Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/United States presidential pets/archive1

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

The list was withdrawn by Hey man im josh via FACBot (talk) 00:25, 14 September 2024 (UTC) [1].

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United States presidential pets

United States presidential pets (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured list candidates/United States presidential pets/archive1

Nominator(s): Di (they-them) (talk) 23:40, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured list because I think it has a good overview of the subject and has comprehensive coverage with plenty of sources. This is my first time nominating anything for FLC, so please be patient with me. Di (they-them) (talk) 23:40, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

QoH

Interesting topic. I'll take a look soon. Queen of Hearts (talk) 23:52, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately looks like I'm gonna have to butt out of a full review because of real life, but I'll leave with a thought: this list has several unsourced entries and an unsourced sentence in the "History of White House pets" section; I don't have the energy to tag them all, but I recommend looking over this list with User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages and citing anything highlighted red. Cheers, Charlotte (Queen of Hearts • talk) 23:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

(and FWIW, I agree this is one of the rare cases where a bulleted list is the best re. below.) Charlotte (Queen of Hearts • talk) 23:56, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Dajasj

Thanks for the nomination. A few things I noticed right away:

• There are links in headers, which is not allowed: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Section_headings
• Links are often duplicated, even if they are in the same section
• I would leave out Trump, Polk and Johnson, because you already mention them in the lead. Dajasj (talk) 07:33, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Dylan620

Dibbing an image review for this – with a lead image like that, how can I not? I should be able to start in the next day or two. Dylan620 (he/him • talk • edits) 21:10, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Review completed:

• Alt text needs to be added to each image
• Sourcing for each image checks out (though I did fix a few links myself over at Commons; see my recent edits there)
• As works of the US Government, all images are appropriately licensed for the public domain
• All images contribute encyclopedic value to the list
• Each image is appropriately captioned

Once the lack of alt text is resolved, I expect to be able to pass this image review. Dylan620 (he/him • talk • edits) 22:22, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Sgubaldo

Some general comments:

• Source formatting is inconsistent and really needs a thorough sweep; just a couple of small examples:

• |publisher= and |website= are both used for Business Insider; alternatively, Vogue is listed as a |publisher= in Ref. 167 when it should be |website=/|magazine=
• Several authors are missing author-link (e.g. Ref. 93, 94, 97, 100 all need Roosevelt wikilinked)
• Some are missing several parameters like access date, author names, website names, archive links, etc (e.g. Ref. 73)
• Websites/publishers/newspapers should either be wikilinked or not wikilinked, but it should be consistent
• I can't actually seem to access multiple sources (e.g. )

• I'm not particularly sure as to the reliability of several of the sources (e.g. Ref. 17, New York Post considering this is a politics-adjacent topic at least; Ref. 92, ispn.com; Ref. 150, bullysticksinfo.com just to name a couple)
• The White House Pets book in the 'Further Reading' section should probably be used more than once in the article
• The see also section is bloated; you can probably remove List of individual cats, List of individual dogs, the category and Sully at least
• The lead is really short. Perhaps just merge the lead with the history section?
• Perhaps others may disagree, but I'm really not a fan of how the list part of the article is divided into 45 headers/subsections. I feel like it would look better in a table format. A rough outlook at what this could look like is below (taking inspiration from List of presidents of the United States):

List of presidents of the United States from 1789 – till date.

No.	Portrait	Name	Term	Pets	Notes	Ref.
46		Joe Biden	January 20, 2021 – Incumbent	Champ (November 11, 2008 – June 19, 2021) – German Shepherd
				Major (born January 17, 2018) – German Shepherd	Rescue dog. Sent to live with family friends in Delaware by December 2021 after several White House biting incidents.
				Commander (born September 1, 2021) – German Shepherd	Given to the Biden family as a puppy by the president's brother, also removed from White House after biting incidents
				Willow – gray tabby cat	Adopted after the cat jumped onstage during a rally in Pennsylvania in 2020. Willow, who Biden described as having "no limits", often sleeps on top of the president's head

Sgubaldo (talk) 21:12, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Portrait of president is unnecessary unless animal is also in the picture. ―Howard • 🌽³³ 20:29, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree, per my comment below. Sgubaldo (talk) 21:10, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Drive-by comment

Before any massive overhaul is done, I'd just like to say that I think the current simple section & bullet points style is preferred over a table style that Sgubaldo recommends above. It comes down to stylistic preference at the end, either way can work, but the important stuff is the text and links. We don't need distracting pictures of the presidents themselves; any images should be highlighting the pets (with the owners in the background often, sure), as is done currently. A bullet point entry with a link to the relevant pet, and then some text with details, is perfect and doesn't include any extraneous table layout stuff. (It's also friendlier and easier for people to maintain & edit in the future, although this is more a secondary concern.) Tables are good if there's more than two or three columns or things like numerical data to sort by, but that isn't the case here.

I'm personally a fan of short ledes, and think the current lede is fine-ish. It seems very difficult to construct an overall theory of "presidential pets" to explain in the lede that doesn't overlap with the "History" section on individual pets, so a short section makes sense - it's hard to make sweeping, overarching statements on this topic other than "Most Presidents have pets." Could be brushed up some if there are overarching things to say ("Presidential historian FirstName LastName suggests that keeping a pet leads to a 10% increase in popularity, as seen by the Checkers speech" or the like), but I expect a perfect lede to still be on the short side.

(Sgubaldo's other concerns are fine and should be fixed, of course. Just chipping in that I think the structure of the article is fine, since it's a decent amount of work to change it over, but I think such a change wouldn't be helpful anyway.) SnowFire (talk) 18:20, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Good point on the images, the portraits are unnecessary. Sgubaldo (talk) 18:25, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree with @SnowFire on this, I think an actual list format is preferred in this case over a table. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:17, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

@Di (they-them): A number of comments in this nomination thread have gone unaddressed. Are you still working on / wanting to promote this nomination? Hey man im josh (talk) 20:22, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

If you don't mind, I think I want to drop it. This was my first time trying to promote something so it's all a bit much for me right now. Di (they-them) (talk) 20:35, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

No problem at all Di (they-them). We hope to see you back with another nomination when you're willing to give it a go again. In the mean time, you're welcome to of course stick around and provide reviews, which I find are a helpful way to get familiar with what we do here. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:15, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been withdrawn, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FLC/ar, and leave the {{featured list candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:15, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

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