Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Hillary Rodham Clinton/3

Hillary Rodham Clinton[edit]

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

Previous community GAR February 2008

Result: Weak keep/no action per comments below; no compelling case has been made that this article does not meet the criteria, but article editors are encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to trim detail to spinout articles. Geometry guy 16:40, 6 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As a part of GA Sweeps, I have asked that this article be pruned back to 60KB of readable prose. The involved editors have argued against the necessity of such pruning and stated their preparedness for debate at GAR. Arguments have been presented that nearly 1% of FAs are longer than this article. Instead of delisting this article for failure to address suggested points of interest, I have decided to send it to the community for resolution on the necessity of pruning the article to less than 60KB. Hopefully, we can achieve consensus. At Talk:Hillary Rodham Clinton/GA1, there was no consensus reached during individual reassessment.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 03:56, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In defense of this article retaining its GA status:

First, WP:GACR does not explicitly address article size. Item #3b does advocate use of WP:Summary style, which this article does use in many places. For example, Senate career of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Electoral history of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton awards and honors, and List of books about Hillary Rodham Clinton are all direct BLP subarticles, while Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2008, United States Senate election in New York, 2000, and United States Senate election in New York, 2006 are all related campaign articles, and Hillary Rodham senior thesis, Hillary Rodham cattle futures controversy, and White House travel office controversy are all specialty articles on particular matters. There are more; see Category:Hillary Rodham Clinton for the full constellation of Hillary articles.

Second, WP:SIZE does not place hard-and-fast requirement on article size. It says that readers "may tire" of reading articles more than 10,000 words and that in terms of readable prose size, "> 60 KB Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time)". This article is currently 63 Kb readable prose size and 10,150 words.

As evidence that WP:SIZE is not a hard requirement, User:Dr pda/Featured article statistics shows that 43 current FA articles are over the 60 Kb readable prose mark, including 8 that are the same size as this one and 24 that are larger than this one, in some cases considerably larger. I quote these stats because the goal of this article has always been to stay at FAC quality, not just GA quality (I call it "FA without the star", analogous to academia's ABD).

So why does this article need to be on the long side? It is describing a very controversial figure in American politics, who has had a number of very distinct stages to her life and career. In order to thoroughly cover all of her life and accomplishments and setbacks and controversies, the article has to be detailed, present all views, and be heavily cited. I believe this article has successfully done this. It has had relatively few edit wars given its controversial nature and never been locked down (compare to the Obama and Palin articles, for example). Size is not the most important criteria in a BLP; conformance to WP:BLP, WP:V, and WP:NPOV are, and I believe this article does all that well. I do not believe a more aggressive approach with breaking up this article into even more subarticles is warranted; BLP subarticles have an extremely low readership rate – see some of the statistics I gave in Talk:Hillary Rodham Clinton/GA1 – and the delicate and successful balance that this article has maintained for some time would not be successfully maintained once important material was farmed off to articles that no one ever reads.

Third, note that I did not ignore this GAR when Tony filed it. I made some 25 to 30 edits to fix up things in the article, including tightening the lead somewhat and doing some MoS tweaks like non-breaking spaces. Most importantly, I fixed 20 citation problems that the Checklinks run discovered, and a couple more things that a dablinks run found. There is however this one issue regarding size that we could not agree upon, and so here we are.

