Talk:Social justice warrior/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: AHeneen (talk · contribs) 18:28, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

This article is a quick fail for GA because of an NPOV issue and ongoing edit war (see 3 and 4 of WP:GACR#Immediate failures)

Before going further, understand that I'm just trying to offer constructive criticism and not interested in getting involved in the politics of this issue. I saw this article a couple weeks ago and spent a while pondering whether to review this article or not. Since the article was stable then, I'll give a few thoughts about the content of the article without considering the quick fail criteria.

Concerning NPOV issues:

• More inline citations!!!!!!!!! There are way too many sentences with just one citation at the end. This is very important on an article with contested POV. This is a topic that will continue to attract POV issues for a long time to come. More inline citations will make it easier to counter any criticism that the article contains biased sources or original research.
• The lead sentence begins "Social justice warrior...is a pejorative term for an individual...". This is not consistent with the "Reappropriation" content and so either a) it should include something like "Social justice warrior...is a term, often pejorative, for an individual..." or b) the "pejorative" remark could be added as a sentence after the lead (eg. "The term is often used as a pejorative, although some have sought to reappropriate it.")
• The lead should be an overview of the topic. While I can't cite any policy, in my opinion the lead should contain specific details calling out the source in the prose. The sentences about "Vice reported" and "Vice explained".

In my opinion, since the feminism element to this subject seems to be a magnet for NPOV claims, a couple of ways of helping to quell the NPOV claims is to add more content concerning social justice warriors in other areas (LGBT, multiculturalism, and civil rights advocates). The NPOV policy has a balanced viewpoints criteria, but what the previous section is advocating is a broader scope.

Much of the "In popular culture" section seems like trivia and should be removed. See MOS:POPCULT. While "In popular culture" sections are not categorically banned, the relevant part of the policy is that:

Unfortunately, these sections are frequently just lists of appearances and mentions, many of them unencyclopedically trivial...It is preferable to develop a normal article section with well-written paragraphs that give a logically presented overview (often chronological and/or by medium) of how the subject has been documented, featured, and portrayed in different media and genres, for various purposes and audiences.

The first paragraph about the video game is appropriate and properly-formatted content for such a section. The remainder of the section is just mentions of the term in popular culture and provides no encyclopedic value. See also WP:INDISCRIMINATE ("To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources.").

Other issues:

• The bolded subject in the lead sentence should not be enclosed by quotation marks. For formatting of the lead sentence, see WP:LEADSENTENCE
• The Harvard footnotes should include the supporting quote in the short footnote (what appears in the "Notes" section) rather than in the full citation. This can be done by adding the parameter |ps= into the Template:Harvnb. The benefit of this is that readers can easily see the supporting quote when they place their cursor over the citation in the prose. This is especially useful on an article like this with POV drama. See, eg., WP:STRUCTURE (a section of the NPOV guideline):

Pay attention to headers, footnotes, or other formatting elements that might unduly favor one point of view, and watch out for structural or stylistic aspects that make it difficult for a reader to fairly and equally assess the credibility of all relevant and related viewpoints.

Hopefully this critique helps improve this article. I think that, once it becomes stable and NPOV issues are satisfactorily addressed, that users should wait a couple months before nominating for GA again. In this case, the article was improved in early April and relatively stable (vandalism issues, but no edit warring) from the time of the nomination until about the turn of May. For a topic like this, which is bound to attract POV claims, you should give the article a modest amount of time should be given until it is nominated for GA. AHeneen (talk) 18:28, 11 May 2016 (UTC)