Template:Did you know nominations/Melvin Tumin

Melvin Tumin
Created/expanded by Jokestress (talk). Nominated by Yaris678 (talk) at 12:37, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
 * ... that author Philip Roth stated that his novel The Human Stain was based on an incident that happened to American sociologist Melvin Tumin?


 * Symbol possible vote.svg Right now, the article has only 968 characters of prose (as measured by User:Dr pda/prosesize.js), below the 1500 minimum. Chris857 (talk) 02:23, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol possible vote.svg Article was expanded to about 1,900 characters as of now, being well above the minimum. Hook is currently inaccessible for the time being so I can't check. Arius1998 (talk) 02:16, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol possible vote.svg Correction: article is currently 1233 prose characters, and thus still too short. Please use one of the tools that measures prose characters only (as opposed to total characters), such as DYKcheck or the above prosesize. In addition, the article is classified as a stub (stubs are not eligible for DYK until they have been expanded to the point that they are not stubs), and at least two paragraphs do not contain source citations. I am puzzled by the statement "Hook is currently inaccessible for the time being", as the hook is the sentence above that starts "... that author Philip Roth". I think you mean that you cannot confirm the hook fact (that the New Yorker url is not working at present); with luck, it will be soon, or another source can be supplied (I found a couple via Google), as Roth taking to the New Yorker blog because Wikipedia refused to change the article on his book when he tried to correct it directly (the old secondary source requirement) was news. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:21, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: neither creator nor nominator had been notified of these issues; I'm just now doing so. This nomination should remain open for at least another 72 hours, to give them a chance to respond. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:10, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the notification. I have some ideas for expansion of the article and will attempt that now. Yaris678 (talk) 16:29, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Article is now expanded... although Jokestress, the creator of the article, has stated a belief that the size of one section is WP:UNDUE. A third opinion has been requested on this so it may be best to wait until that has been given.  Also the section relates to the hook given, so maybe we should think of a different hook.  What would people think of ALT1, below?  Yaris678 (talk) 07:50, 24 September 2012 (UTC)


 * ALT1 :  "... that American sociologist Melvin Tumin challenged the Davis-Moore hypothesis and went on to write a widely used text book on social stratification?"
 * I think the first hook is better. Even though I offered the third opinion that the article shouldn't heavily cover that incident, it's still a more interesting hook, the incident in question is sourced well enough, and it is not disparaging to the subject. Gigs (talk) 13:46, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
 * OK. I am happy with that.  I notice that Jokestress hasn't commented on your third opinion yet.  But unless she objects to it soonish I think we are ready to go.  Yaris678 (talk) 17:32, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment: before I put out a call for a new reviewer, the article still needs a few things:
 * The lead of the article says that Tumin was an expert in race relations: that information should also be in the body of the article, not just in the intro. (The citation would then go in the article rather than in the lead.)
 * Each paragraph in the body of the article should have at least one citation. The first and fourth paragraphs of Life and Career are both lacking an inline citation.
 * Articles that claim they are stubs cannot be approved for DYK, so please remove the stub template from the page.
 * Once these are done, it will be ready for review, and I imagine ought to pass in fairly short order. Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:29, 28 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Symbol redirect vote4.png Reviewer needed now that significant edits have apparently been done. (They should have been reported here at the time, to help move this along.) Noting that my first item above has not yet been addressed, and that other issues brought up earlier should be checked as part of the review. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:59, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol confirmed.svg Ok, here's my re-review. The length is of course still ok, and (after some very minor edits that I just made) the sourcing has been improved to the point where every paragraph is sourced. The sources check out, and I think notability is clear. I'm not entirely happy with the similarity of wording between our article's "[Tumin's book]was widely used as a textbook and was re-issued in 1985." to the NYT's "Reissued in 1985, it has been widely used as a textbook." but it's so short (and difficult to find alternative phrasing for) that I don't think we should hold up the nomination over it. As for which hook to prefer: I greatly prefer ALT1. The original hook is more interesting, but I'm a bit concerned over its quality of sourcing: it describes an event that must have been highly polarizing, solely from the second-hand point of view of one of the subject's friends. There do not seem to be e.g. any newspaper stories that refer to this, or that provide an unbiased account of what the supposed university investigation really concluded. As a story about how Roth's novel was inspired, this is unproblematic, and I think it's not so badly sourced that we need to remove it from the article, but to make it the main hook for a biographical DYK I think we need to have enough depth of sourcing to be confident in the accuracy of this anecdote. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:40, 17 October 2012 (UTC)