Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The Giver/archive3

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[edit] The Giver

Self-nom (this is the article I hack upon when my insomnia starts biting me). It has been up for FA twice before, once nominated by me and once by SocratesJedi. Anon edits have snipped away the POV bits mentioned the last time. It is now more thoroughly footnoted and referenced than many FAs, and it includes material hard to find elsewhere on the Web (thanks to things like "newspapers"). Anville 06:32, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Conditional support, there are a mix of rererence styles used throughout the article, please adjust them so they're all using the same system and the numbers in the text match the notes.--nixie 06:50, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

All citations are now done using footnotes instead of inline hyperlinks. Anville 18:44, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Support A well written article on an interesting topic. Just one thing I would like to see addressed. The plot summary is rather dry visually. This may have to do with the lack of links, but I think it could be improved. See The Brothers Karamazov for an example of how this could possibly be changed. Also, on the same note, some of the sections are rather long and dull as well. This is often a difficult thing for literature articles, but maybe some pictures could be added? Anyways, these are minor quibbles and I still support whether the article is changed or not. --Omni gamer 06:52, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• I gather in reading this that it is geared towards the middle-school age level, like 12 or so? I don't think that's made sufficiently clear, a mention in the intro or something like that would be nice. Also I'd like to see a little more detail about the controversy. How strong is the content to which some of these parents are objecting? That's not a vote, by the way, but I'd lean towards support if those things were addressed. Everyking 07:42, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • To amend that last part, upon reading more of the article I think I understand the controversy, but maybe it should be made a little more clear. Everyking 07:48, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• Support. A very well-written article. Some pictures would be nice, but this is a literary article, so that's less of a possibility; with that in mind, I think it's definately featured-article status. Almafeta 16:59, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• <Jun-Dai 17:54, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)> The opening section should contain information on the relevance of the topic. What impact has The Giver had on society, and why should anyone care about it? Is this book widely read? Did it spark a literary revolution? or a revolution in the US or any other educational system? Did it cause riots? Is it still selling a good number of copies after 12 years, or has it mostly been forgotten? I'm not saying that the book has to have been revolutionary to deserve an article or get FA status, but it should at least provide some scope in the opening passage with regards to the book's significance. In fact, I would cut down the synopsizing in the first paragraph, since the first section after that is the plot synopsis. Additionally, the plot summary should be shorter. We don't need a long overview of the plot in an encyclopedia.

  Just briefly: notice that the opening paragraph in The Adventures of Tintin starts with a description of how popular the series is (200 million books, 50 languages), followed by a description of the whole series in under 50 words, followed by what the series is known for. The Brothers Karamazov also starts by explaining the book's relevance. It also described the book in less than 50 words in the opening section, mostly focusing on relevance. The Country Wife also mostly discusses relevance in the opening section. The Giver, on the other hand, doesn't mention anything external to the book and its author in the opening section.

  To continue: the article as a whole suffers from a similar problem: it is mostly focussed on the internals of the book and its relevance to the author. The "history and critical reception" needs to be broken up. The critical response doesn't really need to be in the same section as discussions on classroom use of the book. The "inspirations and adaptations" section is especially choppy in a fairly choppy article. Anything that seems as much like a list as that section does should be done with bullet points or rephrased to flow better. Additionally, the fact that imdb listed the Giver as a possible movie is not encyclopedic material, and this especially includes details about that listing ("Bridges himself is, at present, the only credited cast member to be listed.").

  Additionally, the fact that a small town decided to pull the book from 8th grade reading lists is pretty minor as controversy goes, and really doesn't deserve one of the longest paragraphs in the History/Criticism section. General trimming and restructuring is needed overall. Lack of concision is the most critical problem. All of the FAs on books are more concise, even though each of them is more well-known, and had a longer time to develop a history and have impact on society. The Giver should probably be one of the shorter FAs for a book. </Jun-Dai>

  Those should be longer, then. This one should not be shorter. Everyking 20:03, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • Aw, James! You didn't say anything like that when you supported The Country Wife as "an example of literary cruft at its finest"! Bishonen | talk 20:02, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Refer to Peer Review. I endorse Jun-Dai's acute points about relevance and internal/external analysis. Also, the page is unhelpfully structured, a section with lesson plans is totally redundant (Wikipedia is not a how-to guide) and there's some quite surprising POV in it. I was nonplussed to find the passage "On the other hand, the current fashion in postmodern literary criticism of applying "serious" methods to any and every work in sight, thereby producing verbiage impenetrable to the outsider..." in a page nominated here, and looked for evidence of recent vandalism in the History: but not at all, it's been there since March. Unfortunately I wasn't able to access the (rather incomplete) online reference cited for it, which was to an article by Chip Morningstar entitled "How To Deconstruct Almost Anything" (no context or time of writing or retrieval supplied), as the site was down--I don't know whether temporarily or permanently. But whatever the cite says, there's no excuse for this kind of aggressive (and tangential!) POV in an FA. This is just one example, I'm going to look at the article and not least the links more carefully, hoping to come up with specific advice, but I can see right now that it's not ready for FAC. Bishonen | talk 20:02, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More: I believe there's a strong connection between the lack of external/societal context and the weak structure. Such a context is exactly what could give a master plan for the page, and avoid the impression of random order. There's good stuff here, if it were better organized and contextualized. For instance, the themes section needs context (with inline references) showing that not only the book, but the ways of reading it, come out of a particular time and place.

Now I've been able to access the Morningstar essay, and I have no quarrel with its quality, but I'd change "tangential" for "utterly irrelevant": what it's doing here is a mystery. The paragraph starting "The prolonged and arduous journey" is also irrelevant, with an "oh, that reminds me" effect.

It's very teasing to have a spoiler warning, plus references to the mystery and ambiguity of the book's ending in nearly every section, and yet never be told what the mystery ending is. The boy and the baby either die or don't die at the end, that's all I'm getting--is that all there is?

References seem good on the whole, but technically, I have trouble getting my mind round the way the footnotes work--not sure they do, in fact. Also, see here for how to format online references. I've done one example ("Award-winning book frequent target in schools") to demonstrate. Also reverse authors' names to surname-first name for alphabetizing and make a separate alphabetical references list, please, as well as the notes list. I know it takes extra space, but the reader needs it for orientation. Hope this helps. Bishonen | talk 28 June 2005 12:43 (UTC)