Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Al Gore/archive2

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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 04:25, 4 November 2007.

[edit] Al Gore

previous FAC

The article developed a lot: Education, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Honors and awards, Family, ... .--Tamás Kádár 15:43, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Support - This article is quite good and worthy of FA with a few minor changes. The photo is too way too old. Can't we do better? 3rd paragraph, think of a better way to say "today". How do we know that his son's accident denied him the chance to lay a foundation for the 1992 campaign? Excuse or truth? VP section, reword "also in 1998". 2008 presidential election section is the place that really needs the most rewrite. It sounds like a daily blog. This is probably because the editors recent memory is good and lots of online articles about current events exists. Under private citizen, did he pay for the charter or just announced it? Is he that rich? All these can be done in a minute or two except the 2008 section which will take several minutes to do. Mrs.EasterBunny 16:52, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
  • I thought that this article was already a FA? Aflumpire 20:51, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Comments Oppose - The main photo is fine. There's no reason it needs to be "up-to-date" (otherwise a large percentage of our bio articles would include pictures of rotting corpses). I'm not a fan of the Nobel icon, but I doubt that is grounds for objecting. The only problems I see is that there are a couple sentences that need citations and the summary for the Controversies section needs improvement (right now it is totally cryptic). Kaldari 22:37, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Support - I agree with comments by Mrs.EasterBunny (talk · contribs) above, and those changes should be made first. Also, the lead would look nicer if it were four paragraphs, so that last bit should be combined somewhere. Overall great work, excellent sourcing. Curt Wilhelm VonSavage 00:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC).
  • Oppose, lots of cleanup needed, basics of an FA aren't yet in place. Citations are incomplete and unformatted, including blue linked URLs (please see WP:CITE/ES. Many publishers aren't listed, so it's not possible to verify the reliability of sources without clicking on each link. There are WP:MSH issues. It's always a surprise to have to make WP:FN fixes (those are rare); I hope regular editors will take note for the future. External links (which aren't listed correctly per WP:GTL) should be cleaned up per WP:EL and WP:NOT (not Gore's personal website, and not an indiscriminate collection of links). For a bio, family information is lacking. There's a popular culture section that starts out as prose but switches to a list mid-stream. Most importantly, there's a serious POV fork to Gore controversies. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:20, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Reject & Oppose
  • On the basis of the all the notes listed previously, which I've reviewed.

Remark: I do not agree with the "not Gore's personal website" as it is "meritable, accessible and appropriate to the article," and if I was reading and researching the article, it would be useful to have that link there. Perhaps place it in the near the middle, though I think second or third is very appropriate. Anyone out there disagree? Please take it to my talk page so I can try to understand why you feel that way.

Remark#2: Yes there is a "serious POV fork to Gore controversies" but the evolution article which is a FA has the same thing. I would be happy to remove it from the evolution article however, but I can't let my biases influence me. Leranedo

  • Comments Oppose - No attempts to work on any of comments below or above. Mark83 16:27, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Amazing to me that the popular culture section appears above things like electoral history.
    • Simpsons image way too prominent. I would question whether it's encyclopedic at all.
    • Too many one sentence paragraphs. Lead very piecemeal too - should be three or four large paragraphs, not five small ones.
    • 3 x "[citations needed]"
    • "According to the 6 February 2007 issue of The Santa Barbara Independent, when Gore received The Sir David Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Filmmaking at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February 2, director James Cameron (who presented him with the award) stated: "[I] beseech Mr. Gore to step up to the plate one more time!"[50]" is very hard to read - the first 10/12 words aren't needed for a start.
    • Similarly "The Washington Post notes in the article Supporters Push Gore to Run in 2008" - that is not needed and hurts readability. Just say "The Washington Post" and put the title etc. in the reference.
    • Controversies - Yes, good to have a subarticle because of size issues - however I feel one sentence as a summary on this article is not enough. I'm not saying have anything more than a paragraph, but an explanation of "a statement in an interview." would be good.
    • Ref 49 says it WAS a joke, so why does the article say "implying it was a rehearsed gag" -- "Implying" suggests Wikipedia believes it could have been a serious announcement.Mark83 16:34, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I believe the 'Controversies' section (and corresponding daughter article) is a violation of WP:NPOV, WP:Content forking, and WP:Criticism. Discussion of controversies should be integrated into the appropriate mainline sections of the article (and any possible daughter articles), just as if you were reading a conventional biographical book. If a particular controversy is major enough, it can become its own daughter article. If you look at existing, comparable articles that are FA, such as Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Wesley Clark, Barack Obama, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Theodore Roosevelt, none of them have Controversies sections. Indeed I haven't seen any FA biographical articles that do have one, although I certainly haven't looked at them all. Wasted Time R 04:13, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Short sections, lacks criticism. Basically, no one wants to read a one-sided article about a politician. It shouldn't be overtly negative, but neither is it Wikipedia's job to sing Al Gore's praises. (Ibaranoff24 13:44, 3 November 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 candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.