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Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

[edit]
The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page. No further edits should be made to this page. The closing editor's comments were: Withdrawn. Scorpion0422 17:54, 30 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am self-nominating this article because I think it is exhaustive, good-looking, well-referenced, and contains informative explanatory paragraphs. The previous version of the article contained a list that was clustered and completely unreadable. I had been working on a completely new version of the article on my sandbox for quite a while, and copied my work onto the original article yesterday. I really checked everything, from the countries' flags to the spelling of the films' original titles. I also wrote paragraphs about the rules governing the award and the eligibility of foreign language films in other categories, since several people had inquired about this subject on the article's talk page. I tried to be as exhaustive as possible and provided the article with appropriate references and citations so that people who read it can find in it almost everything that really needs to be known about this award. BomBom 12:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Addressed comments from Scorpion0422

Oppose I'm not going to lie, I REALLY don't like the way those tables are formatted, but my biggest problems are:

  • The colour for the winners Green tickY
  • All of the titles are in bold font, so it makes it hard for colour blind folks to distinguish the winners from the non-winners Green tickY
  • Is including the IMDB links really necessary? Red XN
  • The text before the charts needs a LOT of work. Red XN
    • There are too many brackets Green tickY
    • It's hard to understand in some places (In order to qualify for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, a film need not have been released in the United States.) Red XN
    • "Oscar®" <- That's unnecessary. Green tickY
    • Some stuff needs citations and clarification: "Foreign Film Oscar" - who refers to it as that? Is there a citation? Green tickY
    • The prose is written quite informally in some places. Red XN
  • In the "Awards in Other Categories for Foreign Language Films" section, the award categories do not need to be written in all capitals. Green tickY -- Scorpion0422 17:27, 16 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
By reading you, one gets the impression that this article is terrible when in fact it is not. Of course, criticisms and objections are always welcome, but you could have at least mentioned the huge efforts that were made in improving the article's quality. Anyway, I have addressed all of your objections :
  • The colour for the winners Green tickY I agree that the previous gold background was visually agressive. I replaced it with a buff one. If you are still not satisfied with the present background, then please choose a precise colour here so that I can use it in the tables.
  • All of the titles are in bold font, so it makes it hard for colour blind folks to distinguish the winners from the non-winners Green tickY I kept only the winning films in bold.
  • Is including the IMDB links really necessary? Red XN YES, it is. Having IMDb links in the Academy Award for Best Picture list, for instance, would be useless since the overwhelming majority of the films listed there have their own Wikipedia entries. However, most of the films listed here are little-known foreign films that do not have Wikipedia articles of their own, so including the IMDb links is necessary. Of course, if someone volunteered to create IMDb-linked stubs for all those foreign language films, then the IMDb column could be removed as it would be purposeless (if I have enough time, I will try to create all those stubs). I did remove the IMDb links from the "Awards in Other Categories for Foreign Language Films" list, since all of the films listed there have their own Wikipedia entries.
  • The text before the charts needs a LOT of work. Red XN The text needed small rearrangements, not a "LOT of work". Cop 663 divided the text into 4 subsections. It is now better-looking and much more coherent. Moreover, I would like to point your attention to the fact that some of Wikipedia's current featured lists such as the one about the Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture do not contain any explanatory section whatsoever and are even incomplete when it comes to nominations. Therefore, the fact that the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film article is exhaustive and contains well-referenced explanatory paragraphs is already a very good thing that you could have mentioned.
    • Just because other similar lists don't have as much text, it does not mean that an article with lots of text is an automatic pass. It's better than it was before, but it still could use a copyedit. -- Scorpion0422 20:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • There are too many brackets Green tickY I removed most of the content that was written between brackets and reinserted it in the form of regular sentences.
    • It's hard to understand in some places (In order to qualify for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, a film need not have been released in the United States.) Red XN This sentence is not only grammatically correct and perfectly intelligible, but it is also written using the exact formulation employed by the Academy itself in its official rules.[1]
    • "Oscar®" <- That's unnecessary. Green tickY Removed it. Honestly, that was a really minuscule detail. The sentence in which this registered sign figured is directly quoted from the Official Academy Awards Rules, which do include the registered sign next to the word "Oscar".
    • Some stuff needs citations and clarification: "Foreign Film Oscar" - who refers to it as that? Is there a citation? Green tickY I included citations for that particular statement ; I hadn't done it previously since it seemed obvious to me that people commonly refer to the award as the "Foreign Film Oscar". However, the rest of the article is perfectly clear to me and fully referenced, so unless you explicitly say which "stuff needs citations and clarification", I will have to ignore your objection.
    • The prose is written quite informally in some places. Red XN I tried to rephrase some sentences to address your objection. However, I find most of the text to be well written, so unless you give concrete examples of the "informality" of the prose, I cannot help but leave the article as it is currently.
  • In the "Awards in Other Categories for Foreign Language Films" section, the award categories do not need to be written in all capitals. Green tickY I agree. I rewrote the names of the categories using lowercase letters. BomBom (talk) 17:23, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]


