Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Change UK/archive1

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 Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 11 March 2024 [1].

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Change UK

Nominator(s): Lankyant (talk) 02:27, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

This article is about a break away centrist political party in the UK which had a lot of hype to begin with but soon disbanded. Article meets the FAC criteria Lankyant (talk) 02:27, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Image review

• Suggest adding alt text

• What's the benefit of so many slightly different logo images?

• Don't use fixed px size

• Almost all of the image source links are dead. Nikkimaria (talk) 05:40, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Daniel Case

Printing out a hard copy to take a look at and lightly copyedit if needed ... Will be back in a few days or so. Daniel Case (talk) 05:43, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

OK ... I'm back finally. UC's review below actually makes some of the same points I wanted to make, but that does not mean I needn't write this.

This article has some commendable aspects. It's very meticulously sourced although it needs a few citations, as tagged and noted below. The prose is, while I did have some issues with it, at least continuously grammatical.

It's good that we make a serious effort in telling what was ultimately an amusing sideshow to the serious of Brexit, an event that was in so many ways Brexit in nanocosm: a group of people broke away from a much larger one, expecting to bring more discontents with them, but they didn't, and shortly they began feuding among themselves. Ultimately nothing much, and probably nothing good, came of it, except for moving Labour more firmly to supporting Remain and perhaps proving that the kind of vague centrism that they espoused as the cure for Britain's political problems was the cause of them.

But while I think we could say it's a good article in its current form, it has a ways to go before it becomes featurable. Some specific reasons for this below:

• As I noted below, the name. Change UK was the middle in the sequence of the three the group went by. It was neither what it was established as, nor what it appeared on the ballot as. So why have we chosen it as the article title?
• It does not tell us the full story.
  • We begin with the emergence of TIG in February 2019. However, a decent browse through the sort of newspaper stories used as sources finds, among others, this BBC story and this BuzzFeed News story. Both tell of what the article narrative should have started with: the mounting dissatisfaction with Corbyn's leadership among moderate Labourites that led to secret meetings of as many as 50 MPs in a Sussex farmhouse, their disagreement about whether to remain a pressure group within Labour or split off, and Tom Watson's political heroics in talking all but eight out of leaving (Had some double-digit number left, à la Limehouse, things could have been different). Learning that helped my understanding of the TIG story. Not knowing it from the article hurts the reader's.
  • I have been trying to find this since I read the article but I recall reading a great sort of retrospective in some newspaper talking to one ex-Tigger about how what really wrecked things was the European elections. Put simply, they didn't expect to have the opportunity, and when it presented itself, they were never all on the same page to begin with about whether to field candidates (Didn't help either that they couldn't really agree on a permanent leader, either). When they did decide to, it forced many processes they had been expecting to have the time (i.e., until the election) to complete onto an accelerated timetable, and as often happens in that circumstance exacerbated personal conflicts to the point that it was no surprise about half the members left right afterwards.
  • I recall also reading another story in which another former Tigger believes the Lib Dems were out to destroy them from the get-go. You have to remember (and maybe this is in the story somewhere) that the Lib Dems had only begun to recover from 2015 then; the 15 or so seats they held were not too many more than TIG. A steady TIG growth spurt would have led them to quickly overtake the Lib Dems, possibly with some Lib Dems defecting, and led to TIG/Change supplanting the Lib Dems' brand as the Sensible Centrist Third Party, likely permanently. Cable and the party couldn't have that, obviously, and so it seems that future historians may find that at a time when it was the strongest voice for Remain, the LDP prioritized shivving its strongest potential ally at the expense of blunting Brexit.
• I concur with Nikkimaria in questioning why so many iterations of the party logo (such as it is; see below) are necessary as images in the article. I realize there aren't a lot of other things we could see images of, especially given that all the MPs who ever were in the party are pictured in the table near the end of the article, but four different images that are mostly of the same black-and-white stripes with some different words in black type next to them do not begin to offset that paucity of pictorial possibilities.
• What I find the strangest choice in writing this article is its structure. We get the history of the party, such as it is, in terms of its members. Then we get another history of the reaction. Then another one on the local officials who joined or considered joining TIG.

  Just why is it necessary to tell these narratives in parallel? In what other article on a political party, even an equally short-lived one, do we do this? In certain movies like Go, this sort of thing makes sense and works to the viewer's benefit, but I don't see the advantage here.

