Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Christopher Reeve

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[edit] Christopher Reeve

Self Nomination. I added a lot more secondary references, and cleaned the article up a bit. Gunkyboy 11:03, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you broke something with your page move/archiving. --Ideogram 07:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Support Not brilliant prose. Left comments in the text. --Ideogram 07:28, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Don't have time to work on this right now. --Ideogram 22:50, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I have copyedited and found no major problems. I am very pleased to change my vote to Support. --Ideogram 18:45, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose Terrible prose, as per Ideogram. Bad grammar & flow.
  • Reeve had an unusual medical history. He suffered from asthma and allergies since childhood. He had suffered from alopecia areata since age sixteen, a condition that caused patches of hair to fall out from his otherwise healthy head of hair. Generally he was able to comb over it and often the problem disappeared for long periods of time.
1) To begin the medical section with the 1st bold is marked with too much enthusiasm on the fact that he had unusual medical history.
2) On 2nd pair of bolds, shouldn't childhood sickness be w/ "had", and teenage sickness be w/o it, considering the timeline?
  • Reeve's first role after Superman was as Richard Collier in the 1980 romantic fantasy Somewhere in Time.
1) "was as" should be "was".
2) correct: "romantic fantasy, Somewhere in Time" (disregarding italics).
  • Reeve was a licensed pilot and had flown solo across the Atlantic twice.
1) Has to be organized better or written more clearly b/c I thought this was about his movies. Try to separate trivias from his roles in movies. (Wikimachine 12:28, 21 November 2006 (UTC))
  • Comment - I made some of those changes. The licensed pilot thing, if you read further, is important since a few sentences later I cite it as the reason why he did the movie The Aviator. Gunkyboy 12:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Support - I found this an excellent article. Very well researched, well written, and highly deserving of being made FA and being placed on the main page. Wikipedia can be proud to include an article of this quality. Jeffpw 08:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment - Thanks Jeff. Yeah, Ideogram, I think I did break something. I was confused with the whole archiving of the old featured article discussion. Hopefully it's not too screwed up. I took your comments to heart and have made a few changes. Those suggestions were very helpful, and if you have any other suggestions for the rest of the article, I'd be happy to consider them. Before objecting the nomination flat out, please know that I am willing to make any changes necessary. The intro was never the strongest part of the article because it was written in haste after someone said I needed to expand it. Gunkyboy 11:01, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Good work so far. I will get back to you with more comments. --Ideogram 14:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
You're right, that line was a bit fawning, so I got rid of it. Also fixed a sentence in the Activism section. It's a long article so it's hard for one person to notice everything. Gunkyboy 03:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment. The article should mention the 'controversy' regarding Reeve, his wife and the episode Terms of Endearment of Drawn Together. More generally, I think there should be a section of 'references in the media on Christopher Reeve'. --BMF81 15:25, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment I think the External links section is a bit bloated. Why is the Why You Should Respect Christopher Reeve essay part of the external links? Is it really that notable? Also the National Health Promotion and Information Center... one is a subpage of Christopher Reeve's own home page, so I don't think you need to include that. Did Mr. Reeve have any ties to Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics? The article doesn't mention it, so why is it in the external links? I'm sure there are many memorial sites out there dedicated to him. Why is http://christopher-reeve.memory-of.com/ the one in the external links? I'm concerned that this invites random users to shove more and more random links in there, and that the section might devolve into a link depository. Finally, ref 65 is missing access date/author/publisher information. Gzkn 01:25, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment Yup, I agree. I didn't add any of those links, except for the Database ones. I fixed that and also fixed the reference. Gunkyboy 12:31, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
  • SergeantBolt (t,c) and Wiki-newbie both gave a Support in the last FAC discussion, so that would make it 5 Supports to 1 Oppose. And the guy who opposed appears to have only read a few lines from the article. Tough cookie. 67.161.26.190 19:04, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
    • It is customary to include the link to previous nominations; FAC is not a "vote", and Supports from a nomination of a month ago aren't pertinent to this version of the article. You might want to correct the archive links on the talk page so that the first nom is to Archive1, unless there are actually two previous noms. "And the guy who opposed" was right about the prose, which needs attention throughout, although he only gave a few samples. Please enlist a good copyeditor to help. Here's a sample (don't just fix the samples): "For the first few days after the accident, Reeve was heavily sedated and remained unconscious. Dana sat by his side and took care of Will the entire time." She took care of Will by Christopher's side? She sat by his side while she took care of Will? She sat by his side all the time but was still able to care for Will who was at home? Needs to be clear, compelling, and brilliant. Sandy (Talk) 14:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Object Several issues that need to be addressed:
    • The prose is choppy and not compelling. It would help to have someone unfamiliar with the text run through the entire article. Here's a random sample:
      • Reeve took a job in the soap opera Love of Life in July 1974, because he needed the money. He played Ben Harper, a polygamous "bad guy." By August, the character became popular and ratings for the show went up.
    • There are too many Fair Use images.
    • Some of the references need to be expanded to include full bibliographic information such as author and publication date (on news reports, for instance). For example, the following does not include the author and the publication date - please complete all entries in a consistent bibliographic style:
    • The article relies too heavily on Christopher Reeve himself as the main source; almost all of the material is referenced to his own books. Those books could be listed in a references section, which would include the full bibliographic info, and then each footnote would be abbreviated to look like:
      • Reeve, Christopher (1998), pp 235-239
    • rather than repeating all of the book biblio info in each note.
    • Some of the sources might not rise to the level of WP:RS; there are quite a few fancrufty personal websites, although I didn't check them all, since there is no consistent bibliographic style, and it's hard to tell. Bookofjoe looks like a blog.
    • The wikilinking is sporadic: some of the words linked are common words, and some of them link to disambiguation pages - they should all be checked.

