Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Kevin and Kell/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 01:18, 23 January 2008.

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Kevin and Kell

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I have been working on this article for some time now, and I believe it to be of FA status. The main problem with webcomic articles such as this one, tends to be the lack of "Reliable sources". However, if you compare this article with Megatokyo, the only webcomic of FA status at the moment, Kevin and Kell has a greater precentage of reliable sources (i.e., sources not from the webcomic or sources directly involved with it, such as FAQs and websites affiliated with it.

Also, the article has been given a copyedit, the images have no problems and it seems now to fit all the FA critera. I believe it is of the rank. ISD (talk) 11:31, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

• Oppose It could use some more copyediting for grammar. For example:
  • The family name, the Dewclaws, is represented as "the Dewclaw's" several times.
  • "Rudy has found it hard to accept Kevin as head of the house due to him being a rabbit..." is awkard and unclear.
  • "Originally, he was is hostile to Kevin and tries to hunt him unsuccessfully, but he eventually accepts Kevin as family."
  • "the strengths of the comic were are the world design, its longevity and its discomforting setting of , where intelligent animals being are killed"

Melchoir (talk) 00:55, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Things have been changed a fair bit since I swept through a few days ago. I've made another pass. GreenReaper (talk) 02:25, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've given it a quick run through Word's grammar check, although I couldn't fix everything. Moving on to content, the second sentence of the body, "The comic describes the world they live in as created by an organization called the "Great Bird Conspiracy" (GBC).", does not appear to be supported by the source, which states "Bill was not the originator of the term 'Great Bird Conspiracy', which is why you will not see the term in the strip, only on the mailing list." This makes me concerned that the article is aimed more at insiders than casual readers or the general public.

The second paragraph begins by introducing Kevin and Kell but then goes back to describing the wider society; Kevin and Kell really belong at the front of the "Characters" section. "In a human-like society, they have many animal features..." is also awkward.

In "Characters", the logic of what material is included is unclear to me. Of course descriptions of the major interpersonal dynamics are invaluable. But take the sentence "He is in a relationship with Fiona Fennec, George's daughter." As a reader, I don't care. I don't even remember who George is. I have to run a search to find George Fennec in the previous paragraph, and I skipped over his name the first time I saw it because it was irrelevant. It's all just really hard to penetrate. Melchoir (talk) 10:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I've tried to make the section simplier to understand. ISD (talk) 20:18, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Much better, thanks! I still think that the article could use a little more polish, but lacking concrete complaints, I withdraw my objection. Melchoir (talk) 06:24, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much. ISD (talk) 07:37, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support, as GA Reviewer of the article. I reviewed the article December 2, 2007, and it's had some good improvements since then. The article is succinct, well-sourced, and written in a clear manner, especially for its subject matter. Other articles of this nature can fall into a trap of being written in an overly in-universe style, yet this article does not. I am not familiar with the particular webcomic described, and yet I can read and understand the article and come away knowing a good deal more about it. Good job. My only comment is with regards to the first image, Image:KevinAndKell.png. If it is not difficult to contact Bill Holbrook, perhaps someone could try to contact him and see about moving the image to Wikimedia Commons, perhaps under a Creative Commons Attribution license? Cirt (talk) 08:49, 16 January 2008 (UTC).

• Response to Comment: As regards to you comment, I will talk to Holbrook after the nomination is over about moving the image. ISD (talk) 08:58, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Weak Oppose - I believe parenthesis impede flow in general, and that it could be better written in general.
• "The strip started in black and white, but began running in color on" - may I suggest "black and white, changing to a color-scheme on"
• "contest where several new comics[,] (both syndicated and[/or] on-line)" - ambiguity - comics that were both or that were either/or or and/or
• "Reviews of Kevin and Kell are mixed." - I understand what is meant - that "it received both positive and negative reviews" and that there wasn't a preponderance of either - could use better phrasing.
• --Kiyarrllston 16:36, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Response to Oppose: I have tried to carry out all the recommendations you have mentioned. I hope these are satisfactory. ISD (talk) 17:22, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Oppose—Poorly written. Here are random samples from the opening. Each sentence needs fixing. A serious copy-edit of the whole article is required to claim the necessary "professional" standard of writing.
  • "The strip is one of the oldest continuously running webcomics, beginning on 3 September 1995.[1]"—"beginning" is not right. K and K began on [date] and is now one of the oldest ..." is one solution; there are others too.
  • "Unlike a mixed marriage of humans, where race or culture tend to be barriers, their difference is species and diet." Um, I think this is POV. Race and culture is no barrier for many people. To whom are you imputing this attribute?
  • Contrastive clauses need the same wording: "Kevin is a rabbit and a herbivore, while Kell is a grey wolf, a carnivore."
  • Colon, not semicolon, after "children". Tony (talk) 13:36, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Remove "comic's", possibly.

Oppose - as it stands, I do not have a sense of the whole picture from this article. The individual details are good and well-sourced, but there's no sense of the whole from it - I don't really get a sense of whether Kevin and Kell is a reasonably well-regarded comic that has the historical oddity of being unusually old, or if there are distinctive and iconic things about it. I don't get a sense of its influence, or of its style. It feels like a well-referenced set of details without an overall organizing argument. (And I mean argument here not in the POV sense, but in the basic writing sense of a thesis expressed in the lead and supported by subsequent sections.) Phil Sandifer (talk) 17:21, 18 January 2008 (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.