  As I noted below this is most directly responsible for the article repeating information, sometimes three times, it only needs to offer the reader once. It also leaves the reader disoriented, suddenly going back in time, and then doing it again, trying to remember what from the previous take might be relevant to what they are reading now. It would be much better if it were written the usual way, with only one chronology incorporating all aspects of the story.

• Lastly, to add to UC's observation about the limitations the almost exclusive use of contemporary news reportage places on the narrative, I offer some of the following sources that could easily be used to improve the article, in addition to those linked above, by offering some analysis both during and after TIG's brief flowering.
  • Tony Blair's early support.
  • Early TIG skepticism from The Daily Mirror, noting that none of the breakaway members were noted for any great vision or ideas, and including an embedded clip of Umunna unable in an interview to say what, if any, current Labour position he disagreed with.
  • An LSE blog post from early April 2019, before even the European election debacle pointing out the failings of TIG as "a group of elected representatives in search of a movement" and their general apparent lack of interest in really engaging the electorate.
  • A Wired article on how terrible TIG's branding was. The article already inadvertently demonstrates this by using all the (barely) different versions of the logo (Maybe we should put them in one {{multiple image}} box). The only thing the logo accomplished was making the name look moderately not so terrible (I have to admit I thought the name was sort of contradictory ... if you're independent, why are you part of a group? How can you really be part of one? ("'WE ARE ALL ... INDEPENDENT!' 'I'm not!') In the end that concern was correct as they all turned out to be more independent than group).
  • Party executive director Nicola Murphy (the one staffer they kept after the European elections. Maybe it's a bad sign to begin with when you have almost as many staffers as members without yet having contested a single election) offering [2] her positive take on TIG one year later.
  • Ditto Stephen Bush in The New Statesman, arguing that TIG's breakaway made it impossible for Labour to keep having it both ways on Brexit, which probably contributed to the Tory margins in the election.
  • Christine Berry at OpenDemocracy saying the same thing and additionally noting how TIG demonstrated that the sort of nebulous centrism it espoused was ill-suited to the public's mood.
  • Novara Media's July take on how the fact that many of the original Tiggers subsequently became lobbyists afterwards shows what hacks they were to begin with (and repeating the same observation that by leaving the Labour Party they made the hard Brexit they opposed that much likelier).
  • Finally, per CR's speculation that books should certainly be available by now, indeed they are.

I had originally intended not to take a position on this FAC, since I wanted to see if the nominator was willing to work on making what I believe to be necessary changes. But after reading UC's critique and investing the time necessary to make mine, and noting that the nominator has not been terribly active since making this nomination, I believe it is best for this article that we end this FAC now so the needed work of improving the article can be done without regard to deadline.

I therefore join UC in opposing this nomination. Daniel Case (talk) 07:59, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

UC

• The article is inconsistent as to whether Change UK is singular ("its eleven MPs") or plural ("appointed former Conservative MP Heidi Allen as their leader").

British English would treat it as plural, no? That first one might be my fault. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

It depends: a matter of taste, really: in general, the more we want to think of them as a united group, the more likely we are to use the singular; conversely, the more we think of them as a loose-ish collection of individuals, the more likely we are to use the plural. However, within an article, we generally want to go with one or the other. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:16, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• A couple of typos stick out: Rather than forming a party, they referring to themselves; the centre-keft Liberal Democrats, Liberal Democrats leader, the Lib Demis

And even I missed those. How horrible of me! Or (worse), they're probably from my rewrites of certain passages. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• In the sources, we're inconsistent about whether to use sentence or title case for article titles.
• Some terms need explaining for a non-UK audience: e.g. Brexit, Remainers.

Well, I understood them, but then again I don't count since I've worked on a few British-politics articles both pre- and post-Brexit. Daniel Case (talk) 21:15, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• We've used the abbreviation "Lib Dems" without spelling out that it's the Liberal Democrats. I would generally avoid it except in quotation, per WP:NOTPAPER.

I sort of thought that readers would feel as though we thought that they were idiots if we did a parenthetical "Lib Dems" after "Liberal Democrats". Given how frequently they have to be mentioned in this article, I didn't feel like spelling it out every ... single ... time.

