Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Dorothy Parker/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 candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 01:32, 14 October 2007.

[edit] Dorothy Parker

self-nomination - I've been putting in a fair amount of work trying to get this up to GA standards but in looking at it I think it may meet FA standards. Otto4711 14:02, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

• Although improved lately, I think this article still needs more work. Right now it is mostly a collection of names, dates, and trivia. There is very little about what she actually wrote and created. Nothing about the genres she worked in, the groundbreaking short fiction Parker penned. There is also a lot of fat: why is the section on Harlan Ellison considerably longer than that of the Algonquin Round Table years? It also has nothing about her life in New York City and Hollywood. I've kicked into this article over the past two years (I took the birthplace plaque photo), but it needs more work on her life as a writer, less as a personality, in my opinion. --K72ndst 02:05, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

• You say there's too much about her as a person and not enough about her as a writer, but you also say there's nothing about her life in NYC and Hollywood. Aside from the fact that I disagree that there's nothing about her life, these critiques seem contradictory. If you want less about her as a personality, how does adding more detail about her personal life help with that? Also, the Round Table years section is several paragraphs long and the bit on Ellison is about four sentences. Otto4711 18:33, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

• I agree it needs work. It says very little about her short stories, and nothing about her verse. (One cannot tell, for example, that You Might as Well Live is a quote from Parker.)
• At a minimum, it needs a bibliography of Parker's work, at least the books published in her lifetime and the Portable Dorothy Parker. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:24, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

• The bibliography is integrated into the text, with the exception of the Portable which I'll add when I get back to a reference book. Otto4711 19:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
• Y Done - paragraph on the Portable has been added. Otto4711 20:44, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I see you have made close to 70 changes to this article in the past week, which must be some kind of record. However, the article is still lacking what I stated earlier. You are merely creating a list of facts. You are not giving the reader any sense, at all, of what she was actually writing about or talking about. This is because you are using biographies and not looking at what Parker was writing. In no instance is there a substantial amount of coverage of what the themes, style, and language used by Parker. It is talking around it. The Ernest Hemingway article stands head and shoulders above this article because there is depth in the Wiki article about what he wrote about, not just the dates of when his books came out. To clarify what I said previously, the New York and Hollywood years were totally different time periods for Parker, and to have the article state what she was writing in these eras is significant. Right now this article is just boiling down a couple of biographies and skipping over the meat and potatoes of what it should contain: her writing. And am I alone here in saying that 25 changes a day by one user is excessive? --K72ndst 03:49, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

• I would hope you're alone in saying it when a number of those changes are things like catching typos or fixing punctuation. Who cares how many changes a day get made if the article's better as an end result? What a silly criticism!
• And maybe you could, I dunno, contribute to the article if you have the material that talks about the things you want it to talk about? Otto4711 03:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
• I also have to wonder how you expect me or anyone to write about what Parker "was actually writing about or talking about" by "looking at what Parker was writing." That would be original research. Otto4711 04:04, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
  • That would be a help. But it would be better still to consult the substantial body of literary criticism on Parker, starting with the introduction to the Portable Parker. Arthur F. Kinney's Dorothy Parker and Rhonda Pettit's A Gendered Collision: sentimentalism and modernism in Dorothy Parker’s poetry and fiction are book-length; there are lots of articles.

  WP:OR prohibits invention and fannish burbling, rightly. This does not mean, however, that we can, or should, limit ourselves to "Our Author published X, Y, and Z." We can and should explain to the reader why Dorothy Parker is interesting. Look at Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which probably should be an FA. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:12, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment I see a few things that should be fixed. Karanacs 20:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

• Some words are wikilinked that really don't need to be. Among those are urban and dynasty.

• Y Done Let me know if there are others.

• She should not be referred to by her first name in the article. After the first references to her name, she should be referred to as Parker.

• Y Done

This is not done. Search for Dorothy on the page and you'll find the ones that need to be changed. Karanacs 15:49, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

• There are not good transitions between the sentences. The first paragraph in Early life just seems like a collection of unrelated facts.
• All quotes need a citation
• Some paragraphs have no citations, or just one in the beginning. There should especially be citations for those statements describing her work or writing style so that they are not confused with original research.
• Headings should not start with "The"

• Y Done although I don't see what the big deal is.

I'm not sure either, but it is part of the MOS.

Karanacs 20:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with what PMAnderson wrote above, and am happy that someone finally brought up the literary criticism books by professors Kinney and Pettit. This would not be original research to include what literary critiques there are of Parker's work. It would make for a better article. Parker deserves as good an article as Mark Twain and John Steinbeck have. Both have summaries of what they wrote about, not just names/dates/trivia. And to the user who asked me to "contribute"... I already wrote 33,000 words about Parker in my book, A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York. --K72ndst 23:16, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

• Then you probably have some excellent research material on hand. I don't and have no idea what if any I might be able to access at any time in the future so if the lack of lit crit is going to keep this from being a FA then it might as well be closed now. Otto4711 23:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

• Problems:
  • "travelling"—surely it should be in US English.
  • "Parker survived three marriages (two to the same man) and several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol." Why "but"?
  • ""wisecracker,"—No, logical punctuation is required throughout, despite what Anderson will say. See MOS.
    • And I will say it: Ignore this dogmatism, and use American English if you want. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:18, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
  • "mid-1930s"
  • "her parents got her back to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so she could be called a true New Yorker."—Huh?
    • That is, she was born to residents of New York, even if they were on vacation when she was born. What's the problem? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:18, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Stubby sentence, so why not join to the subsequent sentence with a semicolon? "Her father died in 1913. Following his death, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living[10] while she worked on her verse."
  • Stubby paragraphing: end of "Early life" and elsewhere.
  • Ellipsis dots need to be properly spaced.
  • No final period for captions that aren't real sentences.
  • What does "suble" mean? See info page of audio clip. So who does own the copyright?

Needs a proper copy-edit throughout.

Tony (talk) 10:44, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Needs a copyedit; but not for these trivialities. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:18, 29 September 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.