Wikipedia:Featured article review/James T. Aubrey, Jr./archive1

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

The article was kept 08:56, 13 February 2008.

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James T. Aubrey, Jr.

Review commentary

Notified User:PedanticallySpeaking‎ as by far the primary editor and also the FA nominator

Notified WikiProjects Film and Biography.

Promoted just over two years ago but current version does not appear to meet FA requirements. If nothing else, sourcing is extremely light so 1(c) is strongly implicated as is 2(c) by the bibliography section which needs to be incorporated as appropriate inline citations. Otto4711 (talk) 19:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Please notify relevant WikiProjects per the instructions at WP:FAR. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:16, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

• Well, a lot of the sentences kind of have inline citations. For example, there are references to specific articles: "The New York Times Magazine in 1964 called..." or "told the Los Angeles Times in 1986:", both of which can be found in the Bibliography section. Unfortunately, some specific items or quotations are not introduced in such a manner, leaving readers guessing where they might be from. Should be fixable though, since I'm assuming all the sources are in the bibliography section. My other concern is the prose. The article over-relies on quotes so that many sentences are quite awkward (for example, the third paragraph of "Early years"). This becomes especially taxing on readers when the specific paper is introduced ("so and so said on this date in the New York Times that..."). There are also issues with the flow of the article (under Early years, it's quoting articles written about him in the 1960s; "Enters broadcasting in radio" section has no reference date in the beginning, so we don't know what "within two years" means; right after he is described as having been named president, one of the sentences begins: "After he was fired,"). It's a well-researched article though, with lots of great stories about his life, so hopefully this one can be saved. 69.202.60.86 (talk) 23:08, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

• I have access to the relevant news archives that I could go through and add in-line citations to this article. I won't have a chance to do this until next week though. Is it possible to hold this until then? If 1c and 2c are the only issues I'm pretty sure I can save this one. --JayHenry (talk) 03:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Can I get some guidance on this? If all that's needed is adding the inline citations I can do that. If it's going to later be challenged on other grounds as well, I think I could more productively spend my energy on different projects. I'm happy to do this if the only concern is 1c and 2c. --JayHenry (talk) 06:00, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are references (1c) and their formatting (2c). Marskell (talk) 08:19, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm about 70 percent done fixing the citations. I've read a lot of the sources -- the article's very comprehensive and interesting. Who was PedanticallySpeaking and why did he leave? If his work was usually this quality than we lost somebody pretty good indeed. --JayHenry (talk) 00:12, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've read all the sources and reworked the article to using the inline citation method. There are a few minor issues that I couldn't find citation for (no idea where the birthday of his son is from). As far as I'm concerned we can remove this information. At any rate, this article now satisfies 1c and 2c with 55 references providing around 100 inline citations. --JayHenry (talk) 23:19, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Excellent work Jay. Let's get a second opinion or two. If information is trivial and can't be sourced, just remove it. Marskell (talk) 18:36, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I saw a few direct quotes that need citation, and I'm a bit concerned about the quotes in the lead, since the WP:LEAD is ideally an overview/summary of material elsewhere in the article. Not a big deal though. If you can cite the direct quotes, it's close enough. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:42, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

PedanticallySpeaking used quotes heavily. I assume he was trained as some sort of journalist (or a frequent reader of newspapers) and he used an interesting journalistic/encyclopedic hybrid style. I actually find it kind of refreshing -- no need for everything to be too homogeneous -- but it was time-consuming to find all the quotations. I didn't realize that I'd missed a few. Will try to find source or, barring that, remove if unnecessary. I was planning on going through and revising the language around the quotes. Now that they're inline cited I don't think it's necessary to say "Variety wrote in 2004" quite so often... Will think about the lead too. Thanks for tagging the ones I missed. Will try to find those soon. --JayHenry (t) 00:34, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

• I've since addressed the points above. In general I've reduced the use of quotation. But I did leave the long quote in the lead. Although a quote, it's one that nicely summarizes several of the themes in the article. I've also given a general copy edit, fixed the parts of the MOS I'm familiar with (and will correct any points I may have missed, if pointed out), references all checked and verified. What's the process at this point? --JayHenry (talk) 06:16, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

• Have you asked the nominator (Otto4711) to revisit? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:05, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

• I think this is basically a keep. I have made one edit, feel free to revert or rephrase. --Peter Andersen (talk) 18:25, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

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