

 Done

• "The character became popular during the 1960s" seems a little vague and I'm not sure the sources really support it. I would take that out and just say "The character was later adapted into various media, including two film franchises by Sony Pictures: ..." You could then make the wording for Maguire, Raimi, Garfield, and Webb a little less awkward by turning them into two list items separated by a semicolon rather than trying to do all of that in one go.
• "Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige stated in April 2015 that they decided to not retell the character's origins in Civil War since there had been two previous retellings with the Raimi and Webb films, so Marvel Studios was "going to take it for granted that people know that, and the specifics"." this feels more appropriate in the characterization section.
• The third paragraph in this section should be moved into the "Casting and appearances" subsection as it is relevant to a later appearance rather than the initial development. It also has a lot of details that aren't too relevant to the character, but it is probably mostly fine. I would just rethink "Disney was reportedly co-financing 25% of No Way Home in exchange for 25% of the film's profit, while retaining the character's merchandising rights" and "with the latter interaction described as "a 'call and answer' between the two franchises as they acknowledge details between the two in what would loosely be described as a shared detailed universe" as some of the more egregious lines.
• The third paragraph of the "Appearances" section should be moved here, as it is talking about the early development of the character in the MCU. Make sure the information about Iron Man 2 matches the information that we have on Spider-Man at that article since the wording over there was determined by consensus and I don't think this page completely lines up.

Casting and appearances

Per previous suggestions, I think the casting section should be combined with the appearances section to not be redundant with the biography and to create a more complete picture of the casting developments over the years. You can pull in the casting information for Holland from all of his other film articles, plus the paragraph from the first "Concept and creation" section as mentioned in the previous point. This is also the place that you should discuss Holland's potential casting in Venom and Into the Spider-Verse as well as the SMU connections because that should not be in the "In other media" section. Other points for the current section:

• the announcement of Jon Watts as director is not relevant to this article

 Removed

• "While filming the Avengers Assemble scene in Avengers: Endgame (2019), Holland accidentally ran and started yelling early because he couldn't here Evans say "assemble" due to their distance from each other" this is trivial and should be removed.
  • Zoo added that due to the potential DYK for this article once a GA. Do you have any ideas?
    • I'll just remove it and we can worry about the DYK later. -- Zoo (talk) 05:14, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Design

There is a bit of a strange split of information here, some of the production info is in prose and some is in the list, plus there is some alternate version stuff in here as well. I am not totally against having prose and a more concise list of suits, but I think we should make a few adjustments:

• Commit to having all the production information in prose, including adding a third paragraph for any information about the suits in No Way Home that you can find.
• Move the What If...? and Freshman Year stuff to the "Alternate versions" section, it is confusing mixing those in with the main version like this.
• Move the see also link to under the "Design" heading and remove the second link from the prose.
• "a slightly more traditional, Steve Ditko influenced suit," can we clarify what it is "slightly more" than? Is he just referring to the previous movie suits? Same for "the previous suits".
• "In The Moviemaking Magic of Marvel Studios: Spider-Man (2021)" we don't usually need to mention where the information is coming from since it is in the reference and isn't really relevant to the article.
• "Holland says that "what [he] loves about the original web-shooters is they're as real as they could be," and compares them to Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man, saying that his web-shooters "[never made] much sense to [him]."" I think you can paraphrase this to avoid the awkward quoting.
• "Spider-Man's Iron Spider armor, used by the character during the Civil War comic storyline, was also considered to appear in the Civil War film." Can we add a bit more information about what the Iron Spider armor is here since this is the first mention.
• The Amazing Spider-Man films should already be linked above
• Once you have moved the information in this section around, per my previous comments, you should be left with a pretty basic list of suits that can serve as basically a glossary of suits which I think will still be useful to readers. Let me know if you disagree. The only other changes we will need then are:
  • Remove the heading. As I said above, a single subheading in a section with multiple sub-sections is discouraged, as is giving a list a heading just to draw attention to it. You can replace it with a simple sentence such as "Below is a full list of Spider-Man suits used in the MCU:"
  • Remove the bolding per MOS:BOLD

 Done

• • Make sure all records in the list are sourced
  • "The Black and Gold Suit" and "The Integrated Suit" are not new suits, the modifications to the original suit should be discussed in prose and then can be briefly mentioned in the list format, but they should not get separate bullet points
• You should avoid giving the suits names unless reliable sources do. If the suit was given a name in other media (i.e. the video games) and we have a reliable source making the connection then you could make note of that here as well.

