Wikipedia:Featured article review/Windows 2000/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed 18:57, 22 May 2008.

[edit] Windows 2000

[edit] Review commentary

Notified: User:Warren, User:Jdlowery, User:AlistairMcMillan, Wikipedia:WikiProject Microsoft Windows

I am nominating this article for FAR because it no longer meets the Featured Article criteria, particularly:

• 1c - quite a bit of the article is now completely unsourced, including some direct quotes, almost all of the Architecture section, several chunks of the Common functionality and Server family functionality Section, almost all of the Deployment section, the entire Editions section, all of Total cost of ownership, etc.

• 1b and 1d - while a huge amount of the article discusses features, there is almost no information on how well received the software was, sales numbers, etc. The only reception type information is security criticisms, which seems imbalanced and lacking in neutrality to be a top level section without other reception information.

• 1a - could use a new copy edit as it is no longer well-written, with several grammar and spelling mistakes.

• 2b - seems several later sections could easily be combined into a single one. The menu was also set only show 1st headers, but I've already fixed that.

• 3 - excessive images, including the logo being included twice; four images of the software box, one for addition, which are completely unnecessary and seem more like decoration than anything else.

• 4 - 60k in length, likely because it goes into far too much detail on the software features and usage, which seems to go against the idea that Wikipedia is not a software manual and not an advertisement. The technical aspects easily take up over half the article, and could be greatly reduced for brevity. I think the blow by blow should be left to tech articles and manuals.

Collectonian (talk) 03:48, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

God forbid an article on a technical subject contain technical details! Windows 2000 is an enormous topic; Wikipedia has hundreds of articles that discuss components included with it. Because of the sheer size of the subject being discussed, each successive Windows operating system article focuses on what's new to that release, and in the case of Windows 2000, it turns out that there's quite a lot to talk about. We had the same problem with Windows Vista, whose "new features" section had to be split into seven sub-articles.

Most of the text in the Windows 2000 article is actually sourced from the book references (esp. Inside Windows 2000), but Harvard-style referencing needs to be applied to it. -/- Warren 17:46, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• I really don't know why this is still featured. A lot of work has gone into it, but...
• Why are there so many lists everywhere? Prose is always better. Long lists should be moved out into their own articles.
• I can even see internal URLs instead of proper citation formatting (see Language and locale support sub-section, at the end of the paragraph).
• Too many images - do we really need to see the boxes for every edition?
• Why is there random bolding in places? Doesn't seem to comply with WP:MOS
• The article is rather technical, for someone who doesn't have a clue about computers. The meaning of kernel is not explained.
• Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see any mention of sales figures, and no 'reception' section?
• Looks like this one needs to go back to square one to get sorted out.

— Wackymacs (talk) 06:30, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I believe the article is good, but may be too long for the average person to read. I suggest splitting it up into multiple sections just like what has been done with the Windows XP and Windows Vista articles. What if we made a section for features, editions, and support. I think this would be a great way to clean up the article a bit. We also should try and find some citations for un-cited sources. I will try to start on this soon. Jdlowery (talk) 02:29, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Like many articles in WP, it suffers from corporatese. I've started to hack away at such grotesque stuff as "While all editions of Windows 2000 are targeted to different markets, they each share a core set of common functionality" (Whatever "functionality" may means, can't even slow readers figure that what's shared is common?); "Windows 2000 can be installed and deployed to corporate desktops" (What's the distinction between installation and deployment, how does it matter whether the 'puter is on a desk or on the floor, and what's distinctively corporate about this?); and "The public received the full version of Windows 2000 on February 17, 2000" ("Received"? 17 February was a day that this member of the public spent not buying Win2k, let alone shoplifting or downloading it). However, this is going to take some time, and this rather mystical treatment of the products of large US corporations is so common across Wikipedia that I start to think that its perps aren't just forgetting they're not writing corporate image copy but instead actually like this stuff. Morenoodles (talk) 07:07, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I find that faintly insulting - I wrote most of this and I run Ubuntu at home, have been a fan of Linux for a long time. Please, by all means criticise but for goodness sake - refrain from making personal comments! - Tbsdy lives (talk) 16:01, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry if you feel insulted but I wrote what I thought and rather than merely criticizing have been sporadically working on the prose. Morenoodles (talk) 07:24, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate that you are doing this :-) I did say "faintly", I suppose more to point out that the following sentence is fairly personal "this rather mystical treatment of the products of large US corporations is so common across Wikipedia that I start to think that its perps aren't just forgetting they're not writing corporate image copy but instead actually like this stuff". This implies that the main author of the article is a Microsoft fan-boy! And given that I was the main author... well, you see where I'm going. The lesson to be learned here is that you can never be sure who writes an article. It's best to be specific when giving criticism and not make generalised statements like the one above. However, that said I'm sure that you didn't mean ill by it, and I'm positive it wasn't specifically directed at me. - Tbsdy lives (talk) 10:04, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

