Template:Did you know nominations/Maria Popova

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by Allen3 talk 13:33, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
Insufficient progress toward resolving outstanding issues

Maria Popova

edit
  • ... that Maria Popova was named one of the 100 Most Creative People by Fast Company magazine and maintains a blog with over 180,000 subscribers?

Created/expanded by Ric.chi (talk). Self nominated at 18:08, 1 October 2013 (UTC).

  • Hi Allen3, I apologize for not applying the edits before nominating the article. As of now, the edits have been made. Please feel free to let me know if there are any other issues that I need to address. Thank you! --Ric.chi (talk) 03:09, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Hi Allen3, thank you for the second reminder and notification. I believe that the article should be sufficient in length now. Please let me know if there is anything else that you need from me. I would be more than happy to address them!Ric.chi (talk) 21:10, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
  • New reviewer needed for full review, now that article meets the 5x expansion requirement. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:10, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
  • OK, I'll take this one:
5x expansion and length per review above by Allen3, well-cited to acceptable standard for BLP, criticism section is fine with regard to NPOV
Verification of Twitter account and GooglePlus were bare urls, I have fixed these
Inline external link to Explore with direct quote of its strapline - assuming good faith - appears inadvertently promotional; I have replaced this with a description of Explore and a citation
Hook format + length fine, sufficiently interesting, the first fact is in the article and cited BUT the second fact - 180,000 subscribers - I can't find it anywhere in the article, and assume it's in one of the sources somewhere. So I have struck the nominated hook and propose ALT1:
  • ALT1: ... that Maria Popova was named one of the 100 Most Creative People by Fast Company magazine and maintains a blog with over 1.2 million readers per month?
So please will another editor review ALT1 for me. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 23:29, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid there are some serious issues to be dealt with first. The picture in the infobox is from the New York Times; I very much doubt it meets the criteria for inclusion on Wikipedia. Also, there is close paraphrasing involved. Compare, for example, "Popova told her boss that she would start her own mailing for inspiration" from this source to the article's identical "Popova told her boss that she would start her own mailing for inspiration". Also compare that source's "Early Years" section, second and third sentences, to the first two sentences of the article's "Early life" section. Nor is this the only source that is closely paraphrased. It's going to take a lot of work and close reviewing to be sure this article has been properly fixed. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:10, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment BlueMoonset, my apologies for missing the image licence. I have examined the embedded metadata for it which explicitly states that it is copyright to the NYT, it appears to be uploaded by Maria herself who could have no authority to give it a CC licence, and have also commented to that end on its deletion review. Copyvio check came back clean, so well spotted on the close paraphrases. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 01:54, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Given the close paraphrasing issues and that the user who has expanded this article has worked on almost nothing else, I will ask here, openly and without prejudice, to the nominator Ric.chi, do you have a conflict of interest on this article which you need to declare? If so please set it out in the open here and withdraw the nomination, so that no further research is needed from the DYK volunteers. There is no shame to this since as a new editor you were perhaps unaware of this policy. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 01:54, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
  • A conflict of interest, at least in the classical WP:COI sense of the term, is unlikely. This nomination was made as part of a class project. The simplest explanation is the students making this nomination were simply attempting to complete an assignment with a minimum of effort. All the other nominations made by students in the same class (there was a sizeable wave submitted on October 1) have already been failed for lack of sufficient expansion. --Allen3 talk 08:08, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the clarification, Allen3. I have struck my original comment. I believe, given that BlueMoonset has identified substantial duplication problems, we need a commitment from Ric.chi whether he is willing to undertake the amount of necessary work to look at each sentence, its source, and rephrase it in such a way that the close paras are removed, and then a review. I'm all for helping a new editor who has a keen interest in developing as a Wikipedian, I just wanted to make sure we weren't dealing with a WP:SPA and wasting the effort that could be given to other articles. If the commitment is forthcoming and the edits are done in a reasonable timescale, say 7 days followed by a detailed review, then we could take this forward. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 12:51, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Baldy Bill, I'm beginning to think that the so-called Copyvio Check should be removed from the DYK toolkit. Too many reviewers think that it checks the sources in the article, when it does no such thing: it just goes out onto the web in some undefined fashion to see if it finds something blatant by unknown means. The only real way to check for close paraphrasing is to use Duplication Detector to compare the article to a sampling of its references, one at a time, and see if anything turns up that way. In this case, the spotcheck turned up some fairly quick results. BTW, putting user links on a template page does not work to page the user (you wouldn't have gotten a page from my use of it above), so I doubt Ric.chi has seen your comments here. I've just pinged Ric.chi's talk page, which I should probably have done yesterday when I posted my concerns. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:04, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Thanks, BlueMoonset (without the wikilink!). Yes, I too should have pinged Ric.chi out of courtesy when I left the ? on a review. Although I was already aware wikilinking a name doesn't ping the user, I like to do it sometimes to highlight their name in the text so it's easily seen when fast-reading the discussion. Re the copyvio tool issue, I was already becoming a bit skeptical over its usefulness, especially when I noted a few days ago on another check that Wikimedia paid Yahoo 0.8 cents (US) for the use of the service. Maybe that's a discussion that should be initiated. As it goes with this article, let's see what Ric.chi has to say, if he (or she, me making rash assumptions) is willing to be mentored on bringing this project article up to standard. On the other hand, if he/she has lost interest then I think this should be closed in a few days without further investment. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 19:55, 29 October 2013 (UTC)