Generally we should have some guidance Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

We should certainly do it the first time, but to me, there are two good reasons to abbreviate: either you want to create a chatty, insider-y tone, or you're a paper source that has limited ink and space. Neither applies to us, so I'd use The Liberal Democrats on every mention: just as we wouldn't normally talk about the Tories, the GOP etc etc. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:17, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I do wish we had some explicit guidance on this. I can understand not using "Tories" regularly (in neither UK or Canadian articles) but for a term that's so obviously derived from the full term, there is less possibility of reader confusion as there would be with "Tories" for those unfamiliar with its usage as the more colloquial term for members of the British and Canadian Conservative parties (here in the US, it's used only historically, for Loyalists during the Revolution ...)

This of course also creates the issue of what to do when that term is used in a quotation where we don't otherwise use it in the article text. I suppose one could avoid that portion of the quote, if possible, but what about where it isn't possible?

But we're getting away from the subject at hand here ... Daniel Case (talk) 04:55, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we do have explicit guidance, at least for FA: the criteria require that the article be "comprehensible to an appropriately broad audience". We also have MOS:JARGON and WP:POPE: the latter is strictly an essay, but certainly counts among the regularly-cited norms of good writing on here. All of these would say to minimise jargon and insider language where it adds little, and to explain it where it adds something of substance. In a quotation, we should keep terms as they are: we can always add an EFN if we think they're likely to be unclear, or bracket (Lib Dems) after the first "Liberal Democrats" in the article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:42, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

• During the period when it's formally "Change UK – The Independent Group", we sometimes refer to it simply as "Change UK", and elsewhere spell out the whole name. I'd suggest abbreviating consistently after first mention, but we need to pick a lane.

This is one of the problems I had when copyediting it, agreed. The group/party changed its name three times, not always by choice, and I'm not even sure that this is the best name for the article. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• There's an unresolved CN tag, and a Who? tag.

Which I left. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• On sourcing: practically everything seems to be sourced to news articles from the time. It's surely been long enough that at least some of this whole debacle has been covered in retrospective articles, books etc?

There are indeed a lot more good sources, including a couple of books, and I will enumerate some of them in my critique when I get to writing it (which I would have a few days back, but for an unusually busy and exhausting weekend. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• stand a full slate of candidates: this is an example (though not the only one) of political jargon that should be expressed more concretely for a general audience. See, for example, the top one for the Scottish constituency. Later, we have the amendment fell, which I'm not sure is even the usual jargon (I'd expect failed, but better as was voted down, was rejected or similar).
• There are a couple of long run-on sentences: see e.g. The Muslim Council of Great Britain and anti-racism charity Tell MAMA condemned the selection of a third candidate, Nora Mulready, who they said had conflated Islam with terrorism and legitimised the far right; this was dismissed by Mulready and Change UK as a "smear campaign"

There were more of these before I did my copyedit, believe me. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• We've got Rachel Johnson's interview in The Times cited to the Mirror. The Mirror isn't generally viewed as a WP:HQRS: why not track down the original to be sure that it hasn't quoted her out of context?
• Some of the tenses are a bit unclear, especially when talking about events which were then in the future (but no longer are): see e.g. A week later, interim leader Heidi Allen suggested that the party might not exist at the next general election and hinted at the formation of an alliance with the Liberal Democrats., Between the European Parliament polling day and the count, with the Liberal Democrats expected to have done much better in the vote than Change UK, Umunna said that he thought a pact between Change UK and the Liberal Democrats at the next election "would be sensible"

Well, I made those changes. "Might" is perfectly fine, I think, when you're talking about a state of affairs which at the time a statement was made was believed to be possible. "Expected to have done much better" is a more specific example of the same ... that was at a point when the votes had been cast but not fully tallied, and thus Umunna's statement was plausible (as it wasn't after the votes had been tallied). How would you suggest phrasing them? Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• Even separate from the concern about in-cycle news coverage, there are some primary sources cited (e.g. the application to the electoral commission), which don't appear to add much and seem at odds with WP:PRIMARY.
• False titles are generally considered journalistic in UK English: there are several in use here, particularly and most strikingly Prime Minister and Conservative leader Theresa May.