In sum, I do not believe that stripping this article's GA based on this one guideline – a guideline that is couched in terms of "may" and "probably" and that is not explicitly mentioned in GACR – is warranted or wise. Wasted Time R (talk) 04:56, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Article length is not, nor has it ever been a GA requirement, and any form of bean counting (number of bytes, inline citations etc.) is strongly discouraged at GA. The relevant questions are not "is it too short?" and "is it too long?", but "does it fail to cover the topic adequately?" and "does it go into unnecessary detail or make insufficient use of summary style?". Geometry guy 09:48, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes that is why it is up for review based on whether it is too long? I have opened the floor for debate.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Aside from being 60k+ in size are there any issues? If that is the case, then length is not clearly identified as a criteria in WP:GACR as it is in WP:FACR. While 3b does mention summary style it does not require that summary style be used, only that the subject is not covered in unnecessary detail and I don't think this article does that. Could the article be shortened, sure, but the editors' lack of using SS on every section does not mean its length means there is unnecessary details within the article. --Bobblehead ^(rants) 22:07, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The fineries of MOS are not my bag. I am just bringing it to the community. If 60 KB is not really an important guideline, then it isn't. I had been led to believe it was, which is why I brought it here for consideration.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:34, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - It is an issue for FACs/FARCs, not GACs/GARs. --Bobblehead ^(rants) 22:37, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I am reluctant to set a file size limit. That said, the article is a tad lengthy and should be broken into additional sub-articles, per criterion 3b and Summary style. There are several sections, such as "College", which are begging for summarization; can't they be spun off into new articles? For example: how necessary is it for the main article's "College" section to include phrases such as: She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers. ? Majoreditor (talk) 02:14, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One of the major issues of Hillary biography is how much her career has benefitted from being married to Bill. Everything she did in college came before Bill, including the national exposure due to her commencement speech, and is thus significant in answering this question. The college period is also quite significant in this is where her political leanings became fully formed, as it's when she switched from being a Republican to a Democrat. So yes, all this belongs in this biography, not buried in a sub-article that no one ever reads. Proof that no one ever reads? April 2009 viewing stats: Sarah Palin 200,122, and Early political career of Sarah Palin 413. That's a 500-to-1 ratio. More than 1 out of every 500 readers deserves to know how college affected Hillary's life and political formation. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:21, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I concur wholeheartedly with all of Wasted Time R's comments here - as I said in the GA sweeps discussion, this subject has had a multi-layered life, with several notable careers and stages, and the main biography needs to give a comprehensive view to aid our readers in understanding. Even by FA standards, I would argue that the extra 3K of readable prose is not wildly out of line. For GA, there is no stated size requirement, and shouldn't take precedence over the quality of the article, its comprehensiveness, readability, verifiability, neutral presentation, stability and overall value. Tvoz/talk 16:38, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Since we are only talking about removing 5% of the content, could you briefly run through each of the top-level sections that do not currently have summary style and explain why they should not.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 16:51, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, for example, the "First Lady of the United States" section already is a summary. Meaning there is much, much more that can be said about the topic. Much of what happened to her as First Lady is covered in more depth by articles such as Clinton health care plan of 1993, State Children's Health Insurance Program, Whitewater controversy, White House travel office controversy, White House FBI files controversy, Lewinsky scandal, and so forth. The descriptions in the First Lady section barely touch on some of these matters, and other parts of her First Ladyship are gone over quickly as well. By comparison, this First Lady section is shorter than those in two high-quality FA articles, Pat Nixon and Nancy Reagan. And some editors have complained about this; for example, see Talk:Hillary Rodham Clinton#First Lady, where another editor claims that much of HRC's First Lady period is ignored, and where I responded by including a few new things but saying space constraints prevent us from including everything.
