Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Joseph Barbera

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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 promoted by User:SandyGeorgia 03:08, 29 September 2008 [1].

Joseph Barbera[edit]

Nominator(s): — Rlevse • Talk •


Influential American animator. — Rlevse • Talk • 01:26, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • As a note, a large chunk of this article appear to be cited to Joseph Barbera's autobiography. This is not wrong, per se, just something that other reviewers should be aware of and watch for unintential bias.
  • http://insidepulse.com/article_v3.php?contentid=63600 dealinks
    • I cut the link from article. — Rlevse • Talk • 13:14, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Otherwise sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:03, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Here's what I found upon reviewing this article: The article's done in the same format as the now-FA William Hanna, so I tried to keep that in mind, since I found some semantics that I didn't care too much for. The numbers after the citations for the book page numbers irk me for some reason. Granted if no one else has had issues with them then I won't worry about them. The sentence "He worked on cartoons such as Cubby Bear, and Rainbow Parades and also co-produced Tom and Jerry; who were a couple of boys, unrelated to his later cat-and-mouse series." feels run-on-ish. Or maybe it's just the comma after Cubby Bear, which is unnecessary (i'll remove it myself, no need to worry). The sentence "The two brought different skills to the company; Barbera was a skilled gag writer and sketch artist, while Hanna had a gift for timing, story construction, and recruiting top artists." feels like it needs a citation, though maybe I'm just being bureaucratic. It seems like the idea is cited in the legacy section, though not in those words. That being said, this was a really enjoyable read, not often I can read an article all the way through without a problem these days. My only concern(s) are quite minor, so I feel comfortable Supporting this for an FA. I think I put edit #50,000 to good use. Wizardman 16:18, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, after getting Hanna to FA, I decided to work on this one since they were business partners for some 60 years. Glad you enjoyed it. Did you read Hanna too? — Rlevse • Talk • 16:29, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • I have read Hanna. Just realized how similar the two articles are :P Then again it makes sense. Wizardman 20:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Comment- In the infobox, nationality is listed as Sicilian, but shouldn't it be American ? Wasn't he an American citizen ? Sicilian can be ethnic origin. Taprobanus (talk) 16:21, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I guess that depends on how you define nationality. I've seen other bios on Americans list their ethnic background that way. To make it clearer, I changed it to "Sicilian-American". Is that okay? — Rlevse • Talk • 16:29, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • I've struck out the comment and support the nominationTaprobanus (talk) 13:24, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Comments by karanacs. You certainly got this one up to snuff quickly ;) A few small things:
    • I think I would remove the sentence about his maternal grandmother. The article says that his parents were both of Sicilian descent and it seems a bit odd to me to hear about only one of his four grandparents.
      • rm'd and moved to talk page for the record
    • Any information on what Barbera did between the time that MGM closed them down and the time he began working with Hanna?
      • absolutely nothing. the period btwn MGM and H-B seems to have been VERY short and is called short-lived in Hanna's article. In Barbera's autobio he jumps from the MGM shutdown straight to the formation of H-B (pp 112-116 of the autobio), briefly mentioning Hanna's short try that other company. Barbera seems to have been unemployed in the interim, but doesn't come out and say so. Is not mentioning this speculation the best way to go for the Barbera article?
    • Is there any useful information on Barbera's social circles? It is mentioned twice in the article that he enjoyed high society, and I wondered if there was anything else that would be useful to include to help us learn more about his character.
      • he seems to have enjoyed dining out, drinking, parties, and hanging out with Hollywood celebs. Is this what you're loooking for?
        • I just wondered if there were any anecdotes that might spice up the article a bit.
          • I'll look for something...added bit on Zsa Zsa

