Wikipedia:Featured article removal candidates/The Foundation Series

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[edit] The Foundation Series

Article is no longer a featured article.

no refs Zzzzz 15:53, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

This article looks complete and well written. I am baffled as to why it is set for removal.63.239.200.42 18:24, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

The nominator has cited the article's lack of references, Criteria 2 (c). --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 18:35, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

This is an excellent article and one to which I often refer. I see no reason to demote it. Polymath69 21:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

• Try Wikipedia:Featured article criteria which clearly shows that this article, while good, isn't really feature-worthy right now. - Mgm|^(talk) 12:17, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
• Remove per nom. Even with references, many of which are probably under "External links", the article would still need substantial work -- it hardly seems comprehensive by recent standards (nothing on criticism, for example). I don't see that it was ever voted to FA status (or the vote has since been deleted), and it looks like even two years ago people were surprised at its quality ([1] edit summary). bcasterline^talk 18:44, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Its FAC page was not "deleted": this is an encient holdover from the Brilliant Prose days. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 18:52, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
    • Often from the original nomination and vote you can glean some relevant information. Is it still around somewhere? bcasterline^talk 19:47, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
      • There was never a vote. It was before there was a FA process. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 20:07, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
      • Just a little bit of history - this isn't technically a hold-over from the BP days. It was my first FAC nom, and went through the FAC when the FAC was sparkling new (december of 2003; BP was November 2003 and earlier). On the other hand, we didn't have individual FAC subpages back then, which is why this one doesn't link to one. Raul654 12:20, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
        • The original discussion, which started on 22 December 2003 and finished on 10 January 2004, can be found here. I love how someone complained that the text had a Flesch-Kinkaid (Flesh-Kinky-aid?) score of 12 and was therefore too complicated. Anville 09:02, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

• Remove, standards have overtaken this article, and it shows no sign of catching up in the near future. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:41, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

• Remove per the nomination and Christopher Parham's observation. In two months and odd days, I will be rejoining my personal library, which contains the sort of Asimov collection only a lonely bookworm teenager could have built. (Yes, I visited the Asimov Archive at Boston University. Twice. I even found the screenplay Asimov wrote for Paul McCartney in 1974.) I also have the standard reference and criticism works on Asimov, of which I think Joe Patrouch and James Gunn's books would be the most important here. At that point, I'd be able to build this article up to present-day FA standards. (I dare somebody to beat me to it.) Let's remove it now, rework the darn thing and nominate it again later. Anville 19:50, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment -- that sounds like a good plan. Jkelly 18:17, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
    • Thank you. Also, don't forget that Dr. Asimov has two other Featured Articles covering him and his life's work, so it's not as if removing this one's Featured designation would hurt his legacy. (The other two are much more deserving than this one, I might add.) Anville 11:07, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

• Remove for now, at least, without prejudice to renomination and restoration. The writing has its weak spots (surprisingly few, given the corporate authorship), but the references just aren't there, and there are places where they're somewhat demanded ("I did a little cribbin' from Gibbon" Asimov said). Missing sections aren't a giant concern of mine, but rather I have some difficulty with the coverage of the fiction as if it were real. I.e. the article is concerned less with Asimov's "Foundation Series" than "all the things by all the people all the times that are part of the Foundation series." I'm no lover of fictional universes being treated as if they are coherent wholes worthy of analysis: that's fan work. Also, the article does nothing to relate the fictions to the actual world (in 1950, Canticle for Leibowitz was already out, and Foundation is the obverse of it; instead of that, though, I would be interested in the historical conditions that made authors gloomy and optomistic about faith and science: the world itself as a set of historical limitations has to have had a large effect, but when the discussion of the author, the production, the reception is quashed, we get nothing but a hermetically sealed "universe"). Geogre 05:01, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment The joke "cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon" is from a poem called "The Foundation of SF Success", published in several different Asimov collections. The relevant stanza goes as follows:

So success is not a mystery, just brush up on your history,

and borrow day by day.

Take an Empire that was Roman and you'll find it is at home in all the

starry Milky Way.

With a drive that's hyperspatial, through the parsecs you will race,

you'll find that plotting is a breeze,

With a tiny bit of cribbin' from the works of

Edward Gibbon and that Greek, Thucydides.

I typed this up for a report way back when, for a poetry workshop which wasn't fanatical about bibliographies, so I don't know where Asimov originally published it. (Methinks it appears in The Complete Asimov, vol. 1.) One more thing to cite when we overhaul the darn thing.... Anville 09:14, 7 March 2006 (UTC)