Template:Did you know nominations/1 the Road


 * The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as |this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:08, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

1 the Road

 * ... that artificial intelligences have have begun to write novels?  Source: "On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans. An old GPS unit was fastened atop the roof. Inside, a microphone dangled from the ceiling. Wires from all three devices fed into Ross Goodwin’s Razer Blade laptop, itself hooked up to a humble receipt printer. This, Goodwin hoped, was the apparatus that was going to produce the next American road-trip novel." (and link the source, or cite it briefly without using citation templates)
 * ALT1: ... that at nine seventeen in the morning, the house was heavy? Source: It is a partial quote of the AIs first words "The novel begins suitably enough, quoting the time: “It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy.”" (and link the source, or cite it briefly without using citation templates)
 * Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Mayan Train

Created by RTG (talk). Self-nominated at 06:52, 26 February 2019 (UTC).


 * Symbol confirmed.svg New enough, long enough, within policy, and the hook meets the hook criteria. Good to go. In my personal opinion, however ( this is more food for thought if anything) that the premise of the article is interesting enough as it is (the first book to be written by AI!) that it doesn't really need a super quirky hook like ALT1 to capture the reader's attention, and the primary hook might be a tad confusing as readers may think that it's an article talking about AIs writing novels in general when it's instead about a specific novel. I personally think something super simple like ALT2: ... that 1 the Road is marketed as the first novel to be written by an artificial intelligence? would work best, but again, that's up to you  Satellizer el Bridget   (Talk)  10:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes the primary is clunky. ~ R.T.G 11:29, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Symbol redirect vote 4.svg New reviewer needed for ALT2. Yoninah (talk) 22:59, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Symbol confirmed.svg ALT2 is the best hook listed here. It is very catchy, properly cited and mentioned in the article. Accepting hook, with the rest of the review as per User:Satellizer above.Flibirigit (talk) 18:11, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Symbol question.svg Hi, I came by to promote this, but I don't find an inline cite for the ALT2 hook fact. I also don't think the article is start-class yet. It has a largely uncited lead section and one paragraph of authorship, also cited to a single source. Aren't there any production details or publishing history? Yoninah (talk) 19:46, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry I musn't have pressed send. In fact the first article is called "The First Novel Written by AI Is Here—and It’s as Weird as You’d Expect It to Be" and it goes on to say, "1 The Road is currently marketed as the first novel written by AI." A quote from the AI creator Goodwin.  ~^\\\.rT G '{~ 22:15, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
 * OK, I moved the cite up to the first sentence in the lead. But the article still doesn't seem start-class. Yoninah (talk) 20:45, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I must put it that this article requires the reader to scroll to finish reading. The subject is a book which makes no sense, is significant only in regard of its author, and has captured a lack of popularity which is both amazing and unsurprising at the same time. If 1 the Road was published in 2000, or even 2010, you could be telling us there was too much useless information in the article, but this is the future and the future is way more crap than advertised.


 * Sorry for the delays. I swear my ping system sometimes flashes up a ping then makes it disappear before I can read it. I must request somewhere that no notification ever be auto-deleted.  ~^\\\.rT G '{~ 07:37, 22 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Symbol possible vote.svg It has been another month without any further needed action from RTG. Allowing another seven days for action, but after that, this may well be marked for closure as abandoned by the nominator. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:37, 23 May 2019 (UTC)


 * I am the last one to post here. You say, "without any further needed action from RTG" yet in the next sentence that I have abandoned the nomination under a deadline for "action". The reviewer is asking for more than DYK requires. The reviewer is claiming they simply can't believe the topic is so short. I'm agreeing with them. They are the ones who have left it here. If they just reviewed it under the DYK rules, it would have been done long ago because it met that on the first day. It was written specifically with DYK in mind. "This will make a good DYK," I was thinking. The purpose of DYK as I recall was to attract editors to new content, not present them with a finished article. The idea was to have the article to a certain standard, not the ultimate standard. I've gone over it several times. I don't want to lose any love for the topic. I repeat, I have responded here. It is not my action you are waiting for. The article meets the character limit. It meets all of the DYK rules. The reviewer is asking for more. Please tell them not to, thanks.  ~^\\\.rT G '{~ 09:31, 23 May 2019 (UTC)


 * RTG, as far as I could tell, Yoninah was saying that the article, while technically meeting the 1500-character length criterion, did not meet "a certain standard"—it wasn't sufficiently robust (hence the comment about not being start-class, which is the next level of quality above a stub). I believe she was referring to this rule: Articles that fail to deal adequately with the topic are also likely to be rejected. I notice that another editor has expanded the article from 1728 to 1996 prose characters; perhaps Yoninah can take another look to see whether her concerns have been addressed. BlueMoonset (talk) 14:59, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * OK, I rewrote the lead and added more information from the sources, as well as reorganized the page so it reads like a Wikipedia article. I removed the part about it being 60 million words long, which is a misquote from the source. The article is now start-class. But ALT2 is not going to work. An article about it in The Atlantic states: "They’re collected in 1 the Road, a book Goodwin’s publisher, Jean Boîte Éditions, is marketing as “the first novel written by a machine.” (Though, for the record, Goodwin says he disagrees it should bear that distinction—“That might be The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed by a program from the ’80s,” he tells me.)" Perhaps it's best to say just that the novel was written by artificial intelligence, period. Yoninah (talk) 19:23, 23 May 2019 (UTC)