- Similarly, the Arkansas years section is a summary as well. Major, controversial events such as cattle futures and the beginning of Whitewater are dealt with briefly. Behind this one sentence: "In one of the Clinton governorship's most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association, to establish mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size.[90][82]" lies a prolonged political narrative that was a key development in Hillary and Bill's political M.O., and one that her biographers spend a good deal of time on; we could easily write a whole paragraph on it. The whole name change thing is dealt with tersely, when this was also a key development in her realizing that politics requires accommodation. And so forth.
- The length of the early years sections is necessary to give a well-rounded picture of her upbringing and childhood and educational influences, and to indicate the potential others saw in her. Given how much she gets characterized as a crazed socialist children-suing-their-parents ultrafeminist-but-Bill-marrying blah blah, it's very important to present her life story accurately and fully. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:01, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Hillary is certainly a person for whom NYTimes best sellers have and could be written for many segments of her life. It will likely be the case that a best seller can be wrtitten for the 2009-2012 period if she stays in office that whole time. That does not mean a limitless WP bio is appropriate. However, if GA consensus is toward placing no strict bounds on the size then so be it. If the article ever wants to be an FA, it is going to have to be cut. I personally would prefer to see the article trimmed now. However, if everyone says let it slide that is how it will go as long as the article has no aspirations of being featured.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:11, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - Tony, you're not reading what I'm writing. I've already pointed you to a discussion where I argued against a "limitless bio". And I'm not as convinced as you are that FAC has a hard-and-fast size limit, otherwise how did the 43 articles over your limit get approved? But in any case, this article has been rejected there multiple times on FACR #1e "future stability" grounds, and since that won't be cured anytime soon, it's a moot point for now. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:34, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      - They got approved at less than 60 KB and have ballooned. I am willing to bet that at least 40 of the 43 offenders were approved at less than 60KB. Any takers? Keep in mind that the WP:FAR process is quite limited. It can only handle a handfull of articles at a time. There are more problematic articles than well-written articles that have gotten a little long. FAR can not chase down every group of editors for the sake of pruning articles for size reasons alone. The process is used for more substantive issues and there is really no other way to police size problems. When I put Theodore Roosevelt up at FAR it was 62 KB. That was only one of the many problems that made it worth bringing it to FAR however.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        It's not easy to check, as many of these articles were approved two or more years ago and you would have to go back through a lot of history to find the version that was approved. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was approved at its current 63 Kb length earlier this year, however. Wasted Time R (talk) 11:47, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I think the article's length is fine. There is no rule about article length for GAs. Ricardiana (talk) 18:45, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep There are plenty of FAs over 60 kb, including FA Ronald Reagan (at 62). It is very hard to balance different aspects of a subject's career, especially in the case of Hillary Clinton, whose career is so vast, but I think WTR and the other editors have done a truly fabulous job of at least attempting to put everything in perspective and write with due weight within each section. That said, I think the political positions section is an area that could use improvement. I'm not a fan of bulleted lists, and I think the bullets could be eliminated rather easily. But size is not an issue to me and there isn't any reason for me to oppose this article remaining at GA status. Happyme22 (talk) 22:14, 23 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the positive feedback – the rarest thing WP editors ever get ;-) The whole "Political positions" area is the weakest of our politician BLPs, I think. The subarticles tend to accumulate material while the person is running for office and be ignored the rest of the time. In this case, both Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton and the summary in the main article tend to focus on her time as senator, and ignore her times as FL Arkansas, FL U.S., and Sec State. However it's formatted, I'm tempted to chop the current summary after the ADA and ACU ratings. Does the main article really need to say what the Drum Major Institute or Americans for Better Immigration thought of her a few years ago? Wasted Time R (talk) 00:12, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - Perhaps the initial GAR reviewer could point out additional areas from WP:WIAGA to address for improvement, in addition to the size issue raised