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. Read words to watch per MoS. Brad (talk) 22:41, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

That the prose here is "not encyclopedic style" is your personal opinion. It is not typical Wikipedia style, but that's simply because the vast majority of editors cannot write half as well as Bishonen and would create a huge, unreadable mess if they tried to, and because many articles were written peacemeal by a large number of editors plagiarising from who knows where, adding ungrammatical sentences, and then trying to somehow turn the result into something that makes sense without properly rewriting anything. Wikipedia does not and should not have rules against good style. The "independent observation" you are relying on is from an account that was blocked as a sock after 4 edits, together with 3 other accounts. [2] Hans Adler 23:32, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

My first time at FAR, but the above asks for independent observations. I defer to those more experienced regarding citations, etc., but I think the fact that the prose of the article is engaging and colourful is to be celebrated. Our concept of encyclopaedic style is pretty broad and I hope that doesn't mean all of our articles need to be dry as dust. While the tolerance levels for authorial colour may necessarily be restricted for BLP's and the like, surely there is no harm in it in this context. So I'm left a bit scratching my head at the claim that this FA suffers from "peacock words" or "reads like a review" - seems to me it gets into the spirit of things and therefore makes a subject that might otherwise be dull for the random reader quite engaging. (An extreme case of this is Eats, Shoots & Leaves). Let's encourage and celebrate articles written like this one rather than pushing them to "conform". Martinp (talk) 14:43, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Glad to hear it, Martin, thank you. I only just saw your comment; I'll proceed to do what I came here for; post a reply to Brad101. Bishonen | talk 20:00, 6 December 2011 (UTC).

• @Brad101. I was sure your nomination was made in good faith, and I responded in the same spirit, Brad, trying to address what I though your major concern: the shortage of inline citation, which I agree about. And I undertook to return to the other concerns later. You have given your opinion of my response — "a lot of tl;dr and arguing the meaning of terms" — but haven't addressed any of it. If you'd got a bit farther than you did in reading it, you'd have seen me acknowledging that inline cites are needed, and proposing to add them for Milhous, the source for most of the longer sections. And you might have seen me ask a direct question, namely if you thought adding "Main article" templates would help some concerns. None of that worth a glance, let alone imparting advice on?

You don't often see tl;dr in civil wiki society. Not unless somebody has been wearing out your patience with a lot of irrelevant ramblings. Why do you speak to me like that, Brad? Am I personally offensive to you in some way? Do we have some disagreeble history (I can't remember any) or did I talk too academically above, and it sounded conceited? I don't think I come off as the uni professor in most of my wikipedia communication, but "The Relapse" is a sort of academic article, so there's bound to be a touch of that when I discuss concerns over it, especially in matters of referencing and verifiability. Those are also matters that inevitably do run long, see all over FAC. Or was it the "if I can face it"? That was a personal confession that I hate returning to old articles. I do understand that that can be necessary, and was prepared to do it to keep a FA in trim for the sake of the encyclopedia, but it's just.. it's boring. I have a threshold of reluctance to climb. :-( Don't know if that's universal, or just me.

I can't see where I argued the meaning of any terms, perhaps you'd like to specify. My response to your nomination took me a long time to write, and of course I'm now sorry I wasted that time. If it needs saying, I won't actually be returning to this page to address any more of your points. (But I will probably post on Talk:The Relapse about the driveby tags you have added to the article.) As for editing the article to bring it in line with current FA standards, well.. I'll try to gird myself for it, but frankly, it's probably not going to happen. This is a lazy time for me for personal reasons (see the top of my talkpage if you're intolerably curious about them), plus my threshold of reluctance just got higher. Bishonen | talk 20:00, 6 December 2011 (UTC).

• P.S. Anybody who's genuinely interested in this FAR might like to take a look at Talk:The Relapse, where Rex and I have now posted about Brad's tags to warn readers how bad the article is, so they don't risk taking it seriously. Bishonen | talk 00:35, 7 December 2011 (UTC).

• The article reads, in my humble opinion, as a well researched and equally well written piece. I believe that Featured article criterion number 1(a) requires it to be "well-written: its prose is engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard." I'm in no position to judge how much has to be paid to make writing 'professional', but I fancy that I am able to spot engaging prose – and this is undoubtedly so.

Without anything more specific to substantiate the {{review}} and {{peacock}} templates, I am at a loss to address those concerns. Since Template:Review#Usage requires "Add a new item to the talk page explaining the problem so editors will know what to address, and when to remove this tag" and nothing related has appeared on the talk page, I've removed the misused {{review}} template. I'd suggest that Talk:The Relapse#Cleanup templates is the correct place to seek consensus on the removal of the {{peacock}} template, should no further explanation of its placement be forthcoming.

I would make one small suggestion to assuage the concerns expressed by Brad. At the end of the ante-penultimate paragraph of The Relapse cast section (or penultimate if you treat the quotation as part of the last paragraph), Cibber is described as having a "squeaky personality". Now, that may be the phrase employed in the source, but modern English is dynamic and current usage associates "squeaky" too strongly with "voice" or with the idiomatic compound adjective "squeaky clean" for the phrase to ring true now. It jars slightly in my reading because of the immediate mental association with "clean" - which is a doubtful epithet for Cibber, even more so in the context of the imprinting of his personality onto Lord Foppington. Consequently, I'd recommend removing "squeaky", or perhaps searching for a new mot juste to convey what the source intended. Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 22:14, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Cibber's "squeaky voice" in the first line of the same paragraph is from the Cibber entry in the Highfill etc,Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. I probably did go too far (as in, did editorialise) in applying it to his entire (acting) personality when I rounded off the paragraph in the last sentence. I'll try to think of another way of putting it. Bishonen | talk 00:35, 7 December 2011 (UTC).