I don't think that's a false title in the sense that the article you linked to is saying (i.e., the sense George Carlin once poked fun at, where, say Martin Luther King is or at the time was (in the American press, anyway) almost always referred to as "the slain civil rights leader", and other terms were commonly used like "reputed mob figure". Leader of the Conservative Party is, after all, a formal position and title, one that if the party wins the election the holder becomes PM, and if not they usually get to ask the PM six questions every Wednesday. Perhaps "Leader" should have been capitalized? Daniel Case (talk) 05:06, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that's an interesting topic but not quite the one I was driving at (or the subject of the Wiki article). There's a New York Times article here on the topic:

We try to avoid the unnatural journalistic mannerism of the "false title" — that is, using a description or job designation with someone’s name as if it were a formal title. So we don’t refer to "novelist Zadie Smith" or "cellist Yo-Yo Ma." ... Often we settle on “the cellist Yo-Yo Ma” or “the British novelist Zadie Smith” as the deftest approach to such descriptions ... [or, better, m]ake it “Best Buy, the electronics showroom.”

On the question of leader/Leader, MOS:PEOPLETITLES is the guide: there is a system here. I must admit to finding it pretty confounding at times, but we definitely want leader in this context. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:34, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

• In April, an unverified internal Change UK memo leaked: we need to think about the phrasing here: if it wasn't real, it can't leak, and yet by saying "unverified" we're refusing to confirm that it was real.

I get the feeling, having gone over so much of the prose and refined it, that the nominator/writer didn't feel particularly adventurous in deviating from their journalistic sources. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• Quite a few examples where MOS:IDIOM needs to apply for cliché or everyday metaphors: see e.g. Change UK had thrown away opportunities in the European elections by not pooling their strength

I had eliminated some of this, but really couldn't think of a better way to phrase that at the time. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• There are a few points where readers might need reminding of the dates, in particular that everything happened in 2019: see for instance the "Funding" section.

Well, as it was before my copyedit the article often repeated the date in consecutive sentences. And by date, I mean the full day, month and year. I think I said in one of my edit summaries that since the party came and went in the same calendar year, a lot of that restatement of even "2019" is unnecessary.

That section has one of the few events from outside that year, so I agree maybe we should distinguish the earlier events once. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• There's quite a lot of repetition: for instance, we learn at least twice that Gavin Shuker was convenor and Chuka Umunna was spokesperson.

One of my complaints as well. I attribute this to the unusual narrative structure of telling the story from four different perspectives. I got rid of some of this but I still would like to hear the nominator's explanation.

I also note that "convenor" was originally spelled with an "-er" ending the second time it appeared, which doesn't suggest a great deal of care when preparing the article for this nomination. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• We're inconsistent as to whether the the in The Independent Group for Change is capitalised.
• Labour councillors in over ten councils: how many, exactly?
• There were further resignations from Labour ... and by Conservative councillors ... It is unknown how many of these councillors supported TIG/Change UK. Given the last part of this sentence, I must question what all of these resignations are doing in an article on Change UK: it sounds as if we're adopting the party's own (generally rejected) narrative that it represented the only way of saying "none of the above".

And since the cited source is paywalled, without access to it (and hitting reader view doesn't work on this one), we cannot tell whether the source supports this. At least I can't. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• European People's Party-: use an endash after multi-word prefixes, per MOS:DASH.
• There's an interesting-looking article cited in Further Reading: could that be integrated into the body text as a whole? It doesn't really cite any other academic treatments of Change UK, but it might be a good starting point to find out if there have been any more.

I should take this occasion to point out that some of the noted copy issues are on me, due to my recent copy edit meant to trim down a lot more repetition than was there before. Daniel Case (talk) 03:02, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm going to oppose at the moment: I think the article could certainly be brought up to FA standard, but it isn't there yet. Unresolved maintenance tags, in particular, tell me that the requisite preparation hasn't been done before nominating. I am very happy to revisit this vote if and when changes are made.

You forgot to sign your remarks, though. Daniel Case (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose. You can’t bring things to FAC with tags on. That’s before a number of other issues that have been enumerated above. - SchroCat (talk) 22:16, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

  In fairness to the nominator (who seems to have, for some reason, edited minimally since making this nomination), those tags weren't there when they nominated it—I added them during my copyedit, as noted above, in the expectation that the nominator would be taking an active interest in the article and swiftly addressing issues reviewers raised. Daniel Case (talk) 06:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

More than three weeks in, no sign of a consensus to promote and no engagement from the nominator. I am going to archive this. The usual two-week hiatus will apply. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:06, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

• 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. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:06, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

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