Talk:Lewis Hamilton/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 17:04, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Alright, I will bite the bullet and take this on. I will print it out for a copyedit and to make comments; this should take a couple of days (at least). Daniel Case (talk) 17:04, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, here I am ten days later, delayed by a combination of things:


 * The derecho line in the Northeast U.S. a week ago that knocked out our power for a day (But at least I used some of the time without it to read through my hard copy with a red pen).


 * More importantly, the limitations of our printing technology. Printing this article in its standard form results in a large stack of papers with the type about 6 points high. I know it's nice to be able to say you've gone over an article with a microscope, but that shouldn't be literally. Something will have to be done about this at the tech end, because in order to properly proof the article, I had to cut and paste it into Word. That came out to 37 pages without the tables and footnotes.

But anyway ...

First and foremost I can say that there is no problem with this article not being comprehensive enough. This would be a prime example of the far end of the spectrum.

I mean ... 255K or thereabouts when I started this? WOW! I thought this would be the longest article we have on a living active professional athlete, but then I got the hint that Cristiano Ronaldo was even longer and ... yep. At 310K and almost 700 footnotes, it leaves this one in the dust. We seriously might want to consider separate "Playing career of ...", or something like that, spinoffs for articles like this.

Someone must have decided after the last GA fails that the best way to go was overwhelming force, and ... on that score, they won. I can only assume FAC is on the near horizon. Perhaps someone should tell them to duck.

There are, nevertheless, some places where this approach hurts more than it helps:


 * In the intro, it is understandable that we say Hamilton is biracial (as we say in North America; I suppose "mised-race" is the UK term?). But I think we can leave the fact that his father is black and his mother white to the section on his childhood.


 * Speaking of which, in that section, I don't think the fact that his parents lived in Grenada before he was born is relevant, at least not when it's not mentioned anywhere else in the article; nor do I see a reason to give his sisters' names if they're not notable (his brother, who seems to be, is a different story).


 * I also don't see why we need that graf of Alonso complaining about how things went after the 2007 Japanese Grand Prix either, as he says nothing directly about Hamilton in it. It's a lot more relevant to Alonso's career, and honestly I think the article could lose this without anyone really noticing.

The writing was, uh, interesting. It feels as is if it was written by three different people, perhaps at different times. One, mostly responsible for the later stages of Hamilton's career and the "driving style" section, was fairly competent and knew how to write for Wikipedia. The parts after that, and some odd sentences here and there elsewhere in the article, read like they were written by a second-language speaker—sometimes I had to guess at what the writer might have intended when correcting the grammar and syntax.

Lastly, the earlier sections, probably older, seemed to have written by a younger, less eloquent writer, one of the kind prone to the overly formal style I associate here with fans whose zeal to make sure the article is up to date outstrips their ability to fluidly use the language. The sort of writer for whom things are never said, but stated. The sort of writer prone to redundant phrasing like "at the age of" and "finishing in fifth place" (as well as a really good one here, "prior to the start of the season" (where everything the first five words say can be condensed to one: "before"). The sort of writer not entirely clear on when to use figures and when to spell out numbers (For consistency's sake, I followed, as I do in all my own writing, the AP Stylebook's rule that one through nine are spelled out both as cardinals and ordinals while 10 and above require figures ... MOS:NUM leaves this up to the writer). The sort of writer who feels we need to know, years later, the exact dates someone was informed of something and when that something was made public two months later. The sort of writer who, without realizing it, has absorbed a lot of bad journalistic clichés like "[they] officially appealed [the decision]" (Has an unofficial appeal ever been possible?)

Cleaning up that latter writer was in large part responsible for the almost 2K I was able to shave off during my copyedit. As a rule, I consider any time you wind up cutting more than 1K to have been an indicator that there was definite fat in the article.

There are still by my count about a dozen fact tags that need to be addressed. has done an excellent job responded to the other ones, and I trust this will continue until they are all gone.

So, I am putting this article on hold until everything is cited. An article this long should not have any uncited grafs, not when it already has almost 400 footnotes. (The other suggestions here can be taken as primarily advisory). Daniel Case (talk) 06:14, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Alright, five days have gone by, and there appears not to be a remaining tag in the article. And my other concerns above have been addressed as well.

Therefore, the article passes. Daniel Case (talk) 06:02, 26 May 2018 (UTC)