All of your objections, including the most recent ones, have now been addressed :

  • Is including the IMDB links really necessary? [...] They should be properly formatted references then. Green tickY
    Having more than 250 IMDb links in the "References" section would have been truly terrible. I therefore removed all the IMDb links after having created stubs for all the films that did not already have a separate Wikipedia article. All the films listed here now have their own entry.
  • The text before the charts needs a LOT of work. [...] Just because other similar lists don't have as much text, it does not mean that an article with lots of text is an automatic pass. It's better than it was before, but it still could use a copyedit. Green tickY
    Everything has been checked and adjusted : the punctuation, the grammar, the spelling, the references, the register... Therefore, unless you point to a specific flaw and clearly explain what needs to be improved, I will consider your objection to be baseless.
    • It's hard to understand in some places (In order to qualify for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, a film need not have been released in the United States.) [...] Well, it's a copyvio then, unless you add quotations and a citation. Green tickY
      I have reworded this sentence : Unlike other Academy Awards, the Foreign Language Film Award does not require films to be released in the United States in order to be eligible for competition. I have also rephrased a couple of other sentences. I honestly believe that the article is now perfectly intelligible.
    • The prose is written quite informally in some places. [...] I don't need to provide every single example, but one is the use of the word "Interestingly", which makes it seem more like an essay than a work in an encyclopedia. Green tickY
      I have rephrased all the sentences that started with words like "interestingly" or "it is interesting to note that". I have also removed statements such as "this resulted in the emergence of somewhat odd situations". I have read the text several times now, and I really find it well-written. If you do not share the same opinion, then please rewrite the sections you dislike or give concrete examples of what you consider to be informal prose so that I can improve the writing style of the article.