 * I am compelled to disagree with Yoninah by pointing out they haven't added any substantial amount of information and have merely copy edited and detailed the information already there. It seems a positive contribution. There is no "misquote". It says sixty million words and gives the megabyte size of those words before later in the article giving a description of another collection of twenty million words, and the megabyte size of that (twenty million words from which the AI draws words and phrases for its prose), so it is easy to draw the comparison. Yoninahs suggestion feels like if one publication disputes another, to delete the whole thing? It doesn't seem to match the modus operandi of the site. You report the dispute, even if it is your own words saying simply, sources disagree about one point on this subject, rather than pretend there is no possible reliable source of information. The curses of an overabundance of information is not in our rationale?  ~^\\\.rT G '{~ 16:22, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, we are constantly running into problems with eagle-eyed editors who will find someone or something else that was the "first".
 * If you could supply a source that says the novel is 60 million words long, we can use it in the hook, like:
 * ALT2: ... that an artificial intelligence has written a 60-million-word novel? Yoninah (talk) 19:57, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
 * ALT3: ... that an artificial intelligence wrote a novel on receipt paper, one sentence at a time?
 * ALT4: ... that an artificial intelligence wrote a novel in the spirit of Jack Kerouac's On the Road? Yoninah (talk) 20:01, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The 60 million words is a misquote. The sixty million words is a reference to the pool the AI drew from. ALT2 is wrong to my mistake. The AI drew from several 20 million word lists of literature totalling 60 million words. Sorry about that... ~ R.T.G 07:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

review is needed for the new hooks proposed. Flibirigit (talk) 02:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm fine with ALT4: "in the spirit of" is a bit loose but captures what the source says well enough. I removed two sentences from the lead: they were not verified/valid, IMO. I'm going to clean up the citations a bit; they're inconsistent. Drmies (talk) 01:25, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Symbol possible vote.svg Returned from prep per discussion at WT:DYK. Please see there for objections to the ALT4 hook that was promoted, the lead/body correlation, and the image. Yoninah (talk) 21:02, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
 * , the hook is fine (and it was yours); User:Lee Vilenski, not every hook needs to explicitly name the subject of the article: this happens often enough at DYK. I didn't look very closely at the image since the nomination was already approved, twice, and then gone over by Yoninah (I thought). I don't really understand the problem with the image--, your "outdated" note actually makes a point: many younger readers may not know what such rolls look like. I didn't write the article; if I had, I would have looked for a source that indicates that On the Road was written on a scroll, and that 1 the Road therefore shares something else with the inspiration. Again, I didn't scrutinize the entire article, though you can see my attempt at cleanup in the history; I didn't notice Cadillacs or laptops. I will look at it again, later, to see if I can improve it based on the concerns (though I don't agree with all the concerns). Drmies (talk) 23:15, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
 * My #1 concern is that there is no year or other date of when this experiment happened - would be good to know that. Correct me if I'm in error on the image. In and of itself, the image is not a disqualifier on the nomination. But in the article, the caption needs some clarification that this is merely a sample of "rolls of receipt paper." That's my guess on why the article creator put that image there, but it needs a better description. — Maile  (talk) 23:39, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Maile66, I just got done with a pretty serious revision. I do still like that hook that Yoninah proposed and that I approved. Obviously I've done so much rewriting I shouldn't be reviewing it--but by now I think I deserve co-credit for writing it, haha. BTW you're right about the date, of course--it was right there in the sources, and I found a cover, etc.--there was a TON of information in the sources that was never used. Also, the documentary, on YouTube, is quite interesting. There really is something to this entire project, though I don't understand how they fit six people in a Cadillac sedan. Drmies (talk) 01:36, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
 * WOW, at first glance, what a rewrite. Don't have time to go thru it all this evening, but will look at it tomorrow if no one else has. Re the Cadillac, is that the car on the image?  Cadillacs used to be bigger, a gas hog on the road, a status of prosperity, Elvis owned Cadillacs, Elvis gave away Cadillacs as an expression of "because I can ... I'm rich".  Now they just blend in with all the other autos that look alike.  — Maile  (talk) 01:55, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Double WOW! It looks like a Wikipedia article now—thank you! I've taken the liberty of adding you to the DYK credits. Thank you for rescuing this! I've also unstruck the ALT4 hook. Yoninah (talk) 09:26, 25 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Symbol confirmed.svg ALT4 approved. Everything looks good. — Maile  (talk) 11:13, 25 June 2019 (UTC)