Wikipedia:Featured article review/Terry Sanford/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 delisted by Casliber via FACBot (talk) 7:37, 20 June 2019 (UTC) [1].

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Terry Sanford

Notified: WikiProject United States, WikiProject North Carolina, WikiProject United States governors

Review section

I am nominating this featured article for review because the issues I raised about it in May have not been addressed. This article was promoted to FA back in 2008 and, as was characteristic of the time, the review was not very rigorous. Terry Sanford was a monumental figure in North Carolina and throughout the southern United States in the 20th century and had a long, acomplished career. Per WP:FACR 1b it is expected that featured articles be comprehensive. This article is simply not a full summary of all the reliable material out there on this man. Some things not well covered:

• He suffered "wounds" in World War II. No elaboration on how he got those, or why he wanted to be a paratrooper in the first place.
• No details on how or why he became an FBI agent (plenty found in the very underused source, Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress, and Outrageous Ambitions)
• Many details on his personal life absent (see above source)
• Sanford left the bureau to work at the Institute of Government (this not stated explicitly in the article), but there are no details of his work there.
• No details on his tenure as President of the NC Young Democrats
• No details on his campaign for governor against I. Beverly Lake, Sr., despite the fact that a whole book (Triumph of Good Will: How Terry Sanford Beat a Champion of Segregation in and Reshaped the South) has been written about it, not to mention the political effects of race in that contest.
• Only two small paragraphs on his work for NC education, probably his biggest legacy.
• No background on the establishment of the North Carolina Fund or evaluation of its success, and no info on his relationship with LBJ and involvement in the overall War on Poverty
• Very little info on race relations politics (I added most of what's there), which played a very important role in shaping his image as well as the face of Southern liberalism and the Democratic Party
• Only the briefest info on how Sanford promoted Research Triangle Park
• Aside from a blurb about his views on capital punishment, not very much other info about his gubernatorial career
• As President of Duke University Sanford had a very important role in trying to right the institution's finances and get more money by appealing to wealthier students (see here), but this is not mentioned.

I've made some improvements but right now I don't have the time to read three books and rewrite a Wikipedia biography. -Indy beetle (talk) 06:00, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Update: I've since added more info about his education policy as governor, though details on his work with commuity colleges still needs to be fleshed out. -Indy beetle (talk) 19:24, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

FARC section

Comments in the review section largely focused on comprehensiveness. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:26, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

This reads to me as an FA standard article - no doubt partly due to Indy beetle's improvements - but I am not qualified to judge its comprehensiveness. Dudley Miles (talk) 11:15, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Notes:

• Bare URL in citations
• Incomplete citation ( Sanford Holshouser Economic Development)
• Incorrect use of ellipses ("Sanford was a very engaging extrovert....His vision in life was to help people.)
• Incorrect non-use of italics (The New York Times writer David Stout characterized Sanford as ... )
• Why do we have "also" here? (Sanford was also a staunch opponent of capital punishment. )
• Awkward, cumbersome: Sanford was an assistant director of the Institute of Government of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 until 1948, then began a private practice of law in Fayetteville.
• WP:OVERLINKing everywhere; I unlinked a few, but kept finding more.
• Redundancy, why the "next"? (a position he held for the next 16 years.)
• What is a "private career"?

Just generally needs a thorough going-over based on this; a number of these items were not there when the article was promoted (oops, passive voice, when I promoted the article). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:37, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

The lead strikes me as rather short at only two paragraphs. Nixon's article, an FA, has a 4-paragraph lead, while Strom Thurmond (not an FA, but a politician of what I believe is comparable importance, location, and era) has a 5-paragraph lead. While that's probably not in of itself a legitimate argument for delisting, it does reflect poorly on comprehensiveness. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 00:56, 24 May 2019 (UTC) EDIT: Remove/delist due to the above, and for the following:

• His gubernatorial career appears to occupy a disproportionate amount of the article; indeed, there's nothing about his early career other than a brief mention of his being a state senator (and no explanation as to WHY he declined a second term) and it's much longer than his Senate career.
• It mentions that his death penalty opposition was used by death row inmates in clemency pleas, but does not elaborate on that or give examples. In any case it's the only "other position" in a section whose title implies that there are yet others.
• Both of these issues (and indeed the lead) are symptoms of faulty hierarchy and organization that I believe would require a fundamental refactoring to achieve FA status.

– John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 21:40, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Casliber, the bot hasn't gone through yet. My apologies as I am new here, but is something wrong with the template or does the bot usually take this long? – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 01:45, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Errr....it is usually somewhat slow but you are right in that this is a fair bit slower than usual......I'll ask someone....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:46, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

• Closing note: This removal candidate has been delisted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please leave the {{featured article review}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 07:37, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

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