Template:Did you know nominations/Merian C. Cooper


 * 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 Yoninah (talk) 15:06, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Merian C. Cooper

 * ... that Merian C. Cooper, director of King Kong, attempted to destroy all 5,000 copies of his autobiography Things Men Die For? Source: Openlibrary.org says that Cooper "changed his mind about releasing the personal details about "Nina" and asked Dagmar to buy up every copy she could find. She managed to acquire most of the 5,000 copies that had been released. Cooper kept a copy and Dagmar kept a copy, while the rest were eventually destroyed." A Hoover Institution news page (through Stanford university) supports this quote.
 * ALT1:... that Merian C. Cooper, director of King Kong, volunteered in the Polish air force and spent nine months in a Soviet POW camp after his plane was shot down? Source: American Polish Cooperation Society: "Together with two Polish officers, the men walked 450 miles to Latvia. Within a month, they crossed the border, and within a week they were back in Poland. After spending nine months in hellish POW camp, he was free again."
 * Reviewed: Equus (film)

Improved to Good Article status by Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk). Self-nominated at 22:29, 21 November 2016 (UTC).


 * Symbol confirmed.svg Made GA recently enough, the article is generally within policy, neutral and well cited (It passed GA). Certainly long enough. Hook is interesting (I prefer the first one) and supported by 2 references. Minor suggestion: Can we replace "attempted to destroy all 5,000 copies" to "destroyed nearly all of the 5,000 copies"? Because the destruction was successful and there were rare copies that survived. HaEr48 (talk) 23:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, the rewording should be fine. I was a little curious about how many were actually destroyed, because one source said that he and his editor kept a copy, but Worldcat showed that at least 7 libraries have a copy. I actually wondered if it was a story they made up to boost sales of the book (the story didn't appear in his biography or BYU's finding aid), but the Hoover institution page says that "several" copies survived. Anyway, thanks for the review! Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:03, 22 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Symbol possible vote.svg I have pulled this one from Q5 because it appears to have some copyvio issues to two different sites as identified by the Earwig copyvio detector. I note that neither the GA review nor the DYK review include a copyvio check -, I have no objection to you promoting hooks that do not include a copyvio check in the review, but if you do so, I think it is incumbent upon you to do a copyvio check yourself. Gatoclass (talk) 13:24, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I always do a copyvio check before I promote. In this case, I thought the phrasing cited by Earwigs in this source met WP:LIMITED. Since it does look word for word and sentence by sentence, though, I'm glad you pulled it and call on to please do some rewriting. Yoninah (talk) 14:04, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, there is something very odd going on here, because when I run copyvio detector I get percentage hits for the first two listed sources of 69.3% and 57.9%, see this. Gatoclass (talk) 14:16, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Very odd. The first source (a blogspot) in your Earwigs list is not even cited in the present article. Do you think it's a Wikipedia mirror site? I randomly looked at the sentence From late 1919 until the 1921 Treaty of Riga, Cooper was a member of a volunteer American flight squadron, the Kościuszko Squadron, which supported the Polish Army in the Polish-Soviet War, which is word for word from the blogspot. However, the article cites it to the Hoover Institution. And the Hoover source doesn't even mention Riga. Yoninah (talk) 14:31, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Now I see that when you did your Earwigs search, you clicked on "Search engine" as well as "Use links in page", so you got all the matches on the internet. I always shut off "Search engine" when I search, because that brings up everything in Google's cache. I only look at the links used in the page. Yoninah (talk) 14:34, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * They could be mirrors, I'm afraid I forgot about mirrors when checking the detector results. The blog was written in 2009, so if the duplicated text exists in an earlier Wikipedia version, it's probably a mirror. Gatoclass (talk) 14:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * OK. That line that I cited was posted in February 2005. Yoninah (talk) 14:44, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, the blog looks like a mirror. What about the second site, war history online? Gatoclass (talk) 14:47, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Looks like that is a mirror too. Apologies for the false alarm - it's a long time since I came across a copyvio and my technique is rusty - but it's better safe than sorry. This one can be re-promoted anytime. Gatoclass (talk) 15:03, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. Yoninah (talk) 15:04, 7 December 2016 (UTC)