Characterization

This is the sort of section that you could really go ham on to make this a really good article, by which I mean there isn't really a limit to how much good discussion can be added here. As I mentioned above, you don't need to limit this to the creative teams of the films, you can also include commentary here discussing how the character is portrayed in the MCU.

• Try to have more logical groupings for this, such as all of the origin story stuff together (including the bit from Feige that I mentioned above), Peter's relationship with Tony and inner conflict related to that, etc.
• If we are going to mention What If...? here then we should make it clear that this is an alternate version of the character. I'm not sure if it makes sense to do that or to move this line to the "Alternate versions" section.

I felt mentioning it here felt appropriate and made an edit. If the GA nominee/other editors feel otherwise they can change. Squeezdakat (talk) 05:53, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

• There should definitely be discussion from Watts and the Spider-Man writers in addition to the Russo brothers
• Most of the "Another change is Parker's close paternal..." paragraph appears to be unsourced, and some of it is discussing critical responses which should probably go in the reception section
• The "Parker's relationships with..." paragraph doesn't really seem to say anything about him as a character, you should expand this to discuss the relationships that he does have in the films and what they mean about his character growth
• I think you should include mention that they picked an MCU superhero mentor for each movie (Stark, Fury, Strange) and talk about all of them, not just Stark, plus how this differentiates him from the previous movies (you should be able to find source supporting all that)
• You should probably have a paragraph on his villains and what they each mean for his character development as well
• There are definitely sources out there that you can use to discuss the way the MCU replaces Uncle Ben with Aunt May, and how the whole trilogy is essentially an origin story for Peter. I know there was a bunch of discussion about that when No Way Home came out which would be good to add.

Alternate versions

• The subheadings in this section are a bit overkill for such a small amount of information, you should just be able to use the three project headings.
• Per my previous comments, all plot details here should be sourced to the film or episode, and any design details for these projects should be included here instead of in the main design section.
• I would include a brief introduction to What If...? here so readers don't need to go read another article to get the gist. Make sure you use third party sources (you can grab them from the What If...? articles) for that and for Thames.
• I would include a brief introduction to the idea of alt universe Spideys in No Way Home for this subsection in case the reader just skipped down here, and then you can have a bullet point each for Peter-Two and Peter-Three instead of subsections.
• I think the draft for Freshman Year has slightly more useful wording in regards to this being a "what if"-style story for Civil War.

Reception

I am concerned with the way this sections seems to have just been copied from the film articles without much extra work being done. It is pretty obvious in the way that some of the information isn't relevant to the character at all. Reception is one of the most important sections of any media article so it is important to get this one right.

• All of the reception prose that is not about the character should be removed. The performances of other actors and mentions of writing/directing in general don't apply to this article. Instead, you should be expanding the reviews beyond what the film articles say about Holland and Parker. You should also include relevant stuff like revies on the costume since we have a whole section dedicated to that here. Be careful to do this all in your own words and not rely on quotes.
• In addition to expanding the relevant reviews, you should also be looking for additional sources that praise or criticise this version of the character. I'm sure you can find a bunch of sources that specifically compare this version to the previous films, or who rank the film/TV version of Spider-Man, that sort of thing. That's all good stuff that should be included. You might also be able to find things such as reviewers comparing Holland's performance as Spider-Man to other roles, or talking about how he has grown in the role over time. I would recommend trying to find as many relevant sources as you can first, and then cutting them down as needed once you try to add the information logically.
• This is another section with a missing subheading, you can use "Critical response" like what the films and TV show articles have.
• I don't see how the box office for the films is relevant here, we can't really prove that any of it is directly attributed to the character or the actor. If there are sources out there talking about audiences going to see the films specifically for this version of Spider-Man or Holland's performance then that could probably be included in the "Critical response" section as prose, but the box office numbers don't feel appropriate to be included.
• "numerous" seems a bit much, I would go with "several" here.
• Can you confirm that there aren't any more awards to be included in the table beyond the ones that were already at the film articles?

