Jump to content

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Glen P. Robinson/archive2

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by GrahamColm 14:17, 10 March 2012 [1].

Glen P. Robinson

[edit]

Glen P. Robinson (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Toolbox
Nominator(s): Disavian (talk) 16:19, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because I believe it meets the criteria. The last FAC, started on Nov 8 and closed on Dec 12, made it all the way down the page with only one reviewer; User:Fifelfoo proposed some excellent changes. Hopefully, this nomination will receive a bit more love than that one did. :) Disavian (talk) 16:19, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments --Sp33dyphil ©hatontributions 08:32, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Source review - spotchecks not done, no comment on source comprehensiveness. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:47, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Image appears unproblematic, though I don't have OTRS access to verify. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:03, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I had a look at the ticket; it's all in order. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:25, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support on content coverage, source quality, toolbox issues, citation formatting, inflation per last time's explanations, I think I spotchecked a few of the sources last time, I remember having gone through a fairly detailed process with this. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:31, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose. Quite short compared to most FAs, which isn't a criterion in and of itself, but I think it's indicative of a lack of comprehensiveness (criterion 1b) given some of the comments I've made below (such as a two-decade gap). Prose is choppy, and difficult to follow in places (1a), multiple examples below, and it relies far too heavily on non-independent sources for my liking (1c), see my last bullet point. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:25, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • References in the lead are a pet hate of mine. They're not against the FA criteria per se, but per WP:LEADCITE, they shouldn't be there if not necessary (because the lead is intended to summarise what is written and cited in the body)
      • FAC reviewers seem to go back and forth on whether leads should have citations. However, since this is a BLP, I would err on the side of leaving them, even though the information isn't really contentious, simply because the mood and policy seems to swing so wildly about this. LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • a physics graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) with both Bachelor's and Master's degrees seems like poor grammar to me. Perhaps it's an Americanism, but something seems odd about the structure "X graduate of Y with both A and B". It also makes it sound like he got both at the same time. Perhaps "graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) with a Bachelor's, and later Master's degree..."?
      • Perhaps is is an Americanism, but it's a style choice made, it seems, for brevity, and is expanded upon properly in the body of the article. I did re-work the structure to the form "a graduate of Y with both A and B in X," however, since that did seem to flow a little better. LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Why are Bacherlor's and Master's capitalised?
    • Is it necessary to repeat "Florida" in the Early life and education section?
    • Some time after his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia, in 1937, Robinson opened a small machine shop—you either have too many or too few commas there, depending on what you're trying to say. Is it that the family moved in 1937, and he opened a shop at some point after that? If so, just say that!
    • Don't abbreviate to WWII in prose
    • Did he enlist voluntarily or was he conscripted?
      • As far as I know, no source specifies this. At least for American WWII veterans, it's uncommon for written accounts of their lives to distinguish between whether they were drafted or they were a volunteer unless they were a volunteer before the U.S. officially entered the war. Short of actually asking the man (which I believe would constitute original research), it's unlikely we'll ever know. LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • I would like to note that this source uses the language "Within a few months, he enlisted in the Navy Signal Corps as a technician responsible for installing telephone systems on re-captured Pacific islands." - which would imply that he enlisted rather than being conscripted. However, I'm not sure I feel confident making that assumption from one sentence in one source. Disavian (talk) 15:38, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Robinson was also a member of Georgia Tech's prestigious secret society, the ANAK Society.—I'm sure you can think of a more interesting way of phrasing that that doesn't ruin the prose.
      • I presume your issue is the repetition of "society." This was the result of not piping a link to the article that is titled with the full name of the organization, which includes "society." Since I suppose it's been established that it's a society, I've shortened it to just "ANAK." LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • too many sentences starting with "Robinson"—variety is the spice of life
