Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Herbert Sutcliffe/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 not promoted by Laser brain 03:05, 6 December 2010 [1].

Herbert Sutcliffe[edit]

Featured article candidates/Herbert Sutcliffe/archive1

Nominator(s): --Jack | ^{talk page} 16:10, 27 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because it is a completed article about a major figure in the history of cricket. --Jack | ^{talk page} 16:10, 27 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: I don't like to be negative about an article that has clearly absorbed a huge amount of effort, but...

16,000+ words of text is far too many. Have you read WP:LENGTH?
A WP biography should summarise and discuss the main events of the subject's life. A section for each of Sutcliffe's 20-odd playing seasons is extreme overdetailing. A comparable article, Wilfred Rhodes (which is featured), deals with the player's career in broad phases, not season by season. The article comes in at 8,000 words - and Rhodes had a much longer career than Sutcliffe's.
The article has never been subjected to a formal review. A PR or GAN would, I am sure, have identified the main problems of length and overdetailing. FAC is not a suitable place for the initial review of an article of this length, which the edit history shows to be overwhelmingly the work of a single editor.
There are image issues, too: oversizing and some licencing questions (e.g. the "unknown" authorship of some of the photographs)
References: Although I would expect Hill's biography to be a major source, in this case it is overwhelming - 110 citations (there are about 40 to all the other books combined). This suggests a lack of balance. I would have expected a broader use of available sources, including the biographies of Sutcliffe's contemporaries, and one or more of the available Yorkshire county histories.

There are some excellent cricket biographies that have made FA: apart from Rhodes we have Sid Barnes, Donald Bradman, Douglas Jardine and others. You could look at these as useful models. My advice is to withdraw this nomination, put it to peer review, contact editors with experience of cricket articles, and work with them before bringing this back here. This is not intended as a put-down; the amount of work you have done is awe-inspiring, but FAC has strict criteria which must be met. I'm sure that with appropriate help you will be able to meet them. Brianboulton (talk) 01:19, 28 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Response

I think your views about article length are outdated: browsers can now cope easily enough with large pages and I fail to see why information should be limited because a few people are still using IE2 or whatever. The length guideline needs to be updated: 500k is a long article, not 100k. This article is one of the site's 1000 longest but I wonder how many more of the 1000 are featured?

Your main objection seems to be the season-by-season approach. You are entitled to your opinion but have you considered the readers who are looking for information about the subject? We are not here to "fashion" articles according to the views of some small internal group like yourselves or the similar one that inhabits the CfD pages, but to provide information for the readers. You think the article should be "in broad phases"? Well, I strongly disagree. A sportsman's career is seasonal and his experiences, his successes and failures differ from season to season, each season being a microcosm of the whole and each needing a review in its own right. It would seem that the "FAC strict criteria" were not formulated with the needs of the readership in mind but rather with the opinions of some committee in mind. I suggest that you and your fellow members contact editors with experience of writing articles for the benefit of the readers and also contact readers for their views before you define your "strict criteria".

Re the images, can you be specific about oversizing and I will attend to that? As for ownership, the photos were all taken more than 70 years ago so how do you expect their ownership to be known? There is no dispute about licencing with photos this old. The photos in the article are widespread across several cricket books and there is no indication in any of these that so-and-so has copyright. The same is true of the photos in the other articles you have quoted above.

As for references, there is only one major biography of Sutcliffe whereas there are two of Rhodes, for example. If you look at the Rhodes article, you will see that those two combined have a similar majority over all other books combined. When you say there are c.150 citations, I presume you have excluded the online citations?

What exactly is the problem with a single editor doing the work? Is there some "rule" formulated by the committee that says articles must be collaborations?

Re other review processes, the GAN process is pointless because the guidelines are unclear and open to interpretation: e.g., does it accept short articles or not? It depends on the individual reviewer and so it has no standard. Although a peer review may be useful, there is no obligation to do that before the FAC process, as you seem to imply. The FAC process should be robust enough to perform first reviews rather than relying on others to do the work for it: typical committee mindset. I would point out that the article has been reviewed, perhaps not "formally", by at least two members of WP:CRIC who may be considered subject experts.

