Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Napoleon/1

Napoleon

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted Its now been a matter of months and the issues aren't sorted. While length itself is not a GA issue, when it does get above 100kb it suggests there are failures in using summary style. Either way the presence of multiple citation needed tags is reason enough to delist this article. Aircorn (talk) 03:35, 7 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Previous GAR was 5 years ago, and there seem to be some significant issues to adress.

Article is too long, with a readable prose size of over 18,000 words, almost twice the recommended 10,000. As noted by Jehochman on the talk page, more content should be moved to subarticles and replaced by summary style.
The lead, too, is way too long, consisting of 5 lengthy paragraphs. The expositions of his wars and campaigns should probably somehow be condensed. There's also a balance issue, with the last paragraph extolling Napoleon's achievements - including a direct quote from a historian taking up more than half the paragraph - without mentioning any negatively viewed aspects of his legacy, e.g. reinstating slavery in the Caribbean. An additional paragraph focusing on the latter was recently added, though not in an optimal way, and has since been removed again. See also Talk:Napoleon#Lead: length and recent addition.
There are six {{citation needed}} tags, five of which date back all the way to 2016.
Reference errors as noted by Jehochman at Talk:Napoleon#Citations.

There might be additional issues that I'm unaware of. The ones above seem altogether sufficient to justify a GAR, especially for such a vital and prominent article. Lennart97 (talk) 14:38, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You may be intrested in the discusion held before on the talk page, in wich i proposed a way to cut the lead to five shorter paragraphs, so far i have proposed it, but i would want to hear your opinion, and how to improve it. (we are talking about the lead). we talked about this. So far we need consensus, and focus on the problem itself.Nuevousuario1011 (talk) 17:33, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I appreciate the proposal of a new lead. It's definitely shorter, that's good. Apart from needing a lot of copy editing for grammar/spelling, I'm not personally sure whether it's up to GA standards. Others' opinions on this are very welcome. Lennart97 (talk) 12:33, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I was notified of this GAR - but I have no real interest, experience or expertise with the article,a dn am not currently writing on Wikipedia. However the concerns expressed are clearly something that someone should be able to fix in a matter of days, expending about the same amount of energy as a GAR would take. Why not fix it instead? By the way, excessive length is really a silly object to an article's quality, some topics need to be longer than the standard article to provide sufficient coverage of the relevant literature - without having read this one, I'd not be surprised if this is a such a topic. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 12:09, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I notified you only because you were involved in the previous GAR, hope you don't mind. I nominated the article for a community review because I'm not personally able to fix the article's problems, it's as simple as that. More specifically, per the guidelines at WP:GAR, I 1) don't believe satisfies the good article criteria and 2) [am] not confident in [my] ability to assess the article - thus a community reassessment seems like the correct choice.
- You may have a point about the article length, but isn't that what spinning off content and using summary style in the main article is for? I'm pretty sure I've seen length considerations in GA reviews, anyway. Maybe Jehochman who first noted the length as an issue wants to comment on this as well. Lennart97 (talk) 12:33, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

. I hope the issues can be corrected within the scope of this review. Summary style is not hard to do, nor does it take very long. I fixed the worst reference issues. Some that remain may require an editor with more reference expertise than my level. @El C: might know who to contact. Jehochman ^Talk 14:26, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]