Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Game of Change/archive1

Game of Change

Featured article candidates/Game of Change/archive1

Nominator(s): IagoQnsi (talk) 18:22, 6 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a historic basketball game played in 1963, and marked the first time that a major team from Mississippi faced a team with black players. The current article is not terribly different from the version that passed GA in 2020, but after talking with some kind folks at WCNA, I decided to seek my first FA while sitting here in the auditorium awaiting the debrief session. Many thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this and provide feedback. IagoQnsi (talk) 18:22, 6 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Link college basketball on first use in body
Link Loyola on first use in body
"that he couldn't play him" => "that he could not play him"
Link Miss State on first use in body
"who'd had a first round bye" => "who had received a first round bye"
"including State Sen." - write this in full, at least on the first usage
"including Gov. Ross R. Barnett." - write in full
Nowhere do you mention when this game was given the title "Game of Change" or by whom - is this known?
That's it :-) -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 10:10, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@ChrisTheDude: Thanks for the review! I went ahead and made all of those style fixes. As for the name origin, I posted on the talk page with some research a while back. It seems to have be coined by the creators of the 2008 documentary Game of Change. I don't have a source that explicitly states that the film invented the name, but I realized that simply describing the film's existence would probably be valuable; perhaps we can trust readers to connect the dots. I expanded the Legacy section to add a bit of info about the film; would you mind taking another look at it? Thanks, IagoQnsi (talk) 23:45, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 07:28, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Airship

A quick question to start: why is a very large part of the article sourced to contemporary newspaper sources, and not to the useful-looking books consigned to the "Further reading" section? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:09, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I often tend to favor citing a source that's more accessible to readers, so I make heavy use of Newspapers.com clippings. Michael Lenehan's book Ramblers, Russell Henderson's article in Journal of Southern History, and Alexander Wolff's article "Ghosts of Mississippi" were the main works that I used to figure out the broad strokes of the article, but I often wanted a bit more detail than they provided and thus ended up citing newspapers from the time. –IagoQnsi (talk) 14:02, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, that method is often troublesome—if an author actively chooses what parts of the article "deserve" more detail, you often end up with questions over balance and weighting (aka criterion 1d); not to mention that 1c) places comprehensivity above accessibility).

To take one example: Lenehan's Ramblers pp. 193–196 places a good deal of emphasis on the personal role Babe McCarthy played in getting the Mississippi team to the tournament. Not surprisingly, such behind-the-scenes action would not have appeared at all in the newspapers of the time—and consequently the current article eschews any mention of his role.

I have only checked a couple of pages of Ramblers, but I already see the problems that excessive use of primary sourcing often cause. I would recommend that you withdraw this candidacy, and try to work in as much detail from the academic sources as possible, only relying on newspaper sourcing at the very last need, before renominating. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:29, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@AirshipJungleman29 and Generalissima: Thanks for the feedback. I originally built the article based on the academic sources, but then dug in to find newspaper articles for more depth. I did not give more weight to the additional details that I found; the extra sources just gave me more flexibility in terms of phrasing, quotes, etc. I think this was valuable in some places, but I also see that I should have focused more on citing the academic sources.

I've reworked the citations and now just about everything in the background, game summary, and aftermath sections is backed up by Lenehan, Veazey, Henderson, or Wolff. I've also expanded some of the weaker parts of these sections with a lot more detail, including McCarthy's role in pushing for NCAA participation as you mentioned. I have kept several of the contemporary newspaper citations in the article, but the article is not strictly dependent on them. Please let me know what you think; I really appreciate your detailed feedback! Thanks, IagoQnsi (talk) 05:06, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Generalissima

Echoing Airship, I think it'd be a good idea to cite the books in addition to the newspapers. Primary sources are fine for support, but they should never be your main building blocks for something that's covered in academic sources. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 14:26, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]