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Wikipedia:Featured article review/archive/October 2013

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Kept status

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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 User:Dana boomer 09:36, 1 November 2013 [1].

Olivier Messiaen

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Review commentary

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Notified: RobertG, Jerome Kohl and WikiProject Composers

I am nominating this featured article for review because it does not contain enough inline references, thus failing criterion 1c. I raised this issue on the article's talk page in January this year, and it hasn't been addressed yet. (Please note that I'm not notifying the editor who nominated this article for FA status, since they have apparently retired from Wikipedia.) Toccata quarta (talk) 05:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is no question about there being a problem with lack of inline references. The list you provided on the talk page amply documents this, and I am as guilty as anybody for not having helped with this before now. I think it might have been better had you flagged the actual offending points in the article, however, since there are some ambiguities, and the only mechanism for documenting progress I can think of is to strike out the segments named on the talk page after correcting the paragraph in question (would that be acceptable?). For example, paragraph 3 under "Tristan and serialism" has actually got two references in it. Although it is possible that these were added after you had posted your notice, there is no graceful way to address the fact that only the badly written conclusion of that paragraph remains unreferenced (and possibly the opening sentence, but it looks as if Griffiths 1985 actually covers this). I am concentrating on this section first, because it is the area where I have the relevant sources most readily at my fingertips. However, the sheer extent of the lacunae means that it may take some while to bring this article back up to scratch in this department. Although you cite only criterion 1c, it appears to me that the related criterion 2c is also a problem, namely, that the citation formatting is not entirely adequate and is confusing. There is a short list of "General references" which (as I understand the term) should contain items that are used for background in writing the article, but are not actually given inline citations in the body of the article, and then a very long list of "Other references". Confusingly, most or all of the "General references" appear to be cited inline, and so are a small number of the "Other references". It seems to me that this needs to be reorganized, by creating one list of "References" (or "Sources") for the actually cited items, and putting the rest in "Further reading". This seems a lot closer to what the Manual of Style recommends than what is currently in place. Then the inconsistencies and inadequacies of the footnotes need to be addressed (replacing "f" with the following page number, and the vague "ff" with the actual run of pages, etc.). The inclusion of comments in the footnotes does not bother me at all, especially since short, author-date citations are being used for the references. In fact, I think this is preferable to the system found in some articles of having two separate sets of notes, one for comments and the other for references, since often (in this case) these functions are intertwined.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:01, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The point you've made about maintenance tags is an important one. Regarding the Tristan paragraph, I wrote the following on the article's talk page: "paragraphs that do not appear to have (enough) references". Toccata quarta (talk) 17:15, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
So far as that particular paragraph is concerned, it can partly be corrected by removing the claim repeated at the beginning of the next paragraph, though this is only moving the problem, not correcting it. Still, it should not be difficult to establish that he was at Tanglewood in 1949. Were there insufficiently referenced bits in that paragraph, apart from the material following the last footnote? (This is what I mean about ambiguities, which I think you are acknowledging is a difficulty.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:02, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me also that not all the statements in the lede are taken up, let alone cited, in the article. For example, he 'believed birds to be the greatest musicians, and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer.' I can't find either of these, although someone else is cited as saying he was a 'consiencious ornithologist'. 'He was one of the first composers to use an electronic keyboard—in this case, the ondes Martenot' - maybe so, but his being 'amongst the first' is again neither mentioned nor cited in the body of the article.--Smerus (talk) 17:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is a good point. This gets a little tricky, doesn't it? If we tag the uncited claim in the lede, somebody might add a footnote there, instead of fixing things so the lede does what it is supposed to do: summarize the article's content.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:02, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In the absence of citations which would enable one to rewrite the body to conform, the appropriate thing to do at this stage is to edit these sentences out of the lede - and possibly place them in the body to await citations later.--Smerus (talk) 19:24, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I will have no time to help with this. I recommend particularly the books by Griffiths (1985), Hill (1995: "Companion"), Hill & Simeone (2005), and Samuel (1994: "Conversations"), as well as Messiaen's own "Technique of My Musical Language". Good luck. --RobertG ♬ talk 17:50, 28 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from PSky
These problems are not uncommon with FAs promotoed prior to 2007. This is article isn't bad, but it doesn't meet modern standards for FAs. Someone knowledgeable about classical music could probably save this FA without too much fuss. PumpkinSky talk 17:57, 30 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

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Featured article criteria mentioned in the review section include referencing and MOS compliance. Dana boomer (talk) 12:01, 23 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep FA status. Thanks to Dana boomer for alerting me that is is time to give an opinion. It was I who raised the single MOS issue, and that has now been corrected to my satisfaction. I have reviewed Toccata quarta's list of referencing problems, paragraph by paragraph, and they all seem now to be adequately documented. The only lingering problem I see is the single short sentence under "Symmetry", which still seems a bit "stubbyish", even though it is introducing two following subsections on duration and pitch. Smerus raised some good points about the lede containing claims not addressed in the article. I see that the claim about birds being the greatest musicians has been deleted, while at the same time there is now a huge amount of information in the article itself on Messiaen's interest in and use of birdsong. There does remain that claim about Messiaen being among the first to use an electronic keyboard in an orchestral composition (vague as well as unsupported by anything in the body of the article), but this could be dealt with at one blow and by itself hardly seems sufficient cause to delist—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:21, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep – As a Johnny-come-lately to this page I didn't see the article as it was when the review was inaugurated, but it certainly seems to me to be admirably referenced now, and admirable in all other regards as well. Clearly of FA quality, to my mind. Tim riley (talk) 13:36, 18 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.

Removed status

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