Wikipedia:Featured article review/OpenBSD/archive2

OpenBSD

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• Featured article candidates/OpenBSD
• Featured article candidates/OpenBSD/Archive1

• Featured article review/OpenBSD/archive1
• Featured article review/OpenBSD/archive2

Notified: Tony Sidaway, Risc64, Mindmatrix, Guy Harris, Czar, WikiProject Cryptography, WikiProject Computer science, WikiProject Free software, WikiProject Software, WikiProject Computing, WikiProject Open

Review comments

I am nominating this featured article for review because in the ten years since the FAC and six years since the previous FA review, the article has undergone significant changes (see the article from 2006) and has fallen short of FA criteria in several areas:

1(a): Not particularly well-written, mostly bland technical writing.

1(b): Not comprehensive, very brief in several sections.

1(c): Citations are lacking in several areas, particularly sections 2-4.

2(a): Five paragraphs in lead; much of this content probably belongs in the main article but not the lead.

I have notified several users above who have contributed a fair amount to the article, as well as one user who also thought this should be brought to FAR. I also notified the projects that have this article listed as Top or High priority. The user who initially brought it to FA, as well as the user who initiated the previous FAR, are both inactive, and the article only averages one edit every 2.1 days as it was only heavily edited during the initial FAC around 2005-06. However, there should be a few users that I notified above and others in the WikiProjects who would be willing to help improve the article and possibly work to keep it as FA (although it does need a considerable amount of work).

I also have a basic peer review of the article that could improve it somewhat to start:

• American vs. British spellings: License and licence both used in lead
• OpenBSD Project: P should be lowercase
• “M:tier” in quotes: not sure if this is proper
• Component and third party sections: Too listy
• Development, 3rd PP: Inverted quotes (double within single)

Tonystewart14 (talk) 14:46, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Comment - Gosh, this really has been battered to death since the last FAR. It's practically unrecognizable and nowhere near even GA status. Lots of unsourced text, lots of choppy sections, probably requires a complete rewrite. --Laser brain (talk) 15:16, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

• My comments are on the article's talk page but in short, the unsourced sections are alone enough work to warrant the delisting. The prose also is a long way from brilliant. I'd be curious what it would be like to rebuild from its 2006 state as opposed to blowing it up and starting over. Good luck to anyone who takes it on  czar 15:33, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

• Sometimes I advocate a blanket revert to the last known good state, but that obviously wouldn't be appropriate here because of everything that's probably occurred with an active OS. It looks like Tony Sidaway updated the article quite a bit in June 2012. I'd love to hear their opinion, but it looks like they have not edited actively in recent times. --Laser brain (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

• As noted above, I did notify Tony Sidaway and a few others who had made some recent edits. Tony's last edit to this article was in July 2015, so he might still be around and provide some good comments. I think the 2006 version, and to some extent even the current one, could be used as templates for sources and content and build from there. It'll be a lot of work, but doesn't need to be from scratch. Tonystewart14 (talk) 16:37, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

• Comment: Reading through this article, it's B-class content at best, and probably closer to C-class. There exist gaps in the history section, no section or significant discussion on the features of OpenBSD, the majority of the article discusses more minor aspects (funding, security, etc.). The present content is fine although needing of a copyedit; however substantial expansion is needed to bring this article to even a GA. Esquivalience ^t 23:43, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
• I also noticed that there are mostly named references, with a few exceptions which were likely added more recently. There were some references added to the lead since the start of this FAR, so if there's a consensus to continue having all sources be named refs at the end of the article, we could standardize this throughout. Tonystewart14 (talk) 18:25, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
• I'm still around. It looks as if this nomination has brought renewed attention to the article, resulting in attempts to improve it. That's good news. On the use of the spellings licence and license in the lede, note that these are the normal British spellings of the noun and the verb respectively according to the OED, which also lists licence as an accepted variant spelling for the verb. I no longer remember whether the article is supposed to be in any particular dialect and I have no strong opinions on which dialect the article should be written in. --TS 01:49, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

