Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Rocky Balboa (film)/archive1

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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 00:11, 11 February 2007.

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Rocky Balboa (film)

Self-nomination. Nominating for featured article status. After much crafting and shaping, this article has really come a long way. It passed GA status with only minimal edits - I think it might just be ready for prime time. Theirishpianist 00:07, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

• Preliminary comments (haven't read it yet)- video game section is short; suggest merging it with the soundtrack section as some sort of "Merchandise" section. I noticed "Rocky Balboa" isn't italicized in the soundtrack section, but it should be wherever it appears (unless you mean the character). The "Statistics based on figures obtained from boxofficemojo.com" is awkward just dangling there- move it to a footnote, or incorporate it into the text. Also, the article has a tag, although this one, a "this section documents a film's box office" is kind of obvious/redundant so you may want to remove it. CanadianCaesar Et tu, Brute? 03:54, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
• Object 1a, 1c. I corrected a section heading to conform to WP:MSH, reference punctuation to WP:FN, and removed white spaces between sections. References are not correctly formatted: please expand all footnotes to include full biblio info (publisher, author and publication date when available - see WP:CITE or WP:CITET). Prose is not compelling, example - Several items of note also appear at certain points in the movie. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment refs are fine Sandy seems to think that her personal preference is a Wikipedia policy, see the FAC for Mutual Broadcasting System among others for more on this. Her views on this subject can and probably should be ignored. Quadzilla99 00:07, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

• Comment The lead needs work.
  • It is the sixth and final film in the Rocky series, which began with the Oscar-winning Rocky thirty years earlier in 1976." We're told that Rocky Balboa is a 2006 film. Either thirty years earlier or in 1976 is fine; no need for both.
  • "The film portrays Balboa in retirement, a widower living in downtown Philadelphia, and as the owner and operator of an Italian restaurant in the city called "Adrian's", named after his late wife." No need for "a widower"; "his late wife" signals to readers that he is one. This seems to suggest he's working, not retired. Perhaps "in retirement from boxing" is meant here? The sentence in general is long and awkward.
  • "Rocky Balboa was produced as the final sequel to the Academy Award-winning Rocky." Didn't we just establish this?
  • "The film also holds many references to people and objects from previous installments in the series, especially the first one." Can you hold references? This sentence could be much better phrased. BuddingJournalist 07:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose for prose. Heavy overuse of "also" throughout the lead, it's rarely needed. Synopsis is over 1000 words long, the film Wikiproject recommend around 600 unless the plot is particularly complex or integral to the article. You could also check out their style guidelines for formatting of cast: actor and character names tend to be bolded, and then there's a colon before the descriptive text. Clumsy sentences throughout. The article is undercited throughout, for anything interpretative it's a must. The "Critical response" section is just a list of "positive" reviews (it's unclear how you measure that). It would be better to give a metacritic or rotten tomatoes rating to give an overall impression, and then quote specific sections of reviews to show which bits of the films were liked or disliked. Trebor 12:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
• Comment I won't go as far as oppose because I haven't read the article in full detail but it seems odd to promote such a recent film to featured status. The box-office numbers and DVD sales numbers will still change and any info about the legacy of the film (if it ever has one) won't be included. So we can't expect that the article is really stable. Also, when articles are written so quickly after the movie has come out, much of the critical discussion relies on sources with no perspective beyond "should you go and see this movie this week" and the result is an article lacking in depth. Pascal.Tesson 20:42, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.