Wikipedia:Featured article review/The Relapse/archive1

The Relapse

The Relapse (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured article candidates/The Relapse

• Featured article review/The Relapse/archive1

Notified: Bishonen (no other editors have over 13 edits to article since 2006) Projects: Theatre and Books.

Article was promoted in 2005. Notices about the lack of citations were given in 2008 and 2009 but little has been accomplished. The first page of the article history goes back to 2006, for example.

• 1a The article reads like a review of The Relapse and it has many peacock terms and weasel words. Some examples:

• This unusual document is signed by nine men and six women, all established professional actors, and details a disreputable jumble of secret investments and "farmed" shares, making the case that owner chicanery rather than any failure of audience interest was at the root of the company's financial problems.
• Following the surprising success of this young cast, Vanbrugh and Rich had even greater difficulty in retaining the actors needed for The Relapse.
• John Verbruggen was one of the original rebels and had been offered a share in the actors' company, but became disgruntled when his wife Susanna, a popular comedienne, was not. For Rich, it was a stroke of luck to get Susanna and John back into his depleted and unskilled troupe.

• 1c Overall lack of citations throughout the article. I'm not familiar enough with the article subject but of the sources that are listed, they appear to be acceptable. I'm aware that "plot" sections are not normally cited therefore that section would be exempt.
• 2c The citations that are in place make little sense to me. Page numbers are missing and several of them only point to a "see also" type of reference.
• The above three issues are the most important. If serious work begins then further review will be warranted. Brad (talk) 16:42, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Regarding 1a: I think you misunderstand the purpose of WP:PEACOCK. When talking about the subject of an article, terms like "unusual", "established professional", "surprising success", "popular comedienne" are often inappropriate. That is not because such expressions are bad per se but because when applied to the subject, they are either relevant and should be explained in greater detail using the principle Show, don't tell, or they are not relevant or even false and should be omitted. That's why {{peacock}}, which you have put on the article, says the following: "This article may contain wording that merely promotes the subject without imparting verifiable information. Please remove or replace such wording, unless you can cite independent sources that support the characterization." (The italics are mine.) Moreover, many of the "peacock" terms can be accurate description rather than puffery, depending on context. Let's look at your three examples in detail. I will make my best effort to guess which words you are actually objecting to.

• There is no harm in pointing out that a document is "unusual" if that is the case. For all I know, many documents similar to the one described in the article may have survived from the era. This is a question of verifiability, not style.
• That the signatories are "established professional actors" is a verifiable or falsifiable (or borderline) claim, and relevant in this context.
• That Vanbrugh's previous play, Love's Last Shift was a "surprising success has a precise meaning that is obvious from context: He lost all his experienced actors, had to write something for the unexperienced troupe that remained, and to his surprise it became a success anyway. This created even greater problems for the cast of the play that this article is about.
• Whether Verbruggen's wife was a "popular comedienne" herself, rather than an insignificant one, is absolutely relevant for understanding why he was pissed when she wasn't offered a share. There is no problem with pointing this out unless it's false. Describing her career in great detail ("Within 5 years, the Times printed 12 letters to the editor that praised her for her breeches roles." -- completely made up example) would be totally inappropriate here. This kind of information must be summarised, and sometimes an accurate summary looks like a peacock description.
• You also included the "stroke of luck" sentence. Unless you are also including negative descriptions under "peacock", I just can't see how anything in this sentence could fit. Hans Adler 18:17, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Hans, very good points. None of the "peacock" (?) terms which Brad exemplifies represent my own opinion; nothing in the article does. To start with Susanna Verbruggen, that Brad quotes me as promoting (? is that it?) and via her, start with the actor information generally: when I FAC'd the article way back in the dawn of time, I first wrote more-or-less short articles on all the actors involved, I think. (Well, Thomas Betterton already existed.) Even though these actors were mostly established and highly regarded at the time, actors were barely respectable as a class, and therefore little verifiable information about them has survived. What we do know about them is summarised, and of course fully cited, in the standard work Highfill, Philip Jr, Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward (1973–93), Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, see my "References" section. Thus, I based the article Susanna Verbruggen on the entry "Susanna Verbruggen" in the Biographical Dictionary, and linked to it from "The Relapse", and so with the other actors. (Btw, per MLA, and per common sense, I haven't given page references to entries in an alphabetical dictionary.) I couldn't very well repeat all about her, about John Verbruggen, George Powell, and so on, here; The Relapse is long enough as it is. It's supposed to be in summary style, per FA criterion 4. If you click on the link to Susanna's own article, you'll get the details of how and why she was a "popular comedienne". Though to know I wasn't making stuff up in that article, I guess you'd have to go to a library, probably a first-class academic library, and check the Biographical Dictionary. I'm well aware that that's not realistic for most people, but you just can't get this stuff from webpages. (If you're affiliated with "NC State Unity Users" or "NC State Library Patrons" you can supposedly access the dictionary via prox.lib.ncsu.edu as an online library resource, in case anybody out there is in this fortunate position.[1])

I was green in some respects when I wrote the piece. I guess I must have thought that even without noticing the links to the individual actor bios, it would be sort of obvious to anybody who read the "References" section that the Biographical Dictionary was the origin of all the individual actor information. (My listing for it does say "All details about individual actors are taken from this standard work unless otherwise indicated".) But with more wiki-experience I realise that looking at that section might be a too roundabout, or unfamiliar, procedure for the average reader. What do you think, Brad, would it help if I put a main article template on top of the "Casting" section, which referred to all the relevant actor bios?

As for your other two examples, "This unusual document is signed by nine men and six women, all established professional actors, and details a disreputable jumble of secret investments and "farmed" shares, making the case that owner chicanery rather than any failure of audience interest was at the root of the company's financial problems, and Following the surprising success of this young cast, Vanbrugh and Rich had even greater difficulty in retaining the actors needed for The Relapse, as well as all the other specifics of the breakaway of the established actors from Rich's "Patent Company", come from Milhous, Judith (1979), Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708, as detailed in the current footnote 4. That rather elaborate note is supposed to be a citation for the entire five-line paragraph it's placed after, which includes the "Following the surprising success" sentence you use as an example above. Perhaps that wasn't clear. I should probably put in specific page references to Milhous here and there, as is current practice, and I will if I can face it; but I don't think I'll ever literally footnote every sentence.

You know, if anything, I've downplayed the colourfulness of my sources at every opportunity. The unusual document mentioned was not only unusual but bloody unique, and there are very interesting reasons why the actors, for once, and against all the normal social odds of the period, dared sign such a frank... but never mind, I digress. It's all in Milhous, but it can't all go in this article. It's only about The Relapse, with a summary bit of background to how it came to be written the way it was. Perhaps not summary enough, is my own feeling.

More later. Bishonen | talk 23:36, 4 December 2011 (UTC).

This is a lot of tl;dr and arguing the meaning of terms. The prose in this article is not encyclopedic style and I did my best to describe why. A related independent observation at Talk:Restoration_spectacular#Featured_article_concerns points out the same problem even though I made no mention of prose. I'd welcome the same independent observation here as well. Brad (talk) 22:41, 5 December 2011 (UTC)