Karanacs (talk) 00:35, 24 September 2008 (UTC) Karanacs (talk) 21:24, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment I do agree with Wizardman that the referencing style is a bit awkward; it's a little rough on the eyes. By the way, I'd recommend that his nationality be listed as American, not Sicilian-American. Not to split hairs here, but he wasn't from Sicily, he was from the U.S. --Midnightdreary (talk) 18:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I found this template has an ethnicity option, so I used that for Sicilian and nationality for American here and on the Hanna (Irish for him) article. That should solve that problem. — Rlevse • Talk • 00:39, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Very nice, especially with Hanna being FA. Sumoeagle179 (talk) 10:25, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Notes: I'm not sure where the guideline is or if it exists, but I don't think that method of providing the pronunciation in the lead is the way it's done. I don't know where you go about finding out about IPA pronunciation. Please watch the endashes in infoboxes: I fixed them. I agree the citation method is very hard on the eyes, but not against guidelines; more importantly, it doesn't use correct endashes on page ranges (if this is an issue on past FAs that use this citation method, you can ask User:Brighterorange to run his script on all of them). I'll continue reading/commenting later: I'm getting an unacceptable and absurd amount of Wikimedia Foundation errors that prevent me from doing anything productive, for the third day. There's a duplicate ref (pls make sure named refs are used correctly, see Whitworth, and the page number is listed incorrectly there as a plural, and why is the page number formatting on that citation different than on others, inconsistent). Sustained attention to citation cleanup is needed here. I can't make any progress because of the Wikimedia Foundation errors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:09, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Rm'd pronunciation as it's not required anyway. Besides, I can't find anyone that knows IPA. I fixed the Whitworth ref, one was from a JSTOR copy and one from a web copy. — Rlevse • Talk • 20:32, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some comments:
    • TV.com is a tertiary source and doesn't meet WP:V.
    • A press release from Time Warner isn't a neutral source and is inappropriate; so is WireImage (OR-ish). The citations to them can be replaced by "The Acadeny of Television Arts & Sciences on Wednesday unveiled a 1,200-pound bronze wall sculpture, dedicated to animators and show creators Joseph Barbera and the late William Hanna, at its Hall of Fame Plaza in North Hollywood." in the March 17, 2005 edition of Daily Variety.
    • {{rp}} kills the readability of the text. I'd really love it if you used parenthetical refs or Harvard refs like I'm doing here.
    • The prose seems a bit choppy to me, especially with a lot of paragraphs being only three sentences or so. Perhaps it's the subconscious effect of those {{rp}}s all over the place. I'll print it out sans refs and give it another read.
    • What's up with the links to Google Books in the references? I've never seen that before - is this commonplace and it's just that I'm just out of touch? :/

east718 // talk // email // 05:25, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Google books simply give the reader an easy way to read and verify the ref. RP is a valid format. Fixed the TW/Wireimage ref issue. More later. — Rlevse • Talk • 10:01, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed TV.com ref. If you have specific suggestions on the prose, please let me know. — Rlevse • Talk • 22:44, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose you're right about gbooks - it must have slipped my mind that it's public. Usually, I avoid linking to subscription repositories such as JSTOR, since the links will be of use to only a small number of people. I also appreciate that {{rp}} is a valid format, but you have to appreciate that it does hurt the readability. Maybe it's just me, but I find that "Barbera was an influential American animator (Doe 17; Roe 22). Lorem ipsum..." flows much better than "Barbera was an influential American animator.[21]:17 [22]:22 Lorem ipsum..." - this in addition to {{rp}} being an invented, non-standard and generally unintuitive citation system. Just to show that the problem exists, I printed out the page without the references and the prose read great. east718 // talk // email // 17:44, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your concern with RP but why do those numbers interfere with readability and not footnote numbers? They're all numbers and right beside each other. — Rlevse • Talk • 17:52, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's the part that's bedeviling me... I know that the page reads better without them, but not why. :P Perhaps I'm alone in this though. I wouldn't be willing to go through the grunt work of flipping the entire citation format of the article because of a half-hearted objection like mine, either. east718 // talk // email // 17:59, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. Fair enough. Interesting too that no one complained about RP during William Hanna's FAC run. BTW, I can't stand Harvard format. — Rlevse • Talk • 18:03, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Random, drive-by comment, but two people "complained" about RP on Hanna's talk page before its FAC nom, so it hasn't exactly been uncontested. The format's nonstandard, nonacademic structure bothers me. María (habla conmigo) 13:15, 28 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to go on record and say I agree that this referencing system is really truly horrible and seriously impedes readability. Not against any guideline, though. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:48, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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