Finally, can you justify the FAC process to convince an experienced editor like me, who has created hundreds of articles for the benefit of the readership, that it is worth my time and effort? I note, incidentally, that very few people seem to have interest in taking part in the process. The overwhelming majority of members seem to have voted with their feet. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 22:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose: Your response leaves me no choice, since you are basically saying that the article has been prepared with your own criteria in mind, rather than what you think are misguided and outdated FAC criteria. Unfortunately for your argument, your article has to be judged within the FAC framework. In particular, I would refer you to criterion 4 and its reference to "summary style". You should also remember that you are writing an article for a general encyclopedia, not for a specialist cricket magazine, and this has to be reflected in your approach. I don't know for sure, but I think if this article was promoted it would be the longest or second-longest FA; when Nikita Khrushchev was promoted last year its 13,700 words made it the 4th longest FA. Khrushchev was a world statesman, and with all respect to Sutcliffe's stature as a cricketer, he is not in the world league. In short, this article is far too long to be within the "summary style" criterion, and could easily be made into a shorter and much more readable article. Lack of summary style is my principal grounds for objection, but the following are also problems:-
Images: The fact that a photo was taken 70+ years ago does not automatically mean that it is free under US copyright law, which is what matters here. I suggest you acquaint yourself with WP image policy in this respect.
Sources: Over-reliance on a single source can affect the NPOV of the article. There may be only one recent biography of Sutcliffe, but he has figured in many books. For example in the biographies of his contemporaries (Hobbs, Rhodes, Holmes etc) and in the three Yorkshire county histories (Woodhouse, Hodgson, Stevenson). I believe that use of these would add some variety and extra dimension to the prose.
Collaboration: there is nothing wrong with articles being mainly the work of one editor, but some form of review process is in my view an essential part of any article's development. Articles that come to FAC without any prior review often fail; an editor may stand to close to his/her creation to be aware of faults that are obvious to others. Preferably this review should be from someone outside the cricket project to ensure objectivity, hence my suggestion of PR.

I do not think that all the necessary work can be completed within the span of a normal FAC and I repeat my advice that the article should be withdrawn from the process for the time being. It is not my job to justify the FAC process to you; you made the decision to bring the article here. Regrettably, the tone of your response was unnecessarily aggressive; you are not under personal attack, and no one is disparaging your work. Rather than making accusations about "some small internal group like yourselves" and "fellow members" (of what?) you should assume good faith. Brianboulton (talk) 21:38, 29 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion: Because there is a dispute over the format of the article, I suggest that you ask for a [[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cricket/Review%7CWikiProject:Cricket Peer Review]], saying that you are proposing it as a featured article, and linking to this discussion. Bluap (talk) 04:13, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The substance of my oppose is that the article fails criterion 4. The chosen format, I believe, contributes to this, but the substantive issue is the length. Brianboulton (talk) 10:03, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Response. The dispute as such is about the FAC criteria which I believe should be challenged. How many people were involved in determining these criteria and have they, as I suggested, consulted the wider editorship and sought the views of those who are essentially readers of the site? The point of the encyclopedia is to provide information and not to write summaries. Does Encyclopedia Britannica present summaries in its macropedia? Certainly a few "featured articles" I have read do not contain enough information and I have seen similar comments made by other people. It means, assuming Mr Boulton speaks for all concerned in this process, that articles are not judged on how well they provide information to the readers but on how well they comply with criteria that has been formulated by a handful of people who are more interested in the details of their process than in the essential purpose of the encyclopedia. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 10:05, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Jack, I hope you don't mind if contribute my perception of Wikipedia's aim. I am just a regular Joe and do not consider myself in any way to be part of any special internal group. But just from having been somewhat active in contributing to Wikipedia in the last few years it seems clear to me that what Wikipedia sets out to do is to provide information for the general user, not the specialist. That means the average person on the street who reads, say, an article about a cricket player, or any topic, will want a more general outline. Then, for the few people who are especially interested in the finer details of the subject, there are references pointing the person to further sources of information. If I may be honest, I find the Herbert Sutcliffe article much too long myself and for me, who is not necessarily interested in cricket in particular, but who nonetheless is open to reading a little about any topic, the article's length makes it too daunting to tackle. To tell you the truth, I have put up an article for FA before that some editors considered too long. I think people, myself included, may easily lose sight of the fact that one's area of specialization is not necessarily fascinating to the whole world, and a more digestible dose is what is appropriate for Wikipedia. In my case, what I and my co-nominators decided to do was to put some of the information in a sub-article, after which the article ended up passing FAR. You could consider doing the same thing: having a more outline-oriented main article and then have sub-articles focusing on different time periods of his career, for example. That way no information will be lost, and those with just a passing interest (likely the majority of people) can get the essentials in the main article, and then those who are especially interested in the topic can delve deeper. Just a thought. Regards, Moisejp (talk) 15:02, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Moisejp. A very worthwhile thought which I'll take forward. Thanks very much. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 15:13, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

May I suggest that the nominator look at Sid Barnes and Sid Barnes with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948, part of the featured topic Wikipedia:Featured topics/Australian cricket team in England in 1948, which uses the suggested style of a broad summary biography article on each player with sub articles on their play during 1948, as well as sub articles on each test game. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:30, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To add to this excellent comment, Donald Bradman is an excellent model as well, which also has a featured sub-article. Notice that, while Bradman's a famous player, the article still maintains that summary style while remaining compelling to read (I think). At the same time, I doubt any reader would feel cheated upon seeing the length of the article. Giants2008 (27 and counting) 04:28, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

DAB/EL Check - no dabs, no external link problems, though do note that all of the "cricinfo.com" links are being redirected to "espncricinfo.com", so it might be worth doing a search/replace on that. --Pres N 22:25, 3 December 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.