    • One of his ham radio friends was actually his boss's boss and EES director, Gerald Rosselot.—what does that mean and why is it significant?
    • Prose doesn't flow well throughout the "Early life and education" section
    • In 1950, Robinson went to Tennessee to work in nuclear engineering for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, servicing radiology-related equipment at local hospitals.—Why did he move to Tennessee to do that?
    • bought all but one of the original investors What does the mean? Do you mean bought *out*? And if so, why all but one?
    • Years later, the school would promote Scientific Atlanta's origins at Georgia Tech, and Scientific Atlanta has been a longtime financial contributor to Georgia Tech. Is it really necessary (or neutral) to put that there? It smacks of "I told you so!"
      • I disagree. Most of the rest of the article's characterization of Georgia Tech's attitude toward Scientific Atlanta (and vice-versa) was almost adversarial, so it's important to note that, that is no longer the prevailing attitude. If the initial conflicts weren't so entwined with Robinson's professional biography, I'd be inclined to agree that this is unnecessary, but since they are, a characterization of the present relationship between the two entities is necessary to maintain neutrality. LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Scientific Atlanta helped NASA establish ground stations for communications with astronauts during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. That's a very abrupt sentence. When? Why? What specifically did the company do? What does this have to do with Robinson?
    • When John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 on Mercury-Atlas 6, his voice was transmitted and received by radio antennas designed with equipment built by Scientific Atlanta—interesting, but what makes that more than trivia?
    • Ted Turner purchased one of Scientific Atlanta's first satellite systems, which formed the basis of Turner's "Super Station" that was broadcast around the country to other cable providers. Tell the reader who Ted Turner is in this context.
      • In this context, it's really only necessary to know that he's the owner of a "Super Station," which I believe is adequately conveyed. Further information is served by clicking on the wikilink to Turner's article.LaMenta3 (talk) 21:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Robinson remained CEO of Scientific Atlanta for 20 years, and chairman of the board for an additional eight years, until he retired from the company in 1979. That's a big jump. What did he do in the intervening 20-odd years?
    • Legacy section—that list of positions should be prose (at the minute it reads like a bulleted list, only with the bullet points removed)
    • Of the 40 sources cited, 25 are connected to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which I don't think can be considered an independent source for information on its alumni; of the remaining most appear to be press releases, web pages for various companies with which the subject has been involved, and new article about products produced by his companies, but the majority of the biographical information comes from Georgia Tech. That's not sufficient to meet 1c in my opinion.
      • I have a hard time believing that a nontrivial number of those Georgia Tech-related sources are not sufficiently neutral and reliable for our purposes. They're published by a variety of people and organizations related to the school, and a few of them appear to be of a historical motivation; for example, this particularly informative source is that man's PhD dissertation in History of Technology. Deriding a source simply because it is related to Georgia Tech is like deriding a source because the author lived in the same city as the subject. Disavian (talk) 15:55, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. I broadly agree with HJ Mitchell's comments above. Here are a few additional prose comments:

Early life and education
Scientific Atlanta
  • "... Robinson bought all but one of the original investors". How do you buy an investor?
  • "... his voice was transmitted and received by radio antennas designed with equipment built by Scientific Atlanta." That's not all clear. Was it the antennas that were designed by Scientific Atlanta or were they designed by some equipment produced by Scientific Atlanta?
  • "Years later, the school would promote Scientific Atlanta's origins at Georgia Tech, and Scientific Atlanta has been a longtime financial contributor to Georgia Tech." That's a very awkward tense switch, from "would" to "has been". And what school are we talking about anyway?
  • "... it received $3.1 million in revenue in 1962". You don't receive revenue.
Legacy
  • "... in 2006 he was awarded with the Joseph Mayo Pettit Alumni Distinguished Service Award." You're just "awarded", not "awarded with".
  • "Since 1995, Scientific Atlanta has sponsored scholarships in Robinson's name for children of Scientific Atlanta employees." Rather laboured repetition of the company's name. Why not just "its employees", or "their employees"?

Malleus Fatuorum 20:46, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]


The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Glen_P._Robinson/archive2&oldid=1138461639"