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Wikipedia:Featured article review/Samuel Adams/archive1

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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 by YellowAssessmentMonkey 00:37, 26 March 2010 [1].

Samuel Adams

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Review commentary

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Notified: Nishkid64

I am nominating this featured article for review because of over-reliance on one single book. Not enough sources. Also prose is not the best. Suggest this be a good article... JB50000 (talk) 03:48, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment After skimming quickly through the article, I'm inclined to dismiss the FAR as frivolous. First of all, please explain why the "over-reliance on one single book" is bad (perhaps the author is the most respected biographer of Adams); moreover, the article hardly depends solely on Alexander. Sure, it uses it more than the other sources, but that is not equivalent to "over-reliance". "Not enough sources" means nothing if you don't specify what needs sourcing, and even then I think the article is very well sourced. "prose is not the best": examples? JB50000, I think you need to familiarize yourself with the FA criteria more, as none of these "issues" can be found in the article. Dabomb87 (talk) 04:20, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
With most of the FA's, if you strip out one reference, the article is still an FA with the remaining ones. With this article, if you strip out the Alexander book, only a skeleton remains. But I have other concerns, mainly that I just discovered that the main editor is a very important person in Wikipedia, associated with ArbCom, an admin, etc. So that type of person is entitled to a lot of leeway and their articles given deference and respect. I am willing to withdraw the nomination for that very reason. It's like if the President of the United States or Secretary General of the United Nations asked to borrow a quarter for the parking meter. You would say, "no need to borrow, here's a quarter to keep, and here's 10 other quarters" and shower them with complements. I am not kidding. You don't heckle the President or Secretary General. JB50000 (talk) 04:28, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You still haven't explained why the "over-reliance" (of which I am still convinced there is none) is bad. However, I am more disturbed by the mentality that because the primary editor is "important", his articles are somehow inherently better and more important. This is simply not true. Anyway, you still haven't given examples of subpar prose or statements needing sources. Dabomb87 (talk) 04:39, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) First and foremost, I am an editor, like anyone else on Wikipedia. My position in the community shouldn't affect your judgment of the articles I have worked on. Quite simply, if the article doesn't meet the criteria, then it isn't worthy of FA status. That being said, I do believe you have brought up a legitimate concern with regards to referencing. When I originally worked on the article, I relied pretty exclusively on Puls (2006). After the article was promoted, someone raised a point that Puls wasn't the most authoritative source on Adams (which I agree with in retrospect) and then proceeded to re-reference and rewrite (some parts) of the article. The article clearly benefited from the rewrite and re-reference, but there still appears to be a slight issue with the over-reliance of a single source. I don't believe this issue warrants an entire FA review, but I believe it's something that should be looked into, for the betterment of the encyclopedia. I would like to help address this matter, but I honestly cannot foresee myself being able to undertake such a project in the near future. Nishkid64 (Make articles, not wikidrama) 04:50, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I briefly looked at the article and agree that, while the overreliance on Alexander's book is a problem that should be fixed, that problem alone is not enough to justify a FAR. I suggest that this matter be moved to the article's talk page. (And while you're add it, please add alt text to the article's images; see WP:ALT.) Eubulides (talk) 05:00, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dabomb87 nailed it: this is a frivolous FAR. (Full disclosure: I'm a major contributor to the article.) There are plenty of sources used—indeed, all of the major biographies have been cited, not to mention a few scholarly articles—and the prose is fine. The Alexander biography should be the one we rely upon for the basic "nuts and bolts" of the article: he's the primary modern scholarly biographer of Adams. He's cited more than 100 times because nearly every sentence of the article is footnoted; he's frequently cited in tandem with other historians, and is never cited alone on any matter that is disputed by historians. Another Adams scholar, William Fowler, is cited 44 times in the article; Maier, one of most important scholars of the era, is cited 35 times; it would be more had she written a biography of Adams. Other recent Adams biographers, like Puls and Stoll, are journalists who wrote books for general audiences; they are not experts in the field, and their books are generally tertiary sources, like all popular biographies.

All sources are not created equal; we can consult the popular works, especially to see it they offer anything other than a recapitulation of the scholarly works, but we should rely on the scholars for most of the meat. In doing so, this article rigorously adheres to Wikipedia:Reliable sources. In all the important controversies in Adams's career, the article cites and compares the major interpretations. The "Legacy" section is quite good in this regard, if I do say so myself. Any person who reads this article completely will come away with a good basic knowledge of how historians have written about Adams over the last 200 years, and where they have disagreed. Wikipedia would be better if more featured articles attempted to summarize the historiography in this way. —Kevin Myers 10:12, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not get angry. Simply find a second source for a number of Alexander only citations and a big problem is solved. JB50000 (talk) 06:00, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not angry, because there is no big problem. The article is fully cited from all of the relevant reliable sources, and easily meets the featured article criterion 1c ("well-researched"). Every statement in the article is cited to at least one reliable source; all potentially contentious points are cited to multiple reliable sources. There are no referencing issues that require attention at FAR. Any specific concerns should be raised on the talk page, as Eubulides suggested.
As Dabomb87 aptly said, this is a frivolous nomination, but I hope it can still be a teachable moment. Comments like "Not enough sources" reveal a decided naïveté about serious history writing, as if adding sources to articles is like adding salt to food. An intelligent assessment of an exhaustively footnoted article like this one requires an examination of the subject and its historiography. A useful critique would be something like: "This article needs citations from Professor Jones, who has written scholarly work on the topic." Another good objection usually comes in the following form: "The claim in paragraph 3 is debatable, and is cited to just one source; what do the other reliable sources say on this point?" Those kinds of specific critiques may indicate that an article falls short of criterion 1c; "Not enough sources" does not. —Kevin Myers 08:32, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Image review

Dare I say it? Yeah, go on I will -- the ndashes in the infobox should be unspaced. The "problem" isn't in the article it's in the infobox template. DrKiernan (talk) 11:13, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I added a new caption and reference for the image. (And indeed, a new version of the image.) Yeah, the inbobox template doesn't like our MOS regarding endashes; it apparently adds the spaces by default, presuming that each field will be a full date rather than just a range of years. —Kevin Myers 16:10, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Great, the color version looks much better. DrKiernan (talk) 19:53, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That's clearly a bug in the template, and I have coded up a fix and proposed it at Template talk:Infobox officeholder #Spaced endashes in date ranges. Eubulides (talk) 20:36, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Alt text done; thanks. I've fixed some of the easier alt-text problems but many images still lack alt text. Eubulides (talk) 20:36, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the alt text is okay now. —Kevin Myers 16:32, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, the new alt text is very nice. Eubulides (talk) 20:57, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

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Featured article criterion of concern are prose and depth of research YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 00:33, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. All substantive comments were addressed. The alt text is good, and the Alexander citations were justified. Eubulides (talk) 00:45, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Looked at the article and read the above discussion, I believe the Alexander source is being used appropriately. Also, just FYI, the editor who initiated this FAR is blocked until March 9 (for unrelated issues) so won't be able to comment until then. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:39, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • And it appears that the nominating editor has been blocked indefinitely as a sock, so he will not be commenting further here. I will be making further comments on the article itself in a while. Dana boomer (talk) 01:02, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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