Do you have (or does anybody else have) further objections to the article's Featured List Candidacy ? BomBom (talk) 15:33, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here is what I think of your objections :
  • Proposal to split the article : Red XN I disagree, for the following reasons. Firstly, the previous version of the article did not include any kind of explanatory paragraph whatsoever. Before self-nominating the article for Featured List status, I spent a lot of time writing the Rules section in order to conform the article to the Featured list criteria, which stipulate that a list must be comprehensive and not omit any major component of the subject. Therefore, I find it really ironic that a section that was initially written with the intention of reinforcing the article's FL candidacy is now being used as an argument to oppose this candidacy. Secondly, all the other film awards articles in Wikipedia include both the description of the award and the list of winners/nominees in the same page. Therefore, I do not see why the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film should be an exception. Having separate articles for the description of the post of President of the United States and for the List of Presidents of the United States is totally justified since there are a LOT of things to say about the post itself, and a LOT of things to include in the list. However, in the case of the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is it really worth it to have a separate article just to describe the rules governing the Award ? The Rules section is really not excessively long and takes just 6 minutes to be read. Thirdly, some of the current featured lists on Wikipedia such as the List of Portuguese monarchs contain a similar amount of text. The only difference is that the textual material there is not written as a single block but is scattered throughout the article, so people just have the impression that it is less overwhelming. Nevertheless, despite my opposition to your proposal, I am ready to split the article if it is the only way to make you and Circeus withdraw your objection to the article's FL candidacy (yes, I am just trying to get people withdraw their objection, I've lost all hope that someone might actually support this article's candidacy one day).
  • Proposal to split the Awards in other categories for foreign language films section: Green tickY I had initially created this section because several people had asked on the article's discussion page whether foreign language films were eligible for other Academy Awards. However, I agree with you that it does not deal directly with the subject of the article, and that including it gives the impression that the article "is trying to be too many things at once". Therefore, I have removed this section entirely and reinserted it in a newly created article entitled List of Academy Award-winning foreign language films.
  • Proposal to make the list sortable: I think that's a good idea. However, turning such complex tables into a single sortable one is a delicate process that might take some time. I am currently working on such a table on my sandbox, and will hopefully insert it in the article once it is finished. BomBom (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Reply: To the break out suggestion and your replies:
  • First, let me say that the sheer amount of work you've put into this list is staggering. I applaud your efforts wholeheartedly and think you've done a wonderful job.
  • Rules section - I agree that, in the interest of comprehensiveness, a rules section is useful and perhaps necessary. However, in a quick look at the other movie FLs, if a rules section is included, it's usually a couple sentences. Now, this one is a bit different because the Foreign Language Film is different from most of the other Oscars, but I still think 13 paragraphs in four different sections, a total of ~11.5 kBytes is either a) overkill or b) deserving of its own article - and one that will probably be of at least "B" quality without much effort at all.
  • Including description of award and list of winners - see Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama (as well as Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Original Score) and List of films that received the Golden Film; all of those have separate articles on the award itself. On the other side of the coin, BAFTA Award for Best Film doesn't do much to describe the award and has an article about the Association, but not the award.
  • I didn't !vote for List of Portuguese monarchs, but the amount of text is just overwhelming - sorry. That's my biggest beef with it. Again, though, the text is great - I just don't think it belongs in the list, but could be a proper article on its own.
-- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 02:46, 30 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I have to agree with SatyrN that the "List of winners and nominees" (and possibly a copy of the tallies) would be better split as a separate, full blown list given the heer amount of non-list material. Otherwise the article is really good, although there are some sections with extra whitespace at the end, links in the headers that should be removed, and the lead could be significantly lengthened. Possibly "Title Under Which Film Was Nominated" could be shortened to something like "Nominated as"? Circeus (talk) 18:29, 28 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, I'd like to really thank you for being the first user to have taken the time to write something positive about the article. Other users simply throw objections without even having the courtesy to insert the slightest positive comment (this is really important, especially when one has spent several weeks trying to improve an article). Anyway, as far as your objections are concerned, I believe that they have all been addressed :
  • Proposal to split the article : Red XN Please see my reply to SatyrTN.
  • The extra whitespace at the end: Green tickY All the extra whitespace in the article has been removed
  • The links in the headers: Green tickY All the links in the headers have been removed.
  • Lengthening the lead section: Green tickY Done.
  • Shortening "Title Under Which Film Was Nominated" to "Nominated as": Green tickY Done. BomBom (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I was thinking about inserting a world map that shows countries that have been nominated for and/or won the Award. However, I'd like to think what other users think of this proposal before creating such a map, because I really don't want to spend my time working on something that people will eventually dislike, or even use as an argument to oppose the article's FL candidacy (just like what happened with the Rules section). BomBom (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Love the idea of the map - down by the "tally by country section"? That would be great and would fit with the way the Golden Globe lists are. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 03:11, 30 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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