Talk:Napoleon/GA3

GA Reassessment
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I've recently come across this article, and straight away have serious concerns about whether or not it continues to meet the standards required of those articles labelled "Good Articles". The reason for this is twofold; on the one hand it clearly does not meet all of the six good article criteria (which will be discussed below), and on the other it does not appear to match the quality of some other GA-rated biographies of prominent political figures, such as that of Vladimir Lenin or Nelson Mandela.

I am concerned that the article fails on the first GA criteria, that the article be "Well written". In particular, the lede clearly does not meet the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, being by far one of the lengthiest that I have ever seen on a Wikipedia article. I also believe that the article fails to meet the second of the GA criteria, that it be "Verifiable with no original research"; this is because there are paragraphs and sentences in various parts of the article which are simply un-referenced. Moreover, there are problems in that the citations that are present are all formatted in different ways, lacking the necessary standardisation. These certainly are fixable problems, but I am of the view that unless these are dealt with in the near future, then the article be demoted in order to keep standards up across the encyclopaedia's political biographies. Midnightblueowl (talk) 17:35, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Have you taken any actual steps to facilitate the improvement you seek? Such as tagging the unsourced sentences and paragraphs, pruning the lead or standardizing the references? (using a single standardized referencing system is not a GA requirement, and the vas majorities of the articles 288 citations are short harvard citations) How does demoting the article itself improve wikipedia or keep standards up?·maunus · snunɐɯ· 17:57, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I have indeed introduced "citation needed" tags at the appropriate points of the article. I believe that demoting the argument would make a very small improvement to Wikipedia because it would help to ensure that those articles listed as "GA" actually meet the necessary criteria; having articles on Wikipedia that are ranked as GA articles but which don't meet the criteria undermines the reliability of our ranking system and accordingly the encyclopedia as a whole. I won't deny that the change I am arguing for will be a very minor one and is hardly likely to improve Wikipedia in any seriously meaningful way, but I believe that my case is still a fairly solid one. Midnightblueowl (talk) 13:03, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Apart from the citation needed tags (most of which I actually dont think are justified, since the paragraphs tagged already have references, only the last summarizing sentence in those paragraphs does not have a reference - and mostly do not need them), the article meets the GA in its current condition, so nothing would be gained by demoting it other than arbitrarily raising the GA criteria beyond what they actually are.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:07, 19 June 2016 (UTC)


 * I have shortened the lead a bit so that it is now 3 paragraphs, well within the MOS requirement which would allow 4 paragraphs for an article of this size (currently 96kb readable prose). The article is clearly well referenced and well written - unsourced sentences or paragraphs are not in itself a cause to worry about OR unless there are specific examples of problematic content. This article is appears quite well sourced with 287 citations, so unless specific examples of OR problems can be given I would not take that concern very seriously. From having looked at the article today (having had no part in writing it previously) I dont see any problems that would warrant demotion - we promote GAs of lower quality even today. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 12:52, 19 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment - if the whole of a paragraph is referenced to a single source, then that source need only appear at the end of the paragraph. We need to be careful not to introduce tags where they are unwarrented. Mjroots (talk) 18:48, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

I'm still not totally happy with this article, but the edits to the lede have been an improvement and it is clear that at present there is opposition to my argument that it should be demoted. Accordingly I shall not do so at this time, but rather will close this GAR. Many thanks to those who contributed their opinions. Midnightblueowl (talk) 20:24, 23 June 2016 (UTC)