above? I note that the WP:LEAD only has one sentence about her current position as Secretary of State, and this subsection within the article seems sort of skimpy as well. The Political positions subsection seems awkward, it'd be better framed in paragraph format instead of its current layout. Cultural and political image subsection lacks any commentary on her image as Secretary of State, and the public/media/scholarly perception of her in this role. Cirt (talk) 07:37, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- In response to this and the previous comments and discussion, I've prosified the spectrum part of the Political positions section, and have moved everything after the ADA/ACU ratings into the subarticle. Wasted Time R (talk) 20:17, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Regarding the skimpy coverage of her time as Secretary of State, that's intentional. She's only been in that office for four months, and it's difficult to say what if anything has happened so far that's very significant from a biographical perspective. She is mentioned many, many times in the Foreign policy of the Barack Obama administration article, which is where most of her trips, position speeches, etc. are being put. That's appropriate because that article has the space and granularity for that kind of detail, and because as Sec State she's acting on behalf of a whole administration and government, not just herself. I'm sure at some point things will happen that merit inclusion here – and they may have already happened but we don't know it yet – at which point of course we will include it. Wasted Time R (talk) 20:23, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that consensus is that 60KB is not a relevant limiation, but Why has this article gotten longer since I brought it to GAR for size concerns? It was 63KB when I brought it here and it is 64KB now. Is this an indication that the large article will continue significant growth and expansion if we disregard any size bounds?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:30, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It may indicate, perhaps, that your concerns are not shared: for instance the comment immediately above yours asks for more information, not less. Geometry guy 20:36, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This is a very bad precedent for WP to authorized and endorse wanton expansion of long articles. Why does WP:SIZE exist?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:41, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"authorized and endorse wanton expansion"? Where is this wanton expansion and who endorse(d) it? I see no precedent being set here. Geometry guy 20:51, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)These last two edits that I did reduced the overall article size by 2400 bytes, but increased the readable prose size enough to bump the total from 63 to 64 Kb. How could that happen? It's because the prose size tool doesn't count bulleted lists as readable prose, and even though I eliminated a lot of the bullets, I changed the rest to regular prose, which does now count. Wasted Time R (talk) 20:54, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Update – after the Senate section trims I did described below, the readable prose size is back down to 63 Kb. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:34, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I agree that size is not itself a delist criterion, but "too much detail" could apply here. Both the senate career and the presidential race sections are summaries of other articles, but remain very large - making the summaries of these and other subarticles smaller would be a step in the right direction. While just at the limit of realistically readable size, more growth is surely expected - something is going to have to be moved to subarticles soon, so why not now?YobMod 10:57, 29 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Both of these sections have already been trimmed down from what they used to be. The Senate section has been reduced several times, with content moved to the daughter article. I would do some further moves, such as the Iraq War amendments complexities and the video games positions, but other editors have strongly objected in the past to moving either of them. With the readership of the Senate daughter article so low, everyone realizes that moves to there are tantamount to deletion. The presidential campaign section was substantially rewritten and trimmed after the end of the campaign; see this discussion: Talk:Hillary_Rodham_Clinton/Archive_13#Presidential_campaign_section_revised. The fact remains that the primary campaign is very biographically significant, because it describes both how she squandered a huge initial advantage but also how she didn't give up and staged several comebacks during the way, albeit falling short in the end. As it stands, I think the description in this section is the most succinct but most analytical description of the Obama vs Hillary battle anywhere in WP. Also, the Hillary president campaign articles are a mess right now, so I'm not eager to rely on them for summary view story. Wasted Time R (talk) 21:17, 29 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep. It's borderline on meeting criterion 3-b, but not in such a state as to merit de-listing. I trust the article's editors will be able to keep it from growing out of control.