A longer stint at peer review, until you get sufficient feedback, would be helpful. I agree with the person who said that Christopher Reeve's entry should have a picture of *him*, not a picture of him as Superman in the infobox. Sandy (Talk) 14:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I made a few changes. I think the References are fine and I can't spend 2 hours changing them just for aesthetic reasons (shortening the Still Me references). I think they serve their purpose well enough. I'm no writer so I'm not going be spitting out any brilliant prose. All I can say is that this is a comprehensive and completely accurate article, and I've done the best I can with the little time that I have for this. Gunkyboy 11:20, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment - I went through the entire article and cleaned up all of the prose. Unless you find any glaring errors, that's the best I can do. Gunkyboy 23:56, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow, Sandy, you cleaned up those references fast! Is there some shortcut? BTW, Christopher Reeve Homepage is a very well researched site, not fancrufty at all, and bookofjoe is the blog of an anesthesiologist. Gunkyboy 14:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The shortcut is, put the article into Word and do a global replace on the Reeve sources. That took five minutes. Expanding your news sources took the rest of an hour. Now that I've helped out, please do spend some time on the other issues listed. Regards, Sandy (Talk) 15:47, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any political involvement in the section headed:

  • 6. Films, family, and political involvement

It looks like that is all in activism, and this section needs a better heading. Sandy (Talk) 16:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I changed "political involvement" to "activism". There is political involvment in there (standing against Pinochet, campaigning for Senators, being asked to run for Congress), but "activism" works better. 70.231.232.18 16:58, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
But now you have two sections covering activism. Sandy (Talk) 19:25, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Object: not written to the required "professional" standard. 2a fails too. For example:
    • In the lead: "In 1987, he stood with 77 Chilean actors who were being threatened by the dictator Pinochet."—Stood with meaning "supported", or stood on a stage with, or what? Vague. Why is this the third sentence of the lead? Big picture first, please.
    • 1995 was not in the "early 90s".
    • "Reeve died at age fifty-two on 10 October 2004 after suffering cardiac arrest"—Replace "suffering" with "a".
    • "Reeve's parents did not remain married for long." Vague chronologically. Here, our readers expect precise information.
    • "an amateur group held tryouts for the play"—"tryouts" is too informal here. Same for "fizzled".
    • Why are ordinary English words such as "apprentice" linked? We do speak English, you know; if we don't, we can look it up.

Not good enough for an FA. Please don't just treat the examples I've provided; I'm referring to the whole article. Tony 12:26, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

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