Talk:Halfway to Sanity/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 01:50, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

As per my usual practice with GANs I review, I will be printing out a hard copy, doing a copy edit, and then I will come back with my thoughts. This should take a few days. Daniel Case (talk) 01:50, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

OK, I'm back after the copy edit.

Too often when I pick these long-unreviewed nominations from the crawl at the top of the page, I see why they have gone unreviewed for so long ... while they aren't clear failures, they usually need some significant work, and a lot of reviewers, I think, aren't willing to make the time commitment to see if the nominator is up to making the fixes. It's not fun.

This, however, was not one of those articles. It was, undeniably, in dire need of the copy edit I usually do. There was a lot of repetition of information (did I say that it repeated itself a lot?), and I just have to pull up some egregious examples like this: "For the recording process, drums, guitars, and bass were all recorded earlier in the afternoon, whereas the vocal track was always recorded later in the evening with the instrumentals already played. Langsam went on to say that the Ramones were "never afforded the respect a band of their caliber should have," insisting that other bands who were "much less worthy had more respect afforded them" were often rewarded with more respect."

It almost looks like two different people wrote these sentences without bothering to look at the rest of the sentence. The copy edit wound up reducing the article by about 1.3K, and my personal rule is that anytime a copyedit takes more than 1K out of the article, there was visible fat.

I had to take that bit about the photography out of the intro ... there just wasn't enough there to justify putting it at the beginning of the article.

There were also some points where the wording—"popular" used where "common" was meant, some non-standard prepositions—suggesting it was written by a non-native English speaker.

But no matter. That has all been corrected.

And that taken care of, I am pleased to say that the article presents a fairly comprehensive account of its subject, and does so coherently and in a logical progression. I'm not a Ramones fan (not in the "I don't like them" sense but in the "I prefer other bands" sense) but this told a good story about a band, a little past its prime, making a sincere effort to stretch themselves a bit despite what appeared to be the sort of interpersonal issues that develop in any band over time. Frankly, I think we should put that "the last time they made an album like they thought it mattered" line in the intro because it does sort of sum the whole thing up.

I also like the use of just the right amount of quotes to tell us the story in the words of the band and those who helped them make the record. Quotations are useful in giving the reader a break from our own necessarily dry house style, and here they come in just the right places. I also checked it against the copyvio tool and I am happy to say that the use of quotations overall is far from needing to be trimmed for inadvertent infringement.

A good article (both in the formal and informal senses) usually also tells me something I didn't know before that delights me to know, and this article accomplishes that when we learn that Richie Ramone, upset with the money he wasn't making, left the band to caddy. Wow! How truly punk!

So, I am happy to say that for the first time in quite a while I am passing an article nominated for GA. Congratulations! Good work! Daniel Case (talk) 17:51, 2 April 2018 (UTC)