Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Boddingtons/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 not promoted by GrahamColm 12:22, 16 June 2012.

Boddingtons

 * Nominator(s): Farrtj (talk) 15:46, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because I believe it fulfills the FA criteria and is an excellent introduction to Boddingtons Bitter.Farrtj (talk) 15:46, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Leaning oppose
 * Seems like a difficult slog, at least for a copyeditor.
 * Greater Manchester is one of the largest metro areas in the UK; this article doesn't seem to make the case that this beer "[raised] the profile of the city" or (this part is okay if you insist, since "revitalise" has been removed) "[revitalised] the image of Manchester", other than by suggesting that there are at least a few attractive women in Manchester. Did the beer somehow make Manchester more widely known or enhance its reputation?
 * If you read the article through then you'd see that this claim is later sourced to the Financial Times, but I'll add the reference to the lead as well if it suits. Besides, I link to the 500,000 population Manchester city, not the Borough, or the Greater Manchester Area. Farrtj (talk) 17:05, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * This article doesn't explain what it means, or what it could mean, for a beer to "raise the profile" "revitalise the image" of a city that's the center of one of the largest metro areas in the UK ... Is the beer more famous than the city? Did it lend the city some of its allure? In what way? - Dank (push to talk) 17:23, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * If the beer is popular nationwide and is advertised as the "Cream of Manchester" then it is promoting the city in the public eye. As a successful export it promotes an image of the city as successful, given that in the previous decades Manchester suffered from deindustrialization. I think that the article as a whole makes this clear, but the introduction is not the place to go into further detail.Farrtj (talk) 17:52, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * "promotes" seems fine. "revitalising", as if the beer or its campaign were more important or better known than the city and lent the city some of their authority ... is an insult to the city, or advertising hype, or both. - Dank (push to talk) 18:00, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The rising profile of the city is explained further in the article, I don't want to go too much into it in what is only supposed to be an introduction: The extraordinary rise of the beer coincided with the elevation of Manchester from "city of dark, beaten mills to the cultural magnet of Madchester". Manchester and the North of England were now fashionable in the public consciousness, and rejuvenated from industrial slump. Whitbread chief executive Peter Jarvis commented in 1995 that:

It was very fortuitous that the brewery was in Manchester. To outsiders, Manchester is a very attractive place – known the world over for soccer, art, music and broadcasting. It would be difficult to have a Cream of Wolverhampton even though Banks's beer is very good. People do not aspire to visit Wolverhampton. On the whole they try to by- pass it.
 * "Boddingtons Bitter ("Boddies")": Established alternative names in the first sentence of the lead are bolded per WP:LEAD ... I guess if the advertising campaign was successful, and it seems to have been, then "Boddies" would qualify as an established name.
 * "Strangeways Brewery, Manchester, England and": See WP:Checklist. I'd prefer an "in" before Manchester, but I won't push it.
 * "Boddingtons becoming one of the city's most famous products": User:Tony1 calls this "noun plus -ing", and Garner's calls it an "absolute construction". Both frown on it ... mainly because it's almost always possible to find words that are clearer and tighter.
 * "second only to Manchester United and Coronation Street": wouldn't that make it third?
 * Not according to the Financial Times, one of the leading UK broadsheets. Unless your authority is higher than theirs. The "and" groups Man U and Coronation Street as a collective. Here is the original FT quote: "The brewery, close to Strangeways prison and the city centre, is second only to Manchester United and the Coronation Street television soap opera as a Manchester brand name."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a7f4de4a-287d-11d9-9308-00000e2511c8.html#axzz1x2O5VtQq
 * Okay, it was also close paraphrasing, although your recent edit that removed "second" dealt with that problem. Btw, SOED says "second" means "coming next after the first in ... position [or time or ...]". - Dank (push to talk) 18:25, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * That's all in the first three sentences, so I'll stop there. - Dank (push to talk) 16:44, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've asked for help with polishing up the prose at WT:WikiProject_Beer and WT:WikiProject Greater Manchester. - Dank (push to talk) 03:07, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * COI ALert On alternate Tuesdays, dates that are prime numbers, and national holidays in the UK this is my favorite beer. On other days, I prefer Guinness. I hope my !vote will receive due AGF. – Ling.Nut (talk) 14:24, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Oppose. The kind of problems that Dank identified in the first three sentences are present throughout the article, and the referencing is frankly shambolic. George Ponderevo (talk) 15:38, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Comment This version, in no particular order. Mr Stephen (talk) 22:58, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * ABV should be defined.
 * There seems to be some inconsistency in the naming of InBev.
 * There is mention of the taste of the beers prior to c.1981, though no mention of the taste of the bitter that went national, or if the move to Moss Side changed it. (Old people assure me the taste declined in the 1980s.)
 * If Cask Boddingtons doesn't exist any more ("production was discontinued in March 2012") it shouldn't be in the list of current products.
 * Wouldn't one of the other refs be more suitable than ref 2? What makes these reliable sources: refs 3, 5/12/13, 11, 30, 34, 39?  Ref 58 needs clarifying.  Are all the refs fully titled and authored? (e.g.43, 59, 75).  Are refs 84 and 86 the same?

Comments just some random comments, as i won't do a full review.
 * Lead seems to miss content summaries for history from founding to pre 1990s.
 * Same for section "products" (variants) - a brief mention in lead would suffice.
 * I am not sure about the article scope, is it only about the beer itself with some brewery background information or is it about the beer and it's breweries as equal parts of the topic? Whatever the focus is, make sure the article covers all aspects of it in appropriate length. The history section appears slightly too detailed. Maybe some information about the breweries would better fit into the very short brewery sub-article, especially when the information has no direct relevance for the beer. GermanJoe (talk) 07:22, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Comment The opening sentence is misleading in that is describes a beer and not the company that brewed it which is what the bulk of the article is about. The lead should mention the famiy's involvement.J3Mrs (talk) 08:36, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Source review - spotchecks not done. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:07, 10 June 2012 (UTC) These need significant cleanup. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:07, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * FN1: page?
 * Compare FNs 6 and 10
 * Identical refs should be combined
 * Don't use bare URLs
 * What makes this a high-quality reliable source? This? This? This?
 * Provide pages for multi-page PDFs
 * Some web cites are missing access dates
 * FN43: formatting
 * FN44, 76, 77, 78: page(s)?
 * Be consistent in whether you abbreviate month names
 * Be consistent in whether website names are italicized
 * Redman: formatting


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.