Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Milton Friedman/archive1

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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 not promoted 17:25, 29 February 2008.

Milton Friedman[edit]

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I believe this article meets the WP:FA criteria. Gary King (talk) 06:57, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain: Note: at least 3 editors have pledged their help to get this article up to standard, so my vote isn't set in stone. My comments are addressed, but new findings about neutrality, raised by Septentrionalis, force me to abstain. PeterSymonds | talk 12:36, 23 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Addressed comments by PeterSymonds
  • All external links need to have a publisher and an access date. See WP:Citation templates for how to format these.
    • Addressed. (If issues are addressed, just say so. I've removed the tick; the graphics are discouraged because they slow the loading of the page. :) PeterSymonds talk 16:39, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • All quotes need to be referenced. To pick one at random: "No, you would not become unemployed. You would only have to move to a more beneficial kind of employment."
  • There are long quotes that you should think about making a blockquote. For example: "there is no way to justify our present public monopoly of the post office. It may be argued that the carrying of mail is a technical monopoly and that a government monopoly is the least of evils. Along these lines, one could perhaps justify a government post office, but not the present law, which makes it illegal for anybody else to carry the mail. If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one else will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter."
  • There is a tag claiming that the external links section needs doesn't meet WP standards. This should have been addressed before WP:FAC.
  • The lead may be too long (and ideally, should have no more than 4 paragraphs). You should think about shortening it to make it a concise summary of the article.
  • The "washtimes.com" external link is a dead link and should be removed. See the "check external links" at the top of the nom page.
  • The references need fixing. You put in the reflist "author, page number" but no sufficient references section, detailing author, publisher and date. Remember that when a reader clicks on the reference in the article, the citation will be the first thing they see. Though you have some instances of full citations in the first instance, further up the reflist, the reader won't know to look up for the full citation. Eg. "Stigler, p. 34"; Who is Stigler? The reader who wants to verify a claim can't find the reference easily. See how the references are listed in Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll for example.
  • Paragraphs are short and stubby. There are many instances of one and two sentence paragraphs, making the prose choppy and more difficult to read.

PeterSymonds | talk 12:31, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Symonds capped his comments as addressed, leaving nothing actionable on which the Oppose is based. Please clarify. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:25, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So far unaddessed comments (the article has been listed at LOCE, so feel free to archive the message once the copyedit request has been carried out:

  • The images [[Image:Capitalism and Freedom.jpg]], [[Image:Milton-hand.jpg]] and [[Image:Free to Choose.jpg]] don't have a fair use rationale.
  • This article could do with a copyedit. There are MOS issues with full stops, for example after the quote "black tiger", a small addition to the sentence, the full stop is before the punctuation.

Comment - I had many of the same thoughts as Peter so I won't repeat them.

  • One addition, I think the criticism section should be folded into the article when discussing the particular policies held by Friedman (See WP:CRITICISM and {{Criticism-section}}).
  • Also, we have a mix of ref formats in this article that should be made uniform - some use footnote citation that show up under the references section (which you may want to rename to "Notes" - see WP:GTL) and some use embedded links - convert them all to footnotes (see WP:FOOT). Consider using the citation templates to make the references uniform (for example, all web links should have a last access date) - see Wikipedia:Citation templates.
  • Either expand the "Works" section to include a summary of that article, or just make it a wikilink in the main content and See also. I don't care for the empty section.

