Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/British Library/1
- Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • • Most recent review
- Result pending
There is lots of uncited text in the article, including entire paragraphs. A large part of the article is a list of what is in their collections, which I think can be spun out and some highlights written in a couple paragraphs of prose. Z1720 (talk) 22:45, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
- Unless absolutely necessary for length reasons, I'd certainly disagree with spinning off the collection highlights, which are surely the main interest of the article. What's the readable prose length? Gutting an article like that is by itself an argument for removing GA status. Otherwise it's just a very big library with mostly the same printed books as other very big libraries. It's in the nature of the BL that "a couple paragraphs of prose" (sic) is nowhere near enough, and that short coverage would badly unbalance the article. You are completely ignoring the strong rejection of this suggestion in October (article talk) and just ploughing on with your personal view regardless, despite no one else supporting it. Why are you not showing the early part of the GA review, with all this? Johnbod (talk) 22:54, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
- @Johnbod: I think the "Periodicals and philatelic collections" section does an excellent job showcasing how the library's collection can be written as prose, instead of as a list. Discussion did take place on the article's talk page after I brought up my concerns there. My review in the introductions of this GAR concerns my issues with today's article version: the list of collections is included in my concerns and can be addressed by other editors below. Uncited text throughout the article would also have to be resolved before I recommend this article "keep" its GA status. Z1720 (talk) 23:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
Perhaps a different problem, but I'm not a fan of the organisation here: loads of L2 headers, no real hierarchy or sense of coherency. For instance, we have an L2 header for the recent cyberattack (incidentally, the info here is now out of date, as things are back up and running), which is preceded by a few other sections that could loosely be termed "history"... except that we've then got "Using the library's reading rooms" slapped into the middle. The uncited text is a bigger problem, but I wouldn't pass this under 1b at the moment even if everything were cited. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:42, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
- I nearly fell off my chair when I saw UC's comment "I'm not a fan of the organisation" until I realised this referred to the text of the article rather than to the BL itself. The organisation of the text doesn't greatly bother me at GA level, but having thirteen "citation needed" tags – all of them justified – decidedly does. I'm uneasy about the "Highlights of the collection" section, too. I'm with Johnbod rather than Z1720 on the continued presence of the list, but it contains well over 300 statements, fewer than 60 of which have their own citations. If the vague phrase at the head of the list "Highlights, some of which were selected by the British Library, include ..." purportedly covers all the others (and I doubt it) this needs to be explicit in every case. It would, in my view, take an enormous, not to say unreasonable, amount of effort to bring the citations in this article up to scratch. If anyone is willing to undertake that I take my hat off to him/her, but as things stand I think there is a strong prima facie case for removing the GA status. – Tim riley talk 09:21, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
- Afterthought: I see the editor who promoted the article to GA in 2011 was me, but it was then only 2,217 words long and adequately cited. It has since grown to more than 12,000 words including the lists and that's where the lack of citations has crept in. Tim riley talk 09:29, 28 December 2024 (UTC)