Talk:2012 Summer Olympics/GA3

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Jamesyboy2468 (talk · contribs) 16:54, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Let's do this. Corrections welcome... jamesy  boy   (2468)  17:06, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

A brief overview of the article finds some striking shortcomings. An Olympics is a huge undertaking which gathers the world's focus for two weeks. There are so many things which can be said about it that entire books could be written. The challenge of the main encyclopedic article is to summarize the event into a comprehensive work: being able to cover all important issues while keeping the overall size in balance. Details can always be moved to subarticles in line with WP:Summary style. I have a number of concerns:
 * Much can be said about the ideal length of a Wikipedia article, but this article is too long by any reckoning; I would expect it to be about half the size, at the most.
 * The entire article is over-focused on the organization of the games and has little content on the actual events and sports.
 * There is no balance between the various section's length (controversies is very short, public transport is very long etc)
 * "Broadcasting" goes into excessive detail about UK viewing, which is highly biased.
 * There is very little coverage of the sports themselves. There should be a prose summary of each sport, which include highlights. This does not necessarily mean a section for each sport, though.
 * The world records should be spun off into their own article
 * Overall, the prose quality is periodically low and the article appears cluttered. The worst example is a single-sentence top-level section ("Victory Parade").
 * The first sentence is a run-on. The lead needs to be more focused on what is important and what is unique to that particular edition of the Olympics, rather than listing more trivial information. It also needs to focus more on the sports. For instance, it is not interesting in the lead who fronted the bit or which IOC session approved it, but mentioning the other candidate cities is, as is London being the first to host the Olympics three times.
 * To take an example for one paragraph in the lead: It starts with "Construction in preparation for the Games involved considerable redevelopment, particularly themed towards sustainability.": the first part could be said about nearly any Olympics, except for a few of the earliest and those immediately after WWII, while sustainability has been a topic for most Olympics since the 1990s. This sentence adds no value to the reader. Despite the amount of information presented about venues, very little specific is said. Use hard facts instead of vague comments, and always ask yourself: could this be said about most Olympics?
 * "The Games received widespread acclaim for their organisation, with the volunteers, the British military, and public enthusiasm praised particularly highly." is at best misleading; I sure remember a lot of criticism of the Olympics. Overall, the article completely undermines the a large amount of valid criticism of the event.

As the article is now, it fails 1a, 2b, 4 with smaller margins, but is nowhere near 3a and 3b. I would recommend failing the article, as it needs to be re-composed before being able to meet criteria 3. Arsenikk (talk)  12:44, 7 October 2012 (UTC)