There are two false assumptions offered up in this GAR. False option #1 is that the article absolutely must meet some predetermined length. Luckily, it appears that concept has been slapped down.

False option #2 is the notion that subarticles are bad because they have lower readership. So what? That's an indication that readers make choices about what they read. They are offered the option to click into the subarticles; the links are fairly obvious and well-merchandised. We should not be so presumptious as to think that all users of the encyclopedia are going to need or desire to read the article from beginning to end.

Wiser editors than I have observed that the subarticle structure is one of the features that makes Wikipedia a success. Readers aren't overwhelmed with too much detail, and it's easy to find and click onto sub-articles to get more details. Let's not engage in bean-counting either for article length nor for page traffic comparison. Summarizing articles via subarticles is hardly "tantamount to deletion"; rather, it represents one of the core miracles of how Wikipedia works better than paper encyclopediae. Please, let's not act like prima dona chefs who insist that diners must eat each and every course in the exact manner it is served up to them. Let's delight in offering up an a la carte buffet. Summarize material where appropriate to keep the article from feeling like War and Peace and provide readers with easy-to-navigate choices for getting extra details as needed. Majoreditor (talk) 00:25, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Readership of the biographical subarticles isn't "low". Low would be perhaps a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio compared to the main article, which I would accept as reasonable. Readership of the the bio subarticles is extremely low, meaning the 100:1, 200:1, or 500:1 ratios I pointed out above. A partial reason is that I don't think the links to the subarticles are as visible as you do; I think the italic xref gets lost under the bold section headers. But that's not the main reason. There was a WP usage study recently (don't have the link at the moment) that found that most users find WP articles from search engines, not from following the links within WP (the opposite of what us editors do). And Google just doesn't rate BLP subarticles highly. Take this search looking for Hillary as senator: the Hillary main article turns up first, but the Hillary Senate subarticle -- which ideally is what readers should be directed too -- doesn't show up within the first 20 google pages of results. Or take this search for Sarah Palin in Wasilla: the Sarah Palin main article turns up first, the Wasilla article second, but the Early political career of Palin in Wasilla article, the one that's got all the juicy controversial stuff that the reader should be interested in, doesn't show up in the first 10 pages of results (I gave up looking). Wasted Time R (talk) 03:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Now, the summary style structure works great in other contexts. World War II is the top Google hit when searching for that, but D-Day and Battle of Midway are also the top Google hit when searching for those events, and have great readership stats as a result. I think it has to do with whether the secondary articles have clearly defined independent titles from the base article. Or maybe it's because there are jillions of WP articles that link to D-Day, but very few that link to Senate career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. But whatever the reason, the proven fact remains that biographical subarticles are not part of the "core miracles of Wikipedia". Instead, they are a sinkhole of effort that is virtually never compensated by readership. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:49, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sub-articles low readership may be unfortunate, but it is not a fair comparison, as we have no numbers for how many readers are clicking on this main article but giving up after the first 50% because it is simply too long for a generally interested reader. If only one in 1000 readers manage to reach the last section, then sub-articles are still preferable. I didn't !vote delist this time - but i also found trudging though some of the senate vote details to be boring, and i certainly would have skimmed it if not for the review. While there is no hard limit on size, if this article gets to more 65kb readable prose, then i think i would say delist on 3b grounds.Yob Mod 10:15, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it would be great to have some kind of usage study that shows how readers navigate within individual WP articles. Maybe half of them read the lead section and nothing else? Maybe a third of them jump around the article based on the table of contents and links and don't read sequentially? Maybe many of them try to read sequentially and never get to the end of long articles, like you say? Alas, we don't know. But what we do know for sure is that biographical subarticles get extremely low readership. So I'd rather base our article structure decisions on what we do know than what we don't. As for the Senate section being boring, I hear you; I've worked on several of these (e.g. McCain, Ted Kennedy, Biden) and legislative process is often just as dull to write about as it is to watch happening on C-SPAN (try reading Adam Clymer's biography of Kennedy if you really want legislative slog ...). I'll take another look at it and see if anything can be improved or cut. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:04, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've now made several trims from the Senate section, including the Iraq War Resolution amendment complexities mentioned above and several other resolutions and non-binding process aspects. However I left the video games/sex scenes material in, as I figure this part of the article needs every jolt it can get. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:32, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of intention to close[edit]

This reassessment has generated some useful discussion together with improvements to and some shortening of the article. However, I believe that beneficial returns on further discussion are rapidly diminishing, and do not really concern the GA criteria anyway. Hence I recommend that further discussion be taken to article talk. My preliminary assessment of the discussion is that a weak keep/no action conclusion would be preferable. No well supported case has been made for delisting the article, but some editors feel that article editors should stay on their toes and look for further trims at every opportunity. This is very much the nature of an article on current political figure, and I hope that article editors will continue to rise to that challenge as they have done here. I will close in 3 days unless new issues are brought to light or someone else closes the discussion before me. Geometry guy 20:40, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- As the nominator, I feel this is the correct course of action and do not really see the need to wait three days. However, there is no rush.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:52, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I concur with Geometry guy and Tony. Majoreditor (talk) 02:44, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]