In other media

• Is there a third party source for the second comics version?
  • Nope :(
• Instead of saying "All of the MCU Spider-Man suits, except the suit introduced at the end of No Way Home, are available" which is a statement that you will probably need to keep updating, can you phrase this as "All of the Spider-Man suits seen in the MCU as of XXX date"?
• Avoid using any made-up suit names in this section as well, and you may not need to mention the video games giving names to the movie suits again (depends on wording in both sections)
  • In Spider-Man PS4, the Homecoming suit is named the Stark Suit, Homemade suit is the same as is Iron Spider. Night Monkey is named "Stealth" and Red-Black-Gold is "Hybrid", while Black and Gold is the same name. This is how I'm getting those names.
• Did Holland and Zendaya provide voices for Fortnite? If so we should state that more clearly, if not then you shouldn't use their names, "based on their appearances in No Way Home" is enough.
  • Fornite doesn't have voices so will remove.
• The last line should have a heading, probably "Live attraction" or something like that which is consistent with other MCU articles.
  • Alright. Doesn't need to be bulleted as it's one entry.

Other

• The two pictures of Holland that you have are fine, but it would probably be good to make them more distinct by also explaining where the second one was taken, in addition to mentioning the reviews. They are also quite big, usually for a portrait image like that I add "|upright" to tell it that it doesn't need to be so big.
• The two suit images that you have are fine enough, but it is difficult to see how the top one is much different from the suit in the infobox which is the whole point of having an image here. I would recommend replacing it with a more visually distinct suit, either the Iron Spider suit or the Night Monkey suit. You should also update the "Purpose of use in article" rationale for both to make it clear that they are being primarily used in the Design section to aid in discussion of the different Spider-Man costumes (the current rationale is vague and weak, you should be trying to convince the reader that it is appropriate to use these copyrighted images in the article).
• The MCU wiki doesn't use the term "Zombie Hunter Spider-Man", I think this external link wording should be updated.

 Done - changed it to zombie outbreak Spider-Man based on the URL

Conclusion and responses

That is all for now, let me know if you have any questions and/or when you are done addressing my concerns. Because there are a lot of major changes discussed here, once all of this is sorted I will likely have another look through the article before deciding whether it is ready for GA or not. I will put this review on hold in the meantime. Good luck! - adamstom97 (talk) 03:29, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Just finished your comments, and they are certainly...alot to say the least. Going on a real-life tangent:

I mostly edit on my tablet, so I'm more used to that than say, a phone and my laptop. I need a new charger for the tablet, so once I get that I'll start work !

(re: comments and working from that) This is gonna take a while... — SirDot (talk) 04:10, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I know its a lot, but I wanted to make sure I was thorough and up front about everything to make sure it was clear and because I know this review will likely set the standard for other MCU character articles. Take your time working through everything and feel free to ask for help from other editors. If it is taking longer than I think is okay then I will check back in. - adamstom97 (talk) 04:14, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Understood. I'm starting to respond on your questions above. — SirDot (talk) 04:19, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I was thorough and up front about everything to make sure it was clear and because I know this review will likely set the standard for other MCU character articles. exactly what I was thinking while reading this. Gonnym (talk) 06:47, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you to both of you for doing this — SirDot for taking the leap, and Adamstom for going all-in. It's about time someone started getting our character articles on par with our very well-written film/TV articles. InfiniteNexus (talk) 04:26, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Following some discussion with the nominator and reviewer, I am closing this as failed given the now overly extended holding period. Best of luck with the article, CMD (talk) 02:06, 30 October 2022 (UTC)