Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/An Inconvenient Truth/archive3

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

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 13:41, 28 March 2015 (UTC) [1].[reply]

An Inconvenient Truth

Nominator(s): The lorax (talk) 03:48, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This article has already been rated as an Arts Good Article for some time, and was previously nominated for featured article status. I think it addressed all of the concerns of the previous reviewers and is a comprehensive, well-sourced article. The lorax (talk) 03:48, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Squeamish Ossifrage

Looking exclusively at reference formatting and selection. I've made no effort to evaluate the prose or judge POV reference weighting at this time.

Date formats. I see MDY (June 20, 2010), ISO 8601 (2007-03-06), DMY (10 December 2009), and stuff that's just wrong (11.10.07).

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Three references are throwing visible errors.

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ISBNs should be given as properly-hyphenated ISBN-13s (use this converter).

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Books need to be titled in title case.

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Publisher locations are optional and you mostly don't use them (which is fine, and even my personal preference) ... except when you do.

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Titling. There's some art to figuring out what should be used as the title for some webpages. But you shouldn't include the website in the title when that's not how the page itself is styled (I see a NYT source with this problem and OnTheIssues.org). I don't see "On a Bender:" in this title either.

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You have a (common) problem with web source formatting in terms of what you list as the website and what you list as the publisher. This is important because the website field is italicized and the publisher field is not. There's some room for editorial discretion, especially when they are the same or very similar (and you rarely are required to include both regardless), but things that are clearly the styling of the website (like RealClimate, Movie City News, AltFilmGuide) are clearly websites, not publishers. Also, sometimes, the citations just get these wrong entirely. I see a cite to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (good), but then 3 references later, another cite that's just styled "OSCAR.com".

Fixed.--The lorax (talk) 02:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You've got some references that are just not formatted correctly, or even just not formatted. At the time I write this: 51, 74, 123...

Looking at the referencing in general, this is almost entirely sourced to news outlets and the like. There are two print books in the entire reference list, and both are used merely to cite things said during the film. This was an influential documentary and the source of no small amount of controversy; has there been no coverage in the works of respected publishers? Are there more scholarly discussions of the work than the three articles you cite from GeoJournal (I see widely-cited papers in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Environment and Behavior, and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that look promising, and I haven't looked very far). At this point, my inclination is: lean oppose : 1b, 2c. I think there is a lot of work to be done here. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Mkativerata

Oppose, sorry. There are quite a few issues with this article, some of which are raised above. The prose is not at FA standard - from minor issues such as the use of contractions ("didn't") and lack of copyediting ("filed a petition to have New Zealand schoolchildren be protected from political indoctrination") to more significant ones such as overly long quotations and vague weasel-words ("An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change"). As for sourcing, I spot-checked the claim that "All 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie said that Gore accurately conveyed the science, with few errors.". The source says the movie "mostly got the science right" and that the 19 scientists were "who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press". There's quite a lot of subtlety lost in translation to the Wikipedia article there. --Mkativerata (talk) 11:12, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's weasely to mention when there's a whole chapter in the article about countries/governments that made the film available for schools and various studies showing that people who watched the film were influenced to believe in climate change--do you think there's a more NPOV way to put it? I'll fix the AP reference.--The lorax (talk) 15:50, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would also oppose on the basis of prose, and think that it could really do with a thorough prose edit, perhaps via peer review. Just reading the lede I can see a variety of problems. I would also suggest that the nominator (or someone else) ensure that every website reference is archived, lest they begin to deteriorate due to link rot. I would also suggest that the article include academic sources; I think it very likely that many academics specialising in environmentalism and its public impact would have written about the film, and their voices should be articulated in this article; try searching on Google Scholar, JSTOR, or Project Muse perhaps ? If these issues are dealt with then I'd welcome this article back to FAC. Midnightblueowl (talk) 11:30, 26 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Ian Rose (talk) 13:41, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.