Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Alan Wiggins/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 09:50, 14 March 2018.

Alan Wiggins

 * Nominator(s): EricEnfermero (Talk) 04:49, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Early in his professional baseball career, Alan Wiggins stood out because of his blazing speed; he looked like he might even become one of the game's great base stealers. In 1980, at the age of 22, he broke the professional baseball stolen bases record, and he was playing in the major leagues by the following season. Before long, however, Wiggins was wrapped up in a cocaine addiction. Though he enjoyed his best season in 1984, he was out of baseball by 1987. Less than four years later, he became the first major league baseball player known to have died of AIDS.

I started contributing to this entry in 2015, and I received a very helpful GA review that year. I returned to the article several weeks ago and decided to prepare it for my first FAC nomination. I secured a peer review and a GOCE copyedit, and I put a lot of work into establishing strong sourcing. While much of the available coverage of Wiggins has detailed his tragic death, this entry is comprehensive, discussing his early life and the impact of his baseball playing career. EricEnfermero (Talk) 04:49, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Sources review
Mainly minor formatting points:
 * ISBNs should be consistently fomratted – compare e.g. 1 with 6, 30, 40. Also the 10-digit isbns in 32 and 61 would be best converted to 13-digit form. The respective numbers are 978-0-06-199981-9 and 978-1-62368-734-2
 * Another inconsistency is in your use of archive links. For most dated newspaper/journal sources you don't archive, but in a few cases – 3, 10, 23, possibly more – you do.  Is there a particular reason for these exceptions?
 * Ref 8: requires access date
 * Ref 13: the main link goes to a GoDaddy logon page. The archive link is working – suggest you use the archive url in the main link
 * Ref 41: newspaper title should be italicised
 * Ref 47: Paywall, therefore add template
 * Ref 62: requires access date
 * Ref 63: If "Real Health" is an online source, it shouldn't be in italics

Other than as noted, all links are working, the sources are well ordered and are of the appropriate quality and reliability. Brianboulton (talk) 17:21, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for this review, Brian. I think I addressed most of your concerns. I did find a few more dated periodical/website sources that were archived and I removed the archiving to be consistent. I left the archiving on Baseball-Reference.com pages (like ref 10) and similar sites, because those are websites that don't have publication dates (as far as I can tell - but if I'm incorrect or if there's another way to handle this, let me know). It turns out that Real Health is a print magazine with some of its content also published online, so I changed that reference to Template:Cite magazine. If I mishandled any of this, just let me know. There's one reference to the UPI.com site (ref 20); it does have a date but I can't figure out where it was published in print, so I left it archived - let me know if this is okay. Thanks again for your time! EricEnfermero (Talk) 07:10, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
 * It's counterproductive to remove a few archive links for the mere sake of consistency. Per WP:DEADREF: "consider archiving the referenced document when writing the article". Preventing link rot inasmuch as possible is a good thing. It's a step backwards to remove these links, and would be torturous and artificial to mandate that an FA archive all of them.—Bagumba (talk) 11:09, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I noticed a discussion about this stuff at WT:FAC last week and started to remove much of the archiving from the article based on a post in that discussion. Then more people responded and it seemed like I should restore many of them. I'm happy to go either way on this, but I'd just like to be reasonably sure that there's some agreement before I make widespread formatting changes again. EricEnfermero (Talk) 01:45, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
 * The discussion to which you refer was precicely that – a discussion, an exchange of views, not an explanation of policy. There's not likely to be any general agreement on this issue, beyond that a consistent practice should be adopted within an article. It is acceptable, for example, to argue that archive links should be added to all website sources, but that links to dated print media or to Google books don't require archiving. On the other hand, some editors choose to cover their bases by archiving everything. I'm neutral about this, but whatever practice is followed,  FAC criterion 2c ("consistently formatted inline citations") needs to be observed. Brianboulton (talk) 11:38, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi Brian - I appreciate your feedback. I went ahead and archived everything that I could see, except for Google Books, Google News Archive and Newspapers.com sources (because I had trouble getting those pages to display correctly when I tried to archive them). I think I've caught all of them, but let me know if not. Thanks for your work.

Comments – Interesting story on a player I didn't know anything about (he was active before my time). Here are a couple brief comments from a quick reading:
 * For the sake of non-baseball fans, I suggest linking to pennant in the lead, as that might be confusing to them. This looks like a good one to use there.
 * Personal life: "Alan Jr. played at the University of San Francisco and played professionally in several countries." The second "played" could just be removed from the sentence, as the sentence would read just fine without it and removal would make it a little tighter. Giants2008  ( Talk ) 23:37, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment, Giants2008. I didn't see this for a few days, but I've incorporated your suggestions now. EricEnfermero (Talk) 15:25, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Comments by Cas Liber
taking a look now....
 * Actually reads fine. Will take another look tomorrow as I gotta sleep now Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:24, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Coord note
Guys, even if Cas were to take a look (and then support) we'd still be a long way from consensus to promote, and this has been open six weeks already. I'm not sure why this hasn't attracted more commentary but I think we need to put it to bed and have another try after the regulation two weeks has passed per FAC instructions. Eric, as you're new to FAC, you'd be eligible to try the mentioning scheme. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 09:50, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 09:50, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.