Talk:What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Rublov (talk · contribs) 14:36, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Rublov. I will be taking a look at this article later today. Ruбlov (talk • contribs) 14:36, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Lead

 * Rather than saying is the title of an informal opinion poll, I would just say is an informal opinion poll.
 * ✅ I'd pondered the same revision and your comment confirms that's the way to go.


 * The NYTBR provided a list of 22 works of fiction... After the poll's publication, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) contacted some participants... — In my opinion, these two sentences are too much detail for the lead. I think it would be better to (a) list the top 5 books in the poll, and (b) add another sentence about the reception of the poll.
 * ✅ — I listed the other four novels from the top five and expanded portions of the lede about reception. I rewrote the bit about the remainder of the list and the one-vote works to curb unnecessary detail, but I didn't cut it entirely. I think it's important to make clear from the outset that the list in this article is not just a 1:1 reproduction of the NYT list. Wikipedia has a (correct) tendency to avoid republishing lists of "bests" because of copyright concerns, but this is a unique case, as the poll methodology and incomplete publication of results make it more akin to raw information like sports scores (except in a weird twist where some results were kept "officially" secret), rather than a typical, editorially curated "top 100" list.

Poll

 * I think it would be better to move the first few sentences of the "Participants" section to a new subsection before "Results" called "Conduct" or something; otherwise it's a bit strange for the description of the poll's results to precede the description of how it was conducted. I think the long list of participants should stay at the end, though.
 * ✅ funny, yesterday I briefly thought about making this exact same change, for the exact same reason.


 * The article describes Beloved's victory as widely anticipated, but in the quote Tanenhaus only says we heard from a few voters who predicted Beloved would win, which in my opinion does not support "widely". I couldn't access the video; is there someone else that more directly supports this claim?
 * I've removed the "widely anticipated" claim—bad example of lazy sweeping placeholder language on my part. Instead, I moved Tanenhaus's quote down to the "Response" section just ahead of Scott's quote, then added the sentence: "The eventual victory of Beloved did not come as a shock to Times staffers who were involved with the project." I think that's a more narrow and defensible claim.


 * did not reveal who voted for any given work nor provide → did not reveal who voted for any given work nor did it provide (clearer syntax in my opinion; I stumbled over this sentence a couple of times while reading it)
 * ✅ Good catch. I tossed in an extra comma ahead of "nor", too.


 * I think the table would be more legible if the "Votes" column were moved somewhere to the right of the title.
 * I'd considered this when making the table, but tbh I had a hard time finding a convincingly better placement for it. What makes this tricky imo is the rank and the vote count are extremely closely related and thus useful to run parallel beside each other (particularly on a sortable table). The only other "logical" choice (imo) would be to place the "votes" column to the far right of everything except the refs column, but that looks somewhat odd and again loses the ease of comparison when the two run side-by-side. The List of most expensive paintings has a somewhat similar situation where the two leftmost columns ("Adjusted price" and "Original price") both express a quantity related to the rank that determines how the list is organized in the first place. Another list, Pazz & Jop § Albums voted number one puts the number of "mentions" and the number of "points" side-by-side; those columns are also placed to the far right of everything but the footnotes column, but that list is organized based on chronology, not on best-to-worst ranking. I remain open to other ideas on this tho.

Response

 * Sara Nelson, then–editor-in-chief — don't need an em dash here.


 * "[a]cademic institutions[,] ... government agencies, private foundations, libraries, other cultural institutions, [and] the publishing world" — so many modifications are necessary to make this quote fit the syntax of the sentence that I wonder if you couldn't just paraphrase it.
 * ✅ it's now paraphrased as "alongside other institutional influences such as academia, governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, and publishing companies."


 * On May 22, 2006, the public radio show Open Source... — I question whether this paragraph should be included unless some summary of the two discussions can be presented; otherwise it more or less amounts to "some people discussed it somewhere".
 * I plan to search for useable commentary and/or other info from these two sources soon. I should be able to get to this in a day or two. A comprehensive summary of two in-depth, multi-participant discussions would be too long, and tbh I expect these to be impossible to boil down into any single "point" given the formats, but I'll look for interesting insights that can be drawn out. I do think these events do have some inherent noteworthiness (relative to the scope of the article's subject), if for no reason than as evidence that the poll actually generated genuine public discussion among public intellectuals (4/5 of those critics on Open Source have Wikipedia articles), not just hype about the idea of "discussion". Even if there aren't many useable facts in and of themselves, these should stay in somehow even if it gets moved out of the way—like, I'd prefer to move them into a brief "further reading and listening" section or a footnote. At minimum they're still valuable jumping-off points on the topic, in much the same way the novel titles are in a different way; worth keeping around for those interested enough to dive deeper into the topic.


 * Any other reactions from the authors? From authors not listed?
 * There's at least one, who I've just added: Michael Cunningham, a poll participant who also got one vote from someone else. I haven't come across any others so far, though I'm still keeping an eye out. That Updike comment alone, published in a long-defunct offline newspaper and buried deep in an academic database, already came as a major surprise to me tbh. Put another way, if the article made a sweeping claim like "no other authors on the list commented about the poll", it'd need a "citation needed" tag (or straight-up removal)—I don't know what else might be out there. I suspect a sense of decorum inhibited journalists from asking direct questions about an accolade like this, not to mention some are more private in the first place.

General comments

 * All images are relevant and either freely licensed or in the public domain.
 * Earwig says "Violation Possible", but this is because of (1) the long list of poll participants, and (2) a few lengthy direct quotes. Otherwise no indication of copyright violation.

Nice article. Just a few things to address. Putting on hold. Ruбlov (talk • contribs) 23:09, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi! Thanks for the thoughtful review. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 15:09, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I will go ahead and pass this article as it clearly meets the GA criteria, but I'll leave a few optional comments that you may address or ignore at your discretion:
 * The runners-up were the novels Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo; a tie for third place between Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy and Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (1995) by John Updike; and American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth. → The phrasing of this is a bit awkward. Suggest The runners-up were Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo, Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy and Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (1995) by John Updike in a tie for third place, and American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth.
 * noting apparent biases against—for example—women's writing, regionalist literature, or genre fiction → Think it should be "and" rather than "or". I'm also unsure that "biased against women's writing" is an accurate paraphrase of "biased against women", as it seems that "women's writing" refers to a specific academic discipline. Women writers might be a better link here.
 * a sense of the zeitgeist when taken as an aggregate whole — nitpick, but I feel that "a sense of" and "aggregate whole" are already kind of encapsulated in the definition of the word "zeitgeist".
 * Cunningham then emphasized the difference between the criteria to name a greatest book of its time versus the personal criteria to name a favorite book. — The phrasing is a bit essay-ish, and usually the preposition used with "criteria" is "of" rather than "to".
 * This was an interesting and informative article. Thank you for writing it. Ruбlov (talk • contribs) 17:03, 20 April 2022 (UTC)