Wikipedia:Featured article review/Prisoner's dilemma/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 removed 09:48, 16 April 2008.

Prisoner's dilemma

Review commentary

Notified Wikiprojects Game Theory and Mathematics

This article is one of the oldest unreviewed FA's, going back to October 2003, and hasn't been reviewed in 4 years. It has 10 inline citations, but this probably needs more as big stretches of the article go without any citation. Judgesurreal777 (talk) 01:50, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

demote- per nom and lack of citations. AndreNatas (talk) 15:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is featured article review, not 'featured article removal candidates'. The point of this discussion is to decide what needs to be done to bring the article up to current FA standards. Algebraist 20:13, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ok sorry my mistake, well it needs a good re-referencing if it is to keep it's status. AndreNatas (talk) 21:12, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article may be confusing or unclear to some readers, even those with a basic understanding of the subject. It is already reasonably accessible to lay audiences, but FACR 1(a) says that the writing should be "engaging, even brilliant," rather than merely "well-written" or "clear." If I had never heard of the prisoner's dilemma before, this article would bore me, which is regrettable, because the idea may be perhaps one of the basic foundations of the field of political science, in that the question "Why do we have governments?" might be answered by pointing to the generalized form of the dilemma and hypothesizing that governments are a way to provide an incentive for people to choose to "cooperate" in producing public goods. 69.140.152.55 (talk) 12:05, 22 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone is watching I'd like to pose the question of how best to fix an article like this? I think part of the reason we have relatively few FAs in Mathematics/economics is that the sort of referencing that looks correct on most humanities topics, such as history or literature or biography or pop-culture, etc., doesn't really make much sense for an economic topic. The examples in the text are correct, and their explanations are quite good, but how does one source an example? Also, we tend to exclude textbooks as sources, but I wonder is that really the best approach for a topic of this nature? It's a fairly simple game and it seems... funny, I guess is the word... to "cite" logical conclusions of examples.

This is probably the wrong place to start this discussion, but I wonder if our guidelines, rather than the quality of editors or their knowledge base of economics and mathematics, is what's preventing more of these articles from being Featured? I'd be happy to do some clean-up work here, but if the goal is to achieve an arbitrary citation density without violating the whole primary, secondary, tertiary sources stricture... well, I'm just not sure I'd be improving the article by citing every couple of sentences to John Nash papers. --JayHenry (talk) 03:53, 25 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You would be, because then people curious as to the veracity of a particular sentence can then go to the reference from which it came. As long as the sources are reliable, adding citations is exactly what is asked and what would improve the article tremendously. Judgesurreal777 (talk) 22:24, 26 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this discussion has been done to death (not by us, but in other places). But the argument that "likely to be challenged" ought to mean "likely to be challenged [by someone knowledgeable about the subject]" is one with which I agree. While on Wikipedia we consider it necessary to sight logical tautology, I don't think this improves the quality of the articles in the eyes of someone educated in the subject; on the contrary, it's likely to lend the appearance that the article was written by someone who doesn't understand the material.

To be clear, I'm not inexperienced with Featured Articles, but the citation density of, for example, Pygmy Hippopotamus would not be appropriate for this article. (I'm not arguing the current density is sufficient.) --JayHenry (talk) 23:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns is referencing (1c). Marskell (talk) 10:06, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Remove per criterion 1c. LuciferMorgan (talk) 12:27, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Remove per 1c. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 06:46, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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