I plan to work on this article to try and improve it before FAC close, so I'm going to reserve my vote until after this week. Morphh (talk) 14:28, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The article does seem to discuss the book in question, since Friedman authored the books - it talks about the book and the views represented in the book. The article itself is not entirely about the book but I still think this use would fall under the fair use of the book cover. I do agree that they need the fair use rationale. Morphh (talk) 17:33, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The brief discussion of the book(s) does not meet the threshold of critical commentary or significant contribution to our understanding. Do we have a significantly better understanding of Friedman (the NFCC#8 requirement) by seeing the book covers? Conversely, would their exclusion be a detriment to our understanding? No. As he is the author, only the book’s content would provide such insight. ЭLСОВВОLД talk 21:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Please alphabetize your categories.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 18:30, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Done Gary King (talk) 19:52, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • TonyTheTiger, can you please point out that guideline? I can't find it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:37, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • I asked you the same question long ago Sandy! You weren't able to find it; I don't think there is one. I'm glad; categories should be ordered from most fundamental to least. –Outriggr § 03:54, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
          • Right. I seem to remember that the notion came from the peer review script, which either still does or used to ask that categories be ordered alphabetically, but we could never figure out where that come from. There is a guideline (somewhere) that interwikis should be alphabetical. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:13, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
            • Alphabetizing them can avoid overlapping cats; like many of our recommendations, a good idea, but should not be a requirement here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:40, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think a truly excellent job has been done with this article so far, but I'm a little bit concerned that this article may be substantially shy of "the relevant body of published knowledge". The article is missing the academic perspective of his life, and I believe this is the most important component of it. Just this past year, a biography of Friedman by Alan Ebenstein was published (as I recall it was favorably reviewed by Foreign Affairs) -- and a number of academic works have been published about his thought and contextualizing his academic contributions.
  • After all, Friedman is perhaps the second most important economists of the 20th century (after only Keynes, and some would probably dispute even that!), this is the most important part of his life, yet it's reduced to six paragraphs of the article. I think this needs to be clearer and fuller. His importance as a leader of the Chicago School of Economics (the school of thought, not the grad program), is almost completely glossed over. How he departed from Keynes is not really examined. The details of his economic philosophies are sparse. There's a short paragraph on statistics, yet an entire book (Hirsch and de Marchi, 1990, Milton Friedman: Economics in Theory and Practice.) has been devoted to the subject.
  • Meanwhile, the section on Estonia is longer than this. The section on Estonia is true enough, but Friedman has had this same influence on dozens of world leaders! Surely that he similarly influenced the economic policies of Reagan is substantially more important to the global economy, yet Estonia seems to have a section because he received an award from the country. This distorts the importance of Friedman in Estonia. It is Friedman himself who conceived this whole modern notion of the flat tax (in Capitalism and Freedom I think) and this is otherwise unmentioned in the article, yet this is one of his most important contributions to not only economic though, but indeed the world!
  • I think a trip to the library will be needed to fill these gaps, and some substantial reading will be needed. I could outline the gaps in further detail if needed, but a better way to address it would be to read Ebenstein and I'm sure the missing elements will jump out at us. Please don't be discouraged, this is one of the hardest articles on Wikipedia to get right, because economics is an esoteric subject (I think it's almost easier to explain quantum physics), and Friedman was one of the most wide-ranging and important thinkers in the topic. --JayHenry (talk) 20:38, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Could you please check that each web reference includes the author and publishing date if known. Epbr123 (talk) 00:26, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done I have laboriously gone through every reference and greatly improved on the details for each one. I have also merged duplicate references together so that they point to the same item in the Notes section. Gary King (talk) 06:07, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note. Please do not cap off comments made by reviewers.[1] If a reviewer is satisified and chooses to cap their comments, they should/can do so over their signature, so I know that they are satisfied and thaty they've capped the comment. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:31, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I second JayHenry. I was surprised that there was no "references" section. The citations suggest that almost the whole article was written using web sources, which is problematic for such a major biography. I hope the nominator can address this because the FA is a worthwhile goal. –Outriggr § 03:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The section 'Scholarly contributions' is particularly short and devoid of references. I realise how much work it is to write these, but I don't feel like it gives enough detail about his theories, and why they are important. Mostlyharmless (talk) 08:07, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Fundamentally, the sourcing is hopelessly inadequate. The sources referenced, aside from news articles, are Friedman's autobiography and a popular book by Bernanke, who supports him on many issues. This article is inadequate on what Friedman has actually done because it's not in the sources, and it is not neutral because they are almost uniformly friendly. In particular:
    • We should not include the obituary prose by Greenspan and the Economist in the lead; it does not summarize the article. It is doubtful we should include it at all.
    • According to his critics, Friedman did not criticize Pinochet's dictatorship at the time,... Whether he did or not is a question of fact; does anyone say that he did criticize Chile at the time? If not, we should not be weaselwording. That this is followed by an entire paragraph of justification makes it worse; this is an encyclopedia, not a collection of speeches for the defense.
As Mill long ago advised, read both sides, even if you know in advance which you believe; you will learn much. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:01, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment suggest that if there's such a strength of POV-ism this article be withdrawn (or speedy failed). I've noted that the article has just been tagged and clearly until this is resolved, an FA pass is not going to happen. I would usually recommend a peer review for this kind of thing (and note that the article didn't have one) so the FAC doesn't dissolve into a pseudo-PR, with the worst case scenario now being acted out. The Rambling Man (talk) 17:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • The tag is essentially my comment above, combined with the many complaints of bias on the talk page. They may all have been dealt with, but it doesn't look like it. Given the way FA works now, the three editors mentioned at the beginning are unlikely to finish in a reasonable time for a candidacy; let them rewrite it and bring it back here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:15, 22 February 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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