• Can't see any problems with the writing style, perhaps the person who thought it had peacock problems is using the term in a different way to how I normally see it used ("The Scrotums" are the greatest band to come out of Camden Town since Madness...yeah, right!). There have been some changes in custom and practice to do with references - quotations now always have an inline citation for example, and there's no reference or footnote for Sheridan's version of the play, even though it is quoted. These would be easily fixed by any editor, as would adding ISBN's (indeed, whoever tagged it could have done that job). The general style of separate footnotes and references with fewer inline citations is still in use by WP:MILHIST - who generally prefer not to overcite articles (except for claims of numbers killed in battles, and the performance of the fly-by-wire english longbow). Indeed, 5 citations per 10 words is usually a sign of very contentious content, got out between clenched teeth or under mortar fire. Unless one actually takes exception to any of an article such as this (or wants to pirate it for homework) there is no reason to cite every sentence. Elen of the Roads (talk) 00:17, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Elen. I was going to improve the sourcing but, as I say above, I lost momentum when my proposals for doing that were rudely dismissed by the nominator. Maybe later. The FAR delegates should feel free to de-feature it in the meantime, I don't really care. (That's the upside of being less than interested in my old work.) But for the ISBNs, Elen, on principle, I wish you wouldn't encourage people to add them. Some people seem to think ISBNs are compulsory, or recommended for FAs or something, but that's not the case. Please see my talkpage post where I argue the case against including them. Bishonen | talk 00:35, 7 December 2011 (UTC).

Indeed. The ISBN can be helpful when one is citing specific pages and the book has appeared in a variety of formats, but even then a full citation is usually sufficient to establish one has a copy of the same edition, size and shape, unless we are talking about something like Mrs Beeton, which exists in hundreds of versions. Elen of the Roads (talk) 00:52, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

As somebody who has added very many ISBNs in his time, and who continues to add them, let me third this. ISBNs can be very helpful indeed (and we needn't be discouraged by the fact that no dead-tree style guide that's taken seriously recommends, let alone prescribes, their inclusion). They're for when one really does have a single edition in mind. Often, however, more than one edition fits the bill, and then the ISBN for one of these editions is a mere distraction and can mislead the reader. (Incidentally, even for their purpose of specifying a particular edition of a particular book, they're not always helpful: see a conspicuously long footnote to this article.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:59, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

• Comment - There hasn't been much talk here since the initial flurry, so I'm hoping to get some additional input... Do the editors commenting here feel that the article in its current state can be kept as a featured article, or does it not meet the WP:Featured article criteria? Please consider that there are still two cleanup tags on the article, which should be dealt with regardless of any other issues that may be present. Bishonen, I know that you had been considering reworking the article - if you would still like to and/or need more time to consider, please let me know. Dana boomer (talk) 00:19, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Other than Bishonen's drones removing the tags I placed, no further effort has been made to address the problems. 1a, 1c, and 2c. Time for FARC. Brad (talk) 13:04, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Like I've said, I don't much mind if the article is FARCd or defeatured. It's Wikipedia's, not "mine", so presumably I don't have to feel responsible for it. Especially as my attempt to take responsibility on December 5 only got me a pie in the face from Brad (see above). Please move it to FARC if you like.

But my "drones"? That's infamous. It presumably refers to the sex life of bees, casting me as Queen bee and User:RexxS as one of my drones. (As for the plural droneS that Brad says removed the tags, they're in his head; nobody other than myself and Rex has removed any tags.) That's not something I need to put up with for the crime of writing a FA back in the dawn of time, and even less something to be flung at Rex for posting civil disagreement with Brad on this page and at Talk:The Relapse. Brad, I hereby request you to strike through your infamous slur and to post no further attacks. WP:FAR isn't AFAIK a free zone for any and all attacks, or an overseas territory of Wikipedia Review in our midst.

@Dana Boomer: You're an admin, Dana. Do you intend to block Brad, for being this far out of line? Or to warn him, a proper stern warning on his talkpage? I merely ask, because if not, I will post this business on WP:ANI. I'd rather not, because I think it's feeble for admins to complain on ANI about PA's against themselves, and I never have before. But since the most direct slur was directed against Rex, I would feel justified this time. On another note, Dana, how do you mean, there are still cleanup tags on the article? I removed the last of Brad's drive-by tags on December 9, after first explaining my objections to them on the talkpage and giving Brad plenty of time to respond. Nobody has put them back, and nobody has responded on the talkpage either. In fact Brad has never addressed anybody's arguments or answered anybody's questions in connection with this nomination. I'm nonplussed and frustrated by the way he'll only weigh in when he has a pie to throw. Is all of WP:FAR this kind of sham? Bishonen | talk 17:45, 1 January 2012 (UTC).

I've warned him; I would much prefer he engage here and this issue be resolved rather than anyone be blocked. Bishonen, there's a {{refimprove}} and a {{deadlink}} in the Notes section; that's likely what Dana was referring to. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:01, 1 January 2012 (UTC)