Talk:Dasavathaaram/GA3

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 04:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I have printed this out and will hopefully reach a decision tomorrow. Daniel Case (talk) 04:50, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

OK. Sorry for the delay of an extra day or so.

This article, about a film that was clearly a major event in Indian cinema, has been nominated for GA twice before in the four years since its release. I can see why the author/nominator wanted to get it to GA. Some issues from the previous two noms have been cleaned up, most notably the plot summary, which now clocks in at less than a thousand words. And there has been some work on the images.

But regretfully I must fail it a third time.

The main issue from the first two noms, the prose, is still a huge problem. Much of it still reads like it was either translated from other languages or written in English by a non-native speaker. As a result we have a lot of bloat and redundancy. On my printout there are large sections circled in red where I just stopped giving specifics as there were so many places where the language could be smoothed out. Some of it may just, for all I know, be Indian English, but other things like "visiting guests" (are there any other kind?) are problematic whatever variety of the language takes precedence. There are also inconsistencies like US and USA being used interchangeably, and then the full "United States of America" being used at one point.

In addition, some sections have a tone and usage which sounds more like a news story than an encylopedia article. That suggests to me that there may have been some copypasting going on at some level, perhaps not so much here but in the original language, perhaps.

And discussing copyright issues brings up the other problem: the images. There were fair-use issues in a previous review. They have been partly addressed, but not completely.

Some can easily be fixed—the onesheet image can and should be reduced to 300px, since that's the acceptable size for such images as it will never be displayed inline at any larger size. But others cannot. I am not sure yet whether the image of the idol can qualify as free. Indian copyright law, as summarized at Commons, says that images of three-dimensional artwork (and yes, something built for use on a film set counts as artwork) can be freely photographed as long as they are "permanently affixed" in a public place. We don't know whether the idol shown has not, in fact, been struck since the production. Or if not, whether it's displayed somewhere the public has access to. Without knowing these things, I cannot comfortably say that image is properly licensed as CC by its original uploader.

This leads into the problem of images, generally, or rather the lack thereof. Ironically, given my above complaints, this article can get away with using more fair-use images. There is a general limit of four per article on a copyrighted visual work. I am amazed that in an article about a film where the cowriter and star plays ten different roles, including some outside his ethnicity, that not only is there not a single picture of him in one or more of those roles, there isn't a single picture of him outside the infobox (and I only know it's him on the onesheet because I clicked on his name to go to the article). Surely there are publicity stills available?

And even if we want images beyond those four we have other options. We commonly use free images of the stars or creators in film articles. There's only the one picture of Haasan, but there's a whole category at Commons of images of our leading lady that we could use.

So, for all these reasons, it fails. It's comprehensive and well-cited (although I will put a fact on the one paragraph-ending sentence about the soundtrack being available in four languages, as I'm sure that's an oversight) but its prose needs a lot of work (if the nominator desires, I will implement a full copy edit based on my hard-copy review), and it could use more images and better justify the ones it does use. Daniel Case (talk) 17:22, 10 September 2012 (UTC)