Talk:Whose Streets?

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Critical reception section[edit]

Copying in a message from my talk page as it seems like a topic other editors of this page may wish to weigh in on (NB, have removed errant hyphen mentioned).

Dear Innisfree987,

Thanks for the format corrections (always welcome) on the article for the "Whose Streets" documentary, but please undo your heavy-handed removal of others' sensible contributions to the article. To show the documentary's universal acclaim, you can simply add additional positive film review quotes and sources. Also, you added grammatically incorrect material which you may want to correct at the same time (e.g. "universally-positive" is not a hyphenated phrase). Putting the material back in that you removed and adding new material to reflect the "due weight" balance you seek would be preferable to my reverting your edits. Thanks. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whose_Streets%3F&diff=next&oldid=819370888 ... Christian B Martin (talk) 08:33, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello Christian,

It seems to me we have three WP:DUEWEIGHT issues to consider here.

First is the one I mentioned in the edit summary: when a film has overwhelmingly favorable reviews, it's not appropriate for WP to devote close to half the reception section to an unfavorable view.
Next, we must consider due weight within the balance of the entry. Unless there were some reason I'm overlooking that makes reception much more important to understanding this particular film than do its other facets, the reception section seems to me more or less appropriate in length relative to the rest of the entry (if anything, other sections like the synopsis need to be beefed up). Thus trimming the long negative quote seemed a better way to achieve due weight than expanding reception, especially as more positive quotes may be repetitive: concision is a high priority in an encyclopedia, where our goal is to give a summary of information rather than exhaustive detail. If you've read other positive reviews with perspectives missing from the entry as currently written, you might reasonably add those--in tweaking the section a bit to try to be as accurate as possible, it struck me there might be an argument for swapping in better, more representative favorable reviews than the ones currently cited, but it seems very unlikely there would be so many additional, favorable perspectives needed that re-expanding the negative Lane quote to the original length you gave would be in proportion to the existing sources.
Additionally, we need to take care that we accurately represent the underlying source, and not give undue weight to a limited facet of it. When I read the Lane source, it turns out it's a longer piece on multiple works; only four paragraphs deal with Whose Streets?, and three are neutral or lean positive. (Metacritic for instance assesses his review as favorable.) So a briefer statement of the aspect he questioned also, in my view, gives a more proper weight in accurately representing Lane's views.

Hope all that helps explain the reasoning behind my edits. Innisfree987 (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]