• Comment: This article seems to me to have a fairly high percentage of "sourcing" that's satisfyingly explicit. What alarms me is the percentage of this that was written by Microsoft. Great swathes of the article are in effect what Microsoft said about its own product. Much of this is very dry and I am not making accusations of advertising or similar. Still, it seems odd to me that screenfuls go by with Win2k compared to its predecessors and successors as if in a world where no non-Microsoft product is worthy of any note. True, Microsoft then had (and still has) a lock on the OS market and one shouldn't pretend otherwise (the great majority of potential customers wouldn't have looked at a non-Microsoft alternative even if it were given to them free). But I'd guess that somebody somewhere would have compared Win2k with Mac OS or even Linux or BSD, yet Linux goes unmentioned other than for price and Mac OS is not mentioned at all. Morenoodles (talk) 12:04, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't think this is particularly valid. Windows 2000 was an operating system created by... Microsoft. We rely on their documentation to understand the technical aspects of the OS. I'm interested, however, in who else you suggest we should be citing? - Tbsdy lives (talk) 16:03, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I really don't know, as I don't claim to be an expert on OSes. Back when I was using Windows, I wasn't using books published by or with the cooperation of Microsoft, and those books (long since thrown away) were sometimes a little skeptical of the claims that MS made. Morenoodles (talk) 07:24, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
      • I'm not trying to be difficult here, but this is all a little too vague for my liking. If you could give me specific examples where there is a pro-Microsoft bias in the article then I will try to address your concerns. However, speaking of long-forgotten books being sceptical of unspecified Microsoft claims isn't really an actionable objection. - Tbsdy lives (talk) 10:04, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are referencing (1c), comprehensiveness (1b), POV (1d), images (3), and length (4). Marskell (talk) 16:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Diff since nomination, appears nothing is happening here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:08, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

• Remove - 1c. --Peter Andersen (talk) 16:49, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Not certain what referencing is terrible. - Tbsdy lives (talk) 16:03, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
• Remove per the still unaddressed issues noted above. Collectonian (talk) 16:59, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment: Diff since nomination, appears that things are after all happening here. (Maybe too slowly, and maybe not enough.) Morenoodles (talk) 11:54, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
• Remove - Still doesn't comply with WP:MOS, poor prose, poor layout/organization of information. — Wackymacs (talk ~ edits) 10:11, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment: Might have been nice if you'd included User:Ta bu shi da yu, the principle author, even if I've retired I still sometimes look up the project. Under this account. - Tbsdy lives (talk) 16:01, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

  Sorry, I saw you were retired and hadn't done any editing and didn't think I should clutter a dead talk page. Collectonian (talk) 17:55, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

  That's OK, not really that upset you didn't. Totally understandable :-) - Tbsdy lives (talk) 10:12, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

• Q: Given that you are here Tbsdy, any thoughts on workin**g on this one? I was going to close it. Marskell (talk) 20:21, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

  A: I wrote much of the article, but some of the prose is not as good as it could be. I do think this can be resolved reasonably easily. I would like an answer on what sources are missing, I don't feel that there are, and the comment that there are too many Microsoft sources is a little silly given that Microsoft is the primary source for technical information about an operating system they created and have been maintaining for some time! - Tbsdy lives (talk) 10:10, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

• Remove. This article's moment in the spotlight should be deferred until all the issues have been adressed. BASE1() (talk) 20:34, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment: Are direct quotes supposed to or not supposed to be included? I feel those parts should be reworded in indirect/reported speech. - xpclient ^Talk 14:21, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
• Remove Deployment, Editions and Cost section are quite weak on refs. Fair use excessive. Ultra! 15:57, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.