Talk:Bruce Dyer/GA1

GA Review
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I'll kick off a review for this article.

My first comment is a general one, before going into the details of prose and sourcing. It is about GA criterion 3, which requires an article to be broad in coverage, including addressing the "main aspects of the topic".

One difficulty I have with this article is that the "club career" section skates over a 153 match career with Crystal Palace in one sentence, and a 181 match career with Barnsley in 2-3 sentences. Then there are three long paragraphs dealing with the very sporadic latter periods of his playing career. The consequence of this is that I am concerned the article does not properly address the main period of Dyer's career, from 1994 to 2003.--Mkativerata (talk) 21:31, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Have expanded his early career, although I'll probably have a go at some more soon. However, I think you're mistaken about his Barnsley career being covered in 2-3 sentences, when it would appear to have a decent-sized paragraph. Mattythewhite (talk) 18:25, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks - I see the article has been expanded, particularly regarding Crystal Palace. I'm a little concerned that the expansion is largely a conversion of statistics from one source into prose form. I'll take it that this source is reliable, but I'm not sure whether sourcing a 153 match career to statistics is giving comprehensive coverage to the critical parts of the article. This isn't a criticism of the article's writing - it may be that there just aren't many sources available. I'm not going to act on this concern any time soon - I'll leave this note here for a response and we'll take it from there.--Mkativerata (talk) 20:58, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The main reason there is so little content on the earlier and larger period of his career is indeed due to little material being available. With the later and nomadic spell of his career being given more coverage by the BBC, club websites etc it has been much easier to write about this period, but from before c.2001 the BBC for example have very little info on footballers' careers. But as you point out, the 50+ apps of his later career shouldn't so heavily outweigh his career prior to that, which included over 300 apps. I'll hopefully be able to do some further expansion soon by trying to grind some stuff out of Google and maybe anywhere else useful. Cheers, Mattythewhite (talk) 01:18, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Excellent - I have no problems holding this GA open. --Mkativerata (talk) 19:44, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * How's the review coming? Nothing on this page in three weeks, so hopefully there's been progress. Wizardman  Operation Big Bear 18:39, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I am keeping an eye on it; I'm not in any hurry to move it along because the nominator is looking for sources and I accept that could take time. I'm planning to check back in a week. --Mkativerata (talk) 18:57, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Ok - here's what I propose to do. As the article stands right now, in my view it can't pass GA because it is not sufficiently broad in its coverage (criterion 3). The reason I do not think it passes this criterion is because the main years of the subject's career are reduced to recitation of basic statistics about appearances and goals. This isn't the fault of anyone; it is probably a reflection of the availability of sources. I suspect helpful sources (newspapers) would only be available in print. Subject to any comments that follow or improvements to the article, I'll check back in in a couple of days to act accordingly. --Mkativerata (talk) 21:05, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. If the sources come up, please let me know and I'd be happy pick the review straight back up so it doesn't have the sit in the GA queue. --Mkativerata (talk) 21:13, 19 August 2010 (UTC)