Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 22:20, 20 March 2009

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Quick-fail assessment

1. The article completely lacks reliable sources – see Misplaced Pages:Verifiability. Y
2. The topic is treated in an obviously non-neutral way – see Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view. Y
3. There are cleanup banners that are obviously still valid, including {{cleanup}}, {{wikify}}, {{NPOV}}, {{unreferenced}} or large numbers of {{fact}}, {{clarifyme}}, or similar tags. Y
4. The article is or has been the subject of ongoing or recent, unresolved edit wars. Y
5. The article specifically concerns a rapidly unfolding current event with a definite endpoint. Y

Everything OK, so full review to follow. --DeLarge (talk) 22:14, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Template-generated summary

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS): — See below.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Specific issues

Prose

• "Youth" or "youthful" appears twelve times in the main text, including eight instances of "Chinese youth". Could probably do with a bit more variety there (adolescents, teenagers, young generation, etc).
• "'Nothing To My Name'...has been described as a 'massive hit' and 'the biggest hit in Chinese history.'" I feel like this could be improved a wee bit. If a song is the biggest hit in Chinese history, it's a given that it's going to be a massive hit. As long as the citations are kept, I think you don't need to quote directly, which would probably give you more freedom. Something like "...was an enormous commercial success, becoming the biggest hit in Chinese history."
• "...wearing a red blindfold to symbolize the oppressiveness of the 'red' Communist government." I'm not 100% on this, but do you feel the sentence is better for the second "red"? Those who know Communism won't need it, while those who don't know aren't having it explained to them (and I can't quickly see anything in the wikilinked article).
• "...the government-controlled People's Daily gave it a surprisingly positive review." There's a wee bit of ambiguity here for me. The way I'd use the word "surprisingly" in this context, I'd be referring to the degree of how positive the review was, i.e. it was expected that the People's Daily would give the song a good review, but just how much they liked it turned out to be a surprise. I'm guessing that's not what you meant, and I'd recommend "...the government-controlled People's Daily unexpectedly gave it a positive review."
• In ==Lyrics and meanings== you state that "Timothy Brace of the University of Texas at Austin has described..." Now , having Googled around to figure out who this Brace guy was, I realised that he's a music academic, the author of the cited PhD thesis, and a recognized authority on the subject. However, at the moment that fact isn't obvious to the reader. He could just as easily be "Timothy Brace of the University of Texas at Austin who lives in the next dorm to me". I'd add a qualifier to explain who he is, with an inline citation to his magnoliaarts.com page where his bio can be found—you've already done that with Dennis Rea by describing him as a "music scholar", even though you were able to wikilink internally to him. It might also be OK to do the same with Rebee Garofalo, although since his contribution is more a mere observer of events rather than expert analyst, it's probably not as necessary in his case.

MoS

• I know there's differing opinions on whether or not there should be citations in the lede. Looking at your previous GA successes, only Mount Huang has any, so I guess you're in the camp that prefers it reference-free. That being the case, I think the citation for Cui Jian being called the "Father of Chinese Rock" could be moved into the body of the article. In fact, I might move that whole sentence fragment down to the start of the ==Impact== section. The lede would then read as "...is the English title of a 1986 Mandarin rock song by Cui Jian. It is widely considered his most famous and most important work...", while later on you'd say "Cui Jian is the so-called "Father of Chinese Rock", and "Nothing To My Name" is the song he is best known for..."
• In the lede, maybe add wikilinks for "traditional Chinese styles" and "rock-and-roll" (to Music of China#Traditional music and rock and roll respectively. I'd also ditch the hyphens in "rock-and-roll".
• The ==Lyrics and meanings== section switches once or twice between putting the English first and the Chinese text in parentheses, and vice versa. My personal choice would be English first (then Chinese), but whichever format is chosen I think it should be consistent.
• After "...which had emphasized conformity and obedience" and "...she will go with him" in the penultimate paragraph, there's two large forced spaces before the next sentence. I presume this is just a formatting slip?
• This is more of a parroting of the kind of thing the peer review bot would say, rather than an opinion of my own, but have you considered an infobox? If you say yes you've considered it, but you think it would add nothing, then that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned. Still, I figured I'd mention it just in case.
• Another parroting of guidelines more than a personal suggestion, but I think many reviewers would prefer you to spell out decibels instead of abbreviating dB, even though you wikilinked it. As with the infobox, though, I'd leave it up to you.

References

I'm going to leave this until tomorrow. It'll take a bit of time to work through the citations, especially since they're mostly not easily available online. Regards, --DeLarge (talk) 22:20, 20 March 2009 (UTC)