Talk:George Balabushka/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Nosleep (Talk · Contribs) 08:00, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Review within 48. Nosleep (Talk · Contribs) 08:00, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Hey Nosleep, Thanks for taking the time. Before you even start let me just tell you preemptively that there is very little detail in reliable sources on his home life, family, children, marriage, etc. and I have scoured all sources I could find including, in addition to my personal billiards books and magazines collection, newspaperarchive.com, old Fulton's newspaper archive, and Google news and books.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:31, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps I should, but I find I don't much care about such sections. Nosleep (Talk · Contribs) 22:24, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality: Sufficient for GA quality. Here are a few nitpicks:

   • and emigrated to the United States in 1924 You emigrate from a country. You immigrate to a country.

   • Hope you don't mind if I interlineate. Fixed.

   • Not at all, that's the idea.

   • He graduated to building children's furniture What exactly is meant by graduating ?

   • Changed, though I simply meant "to advance to". It is a standard meaning, though I can see how the word could be miscontrued here.

   • While on the job, Balabushka lost his middle finger to a band saw and made himself a replacement plastic finger from a wooden mold of such craftsmanship that even his friends did not realize his loss until long after the incident. Presumably, of such craftsmanship that even his friends did not realize his loss until long after the incident describes replacement finger, but the way the sentence is currently constructed, it sounds like it's describing a wooden mold.

   • Fixed.

   • "Josephine's limitless patience and strong sense of independence would afford George the time and solitude necessary that a great artist needs in order to perfect his craft."[2] Good that the quotation has a conspicuous citation, but it kind of comes out of nowhere. Some additional context would help. Who said this?

   • Attribution provided.

   • Stainless steel joints were used almost exclusively, as were delrin butt caps, although the rare ivory joint and ivory butt cap may be encountered, greatly increasing the cue's value. Substandard passive voice – suggest rephrasing. How about Balabushka used stainless steel joints and delrin butt caps almost exclusively, though he occasionally used ivory joints and ivory butt caps as well. Those ivory cues are of much greater value.

   • Rewritten.

   • The "Cue details" section uses "Balabushka" an awful lot. It may flow better if a pronoun or two is inserted.

   • Toned down usage.

   • Spain had become fascinated by splicing technology when he came upon a titlist cue split down the middle in 1965 and set out to perfect and even improve on the titlist splice. Is Titlist a proper noun? It's capitalized earlier in the article.

   • It is indeed a proper noun. Fixed.

   B. MOS compliance:

   • Are American Cuemakers Association and Herman Rambow likely future articles? This is the only inbound link to either in the article space.

   • I delinked the cuemakers association. Only the likely target of an article if I (or possibly one other user) writes it (I'm something of a one man show in this arena). Herman Rambow is very much a likely subject of a future article. Our coverage of pool and billiards topics in general is so sparse it makes me ill. I long ago became blasé about the most famous people in all of billiards—our Babe Ruths—not having articles. Herman Rambow is a legend!

   • "Yes" is a legitimate answer to this question :p

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   • I'm not wild about how the books are cited. Facts should not be cited to an entire book anymore than they should be cited to [nytimes.com] (or whatever) over a particular article. Here is an article that shows a more common citation method.

   • I understand where you are coming from and am well familiar with short citations. I'll fix it if you really think it's necessary but I don't think it's fair to analogize this to someone citing to nyt.com. As part of verifiability, we need to give the reader enough information to easily locate the material for themselves. Here I cite to sharply limited page ranges of sections of books, and I think that is sufficient for anyone to easily find the source material. I would agree with you wholeheartedly as to someone just naming a book entire.

   • Do understand, I'm not asking you to make such a change for this process. That'd be a colossal amount of work. But it will be necessary if your goal is FA.

   • Reference #8 is a dead link, as is the same link which shows up below in the "External links" section (not really necessary to duplicate it anyway)

   • Urls fixed. They just changed it from an "awards" page to a "hall of fame" page.

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

   • Are the exact street addresses of various places really necessary?

   • Maybe not really necessary, but I think encyclopedic and interesting when we are talking about NYC locations.

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales: One image is free, the other has a perfectly reasonable fair use rationale.

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions and alternative text: Hooray, alt text!

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail: You should be cleared for takeoff soon. I'm less concerned with the prose nitpicks than the dead link in the citations. Nosleep (Talk · Contribs) 00:24, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Well done, good article. Nosleep (Talk · Contribs) 09:32, 29 March 2010 (UTC)