Talk:George Mason Memorial/GA2

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

Reviewer put the review on a one week hold. Nominator addresses all concerns. Review sat dormant for two weeks. The following was posted to Reviewer's talk page:

"The one week hold on the review of the George Mason Memorial seems to have turned into a two week hold. Not to rush you, but am not sure what else I can do without you evaluating the changes that I made to address concerns. Abel (talk) 03:24, 21 August 2016 (UTC)"

Rather than continue the process of a review, the reviewer immediately failed the review without the nominator having any chance to make any changes. Abel (talk) 18:26, 21 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I have explained this twice on the previous assessment page. The footnotes are confusing and do not conform to the appropriate standards. The article is not comprehensive enough and relies very heavily on one source published by the entity which maintains the monument. I would encourage the nominator to read my previous comments. I did not immediately fail the article. I carefully reviewed it two weeks ago, gave the nominator a chance to improve it, then I carefully reviewed it again today. Please do not misrepresent my actions. Thank you. Knope7 (talk) 18:41, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
 * You noted concerns. I made changes to address your concerns. You ignored the article for two weeks. A reasonable person would have expected you to wait more than a fraction of one second for me to reply before failing the review given that I patiently waited two weeks for you to reply. Abel (talk) 18:43, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
 * You did not fix some of my concerns and I do not think the article in its current state meets the good article criteria. As a reviewer, I am permitted to fail the article if it does not meet the criteria. Knope7 (talk) 21:37, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Closing comments
Unfortunately, I don't see any chance of this being settled, and certainly not here. GAR is not the venue to get a re-review of a failed nomination; the best thing to do is simply renominate the article at GAN.

This was opened as an individual reassessment by Abel, but individual reassessments are not allowed to be opened by major contributors to the article in question. I don't advise a community reassessment: they take three to six months (or more), and are typically for current GA articles that don't seem to meet the GA criteria any longer. (The hope, in that case, is that the reassessment process will end with the article being once again at GA quality.) Also, there's rarely anyone there willing to drive a comprehensive review, which would be required.

I was puzzled by the heavy emphasis on the reference formatting in the review, though it's not an atypical first-time-reviewer thing to do, and would strongly recommend that Knope7 review WP:GANI and the linked-to GA review instructions and the what GA is not essay, since this point is made there, too. GA also does not require all Wikipedia standards be met, counter-intuitive as that might be; indeed, only a few parts of the Manual of Style are required.

GAN can be a very slow process (if not as slow as the reassessments), and people often wait for months for their review to be selected. Reviewers of such articles will commonly give extra leeway—another round of corrections, or an extra week—if things aren't in order after the first round of revisions, or even the second. The hope is that the article will, with help and guidance, reach the GA standard, though if there are major hurdles that could not be solved with a week or so of work—then it makes sense to explain the issues and end the review rather than extend it.

Looking at the nominated article, it seems thin to me, such that it does not fulfill the broadness criteria for GAs. The History section, especially, is lacking information, especially about how the memorial came to be. The passage of the law is the at the end, not the beginning: whose idea, how long had it been around, did the law pass the first time or were there several attempts, was the financing for the memorial from government sources or were private monies involved, and so on. The sculptor is mentioned under History, but she should be in the Sculpture section, along with details on how long it took, artistic methods and her source image(s), the material used in the sculpture, and what kind of stone used elsewhere in the memorial, etc. The Inscriptions section should use blockquotes for the individual inscriptions; there's also a disconnect between the initial sentences and the image, since the one is talking about them being on walls under a trellis, but the image is of stone slabs in the ground. To my eye, this is currently a C-class article; I'll be changing the article's talk page accordingly. I hope I've given some pointers to how the article can be expanded and improved.

Abel, feel free to follow this advice from the GAN instructions: If you believe that you did not receive an adequate review, you may renominate the article immediately. But I would advise you to do some work on the article first based on what I noted above.

Knope7, you still need to properly close your review, assuming you don't want to reconsider resuming it; at this moment, it still shows as active on the GA nominations page. You'll want to reread WP:GANI; the changes to fail (or pass) a nominated article aren't made to the review page, as you've done, but to the article's talk page.

I'm happy to keep this open for a few questions, if there are any, but plan to close the page in a day or two, since this can't be an individual reassessment per WP:GAR. Thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:07, 22 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comments, BlueMoonset. I have tried again to properly close the article review. I will not be further reviewing the article because I do not feel like it would be productive. I am once again disappointed that the nominator became combative so quickly. I would just like to note that I am aware that not all formatting needs to be perfect and I had read the suggested materials previously, however I found the footnotes in the article to be particularly muddled and frankly nonsensical having two sets of footnotes using the same set of numbers. To me, as a reader of Wikipedia that was worth pointing out as something needing improvement. What made me fail the article rather than suggesting it be fixed is that it had not been expanded in key areas I was confident based on my own research that more comprehensive material is readily available. I had mentioned some key questions I still had from the initial review and those were not addressed. Knope7 (talk) 00:33, 22 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you BlueMoonset. Did not know that individual reassessments are not allowed to be opened by major contributors to the article. I will be happy to make the changes that you recommend. The point of the reassessment request is that there was no second round. There was an initial review. Changes were made. While waiting for a reply to the changes the review was failed. Did not even bring up all the points in the review that are not a part of the review criteria, only that the only reply to the changes made was a failed review. Reviews are supposed to be collaborative not summary decisions. Abel (talk) 01:20, 22 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The "frankly nonsensical" is just a citation style that you are not familiar with. Abel (talk) 01:24, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Knope7, thank you for your reply. I've updated the article talk page and the review page; for the former, you didn't include values for the page and topic parameters, both of which are required, and I've removed the FailedGA template entirely from the review page, restoring the template that had been there (and needs to stay).


 * Abel, I have taken the liberty, based on the examples on the Sfn page, of changing the "#" to "*" for the reference section; they are typically bulleted rather than numbered. I have no problem with "Notes" and "References", even if I've more frequently seen such sections as "References" and "Bibliography" respectively; WP:CITEVAR is alive and well, and the only real requirement at the GA level is that there is some consistency involved. Another way is to have "Notes", "References", and "Bibliography", splitting the first two sections into commentary-style notes in the former (which require a differentiating citation format) and inline source citations in the latter.


 * Reviews are collaborative up to a point, but the ultimate decision is the reviewer's. It's one of the good/bad things about GA reviews: there can be any amount of input, but it's entirely up to the reviewer what to pay attention to and how much leeway is appropriate. Perhaps there could have been a better explanation of the reason the nomination was failed—starting with the issue that the broadness criterion still had not been met rather than leading with the citations. However, the requested additional information was not added to the article, which I can see as indicating that the article would not attain the required "broadness": even if there isn't additional information to be readily found, if the article is insufficiently broad, it won't qualify as a GA. Many articles are like this: because there isn't sufficient information available, the article simply cannot progress beyond a certain point. I can understand why Knope7 decided to close the nomination.


 * When you continue working on the article, the reliance on primary sourcing is something you'll want to address, since it will likely be an issue in a subsequent review: there does need to be more from secondary sources rather than relying too heavily on the National Park Service. Best of luck going forward. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:28, 22 August 2016 (UTC)