• Nice to see you Tony. I agree that User:Michael Reed has done a great job so far and the article is improving rapidly. For the license spelling, I went ahead and changed it to the American version since that was the spelling used in 35 out of 37 instances in the article. Tonystewart14 (talk) 03:52, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

FARC comments

Concerns raised in the review section included prose, coverage, and sourcing. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:21, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

• Michael Reed has done a great job of cleaning up the article. I have also made some changes, and several others have contributed occasionally. I would have to agree with another comment above, however, that the article will probably need a rewrite to be FA-quality. We can use the improved existing version and compare it with older versions to develop a structure for the article that will ensure complete coverage while also being up-to-date. Tonystewart14 (talk) 02:40, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
• Also, I noticed the article has had 175 edits in the past three weeks, whereas the article only had one edit every two weeks or so before. It may be well short of FA criteria, but that's a wonderful statistic! Tonystewart14 (talk) 07:29, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

• Laser, czar, Esquivalience, any comments on the changes made? Nikkimaria (talk) 03:53, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

• I still see a few glaring issues: the number of one-sentence paragraphs, the short sections (if the section needs to be short, perhaps you kill the section heading?), the unsourced lists (are they even necessary?), and there's a whole lot of primary source referencing going on for a featured article. There's no secondary source that covers this stuff?  czar 03:56, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

• Perhaps it would be best to make a list of all the sources in the current article and separate them by primary and secondary sources. This might help improve a rewritten article in that regard. Tonystewart14 (talk) 08:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

• The article is much better from all the massaging done in the past two months. However, I still do not know from the article thefeatures that OpenBSD has, instead focusing on the development process, a whole section on relatively minor things such as marketing and funding, etc. Although I would be comfortable giving it B-class status and GA with some more focus on features instead of less important things, it would be much, much better served with a rewrite. I would move to demote to B-class. — Esquivalience (talk) 04:01, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

• That would be best for now, and would allow us to do GAN and FAC after the rewrite. Tonystewart14 (talk) 08:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

• Delist, sorry. As Esquivalience notes, it's a strong B-class but needs a lot of work. Inadequate lead, stubby paragraphs (some of which are unsourced), and substandard writing. --Laser brain (talk) 19:42, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
• A note: I am working on a rewrite here, but it could take months before it even reaches GA quality. Any help in developing the rewrite is appreciated. — Esquivalience (talk) 00:42, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
  • I'll try to check it every so often and contribute as I can. I'm working on bringing another article to FAC, but want to get this article back to FA quality. I mentioned an idea earlier about going through sources and identifying more that are not self-sourced, such as openbsd.org, to address the above concern and provide a better foundation for the rest of the rewrite. That might help some. Tonystewart14 (talk) 08:58, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks for starting the rewrite; I definitely plan on contributing when I can. The troublesome thing, however, is that a lot of OpenBSD's newer features—security or otherwise—only seem documented via primary sources. There are a lot of ~10 year old OpenBSD USENIX publications, but any newer security features seem only documented in manual pages, blog posts, and self-published papers at http://openbsd.org/papers (see pledge(), for example). Michael Reed (talk) 10:30, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
    • Have you looked at Michael Lucas's Absolute OpenBSD second edition? It's from 2013 so it won't cover stuff like pledge(2) or even LibreSSL, but it's probably the most authoritative and complete secondary source on the OS to date. --TS 21:48, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
      • Thanks for the suggestion, but I have already looked at Absolute OpenBSD; it has an 8-page section that covers W^X, guard pages, address space layout randomization, ProPolice, securelevels, and file flags, but nothing more. So while Absolute OpenBSD is lacking in information on security features, it's much more complete in regards to everything else. The book is, after all, for end-users... or so I think. Michael Reed (talk) 03:00, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
• Closing note: This removal candidate has been delisted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please leave the {{featured article review}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:17, 3 September 2016 (UTC)