Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Taylor Hicks/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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 20:17, 9 January 2007.

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Taylor Hicks

This has already went through peer review and good articles. The editors have done a nice job with it. I didn't write this article but I fixed some minor things like tables and the like. Even if this fails fac, it's good to see how outside editors reviewed it. Pink moon 1287^{(email•talk•user)} 16:25, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

• Comment - The Lede is too short. I'd like to see a source for the last sentence of the first and third paragraph of the American Section. Also, as he is still popular, and as such the article is still a current event (with some parts of the article referring to future events). This could cause some stability problems. At a quick glance, though, the article looks pretty good. Hurricanehink (talk) 18:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Please make all the citations consistent and fully cited. Also full dates should be wikilinked and cite 25 is original research since it refers to no source except your own common knowledge. - Tutmosis 20:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

• Object. Wikipedia is not a blog, webpage, or for commercial promotion or advertisements - it's an encyclopedia. External jumps should be eliminated:
  • Hicks, like most contemporary and modern musicians, uses the internet as an option for marketing and promotion. In late October 2006, Rehearsals.com started launching weekly videos from Hicks's rehearsals dated October 4. In November, fan blog Gray Charles signed a contract with Hicks and his management team, making Gray Charles the Official Taylor Hicks Weblog.
• External sites are linked in references and External links, and then, subject to WP:EL and WP:NOT. The WP:LEAD is inadequate, and what makes the Gray Charles weblog a reliable source for a bio? Since references are not correctly formatted, hard to tell if others are blogs or unreliable sources as well. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
• That paragraph was not originally there, and I had found it recently. It was probably a vandal. Pink moon 1287^{(email•talk•user)} 13:00, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I see. Well, it's good to closely tend to FAs and FACs. If you can complete the rest of your references to include full biblio info, it will be easier to check the article. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. I'll confess to being one of the major contributors on this article. Even I still think there's a long way to go before it can be FA, and we still need a lot more information on his career as it progresses. I think the article is at the best we can do right now, given that he's pretty much just starting out his career. The concerns I can identify right now, other the ones that have just been mentioned, are:
  • "Early life" and "Early career" sections still need to be improved (I've already rewritten the latter from its earlier conception, and I'm still not entirely convinced.) I honestly think we'll only be able to come up with satisfactory write-ups for those sections once his book has been released.
  • I think the "Life after Idol" section and "2006-2007" sections can be merged and whittled down. The last two paragraphs of the latter section can be deleted entirely; I won't cry over them. We need to be careful of what kind of details are included in the article—they have to be relevant to his career as a musician. Like how him being Grand Marshal at Mardi Gras can be left out, but mention of his tour is a must.
  • Since most of the references are my fault, I'll be helping clean them up, of course –NicolaM 16:07, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

• Object—1a. Flabby and full of redundancies. Here are random examples from the top.
  • "for the span of a decade"—Spot the three redundant words.
  • "he was immediately signed to Arista Records"—Perhaps this is the lingo, but I'd have thought it was "was signed up".
  • "influences derived from classic soul, blues, and R&B music have earned him a following of devout fans"—No, redundant: "the influences OF classic ...". "Earned him a devout following".
  • Really, who cares whether he was born at 3.30 or 5.30 AM or whenever; make it tighter and don't waste the readers' time with needless details.
  • Why on earth are "blond", "dark gray", and "pitches"—and many other dictionary terms—linked. Please sift through the whole thing and minimise. The link to "absolute pitch" is probably worth keeping, so why dilute it with useless links?
  • "...at the age of 18, and later taught himself to play guitar when he was 19"—Later? So 19 wouldn't precede, 18 would it?

Sorry to be snippy, but this is just not good enough. Please find someone with fresh eyes to go through the whole artice. Tony 11:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

• Object I was thinking of rejecting this article at Good Articles, but someone promoted it before I got around to it (one of those "I'll do it tomorrow" things). Lots of problems, but chiefly my concern is that it miserably Fails 1(a). Badly written article. Too many one-sentence or two-sentence paragraphs. Paragraphs with more than one or two sentences badly flow and lack connectivity and focus. Prose far from compelling or brilliant. I can't believe that this article has external links to myspace.com. That's low. —ExplorerCDT 10:05, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.