Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Grey Owl/archive1

Grey Owl

 * Nominator(s): Dsiedler (talk) 16:33, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

This article is about Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (September 18, 1888 – April 13, 1938), commonly known as Grey Owl, who was a popular writer, public speaker and conservationist. Born an Englishman, in the latter years of his life he passed as half-Indian, claiming he was the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman. Dsiedler (talk) 16:33, 10 January 2024 (UTC)


 * I may or may not have time for a full review of this in the future, but at a very quick glance I'm tempted to oppose based on the extremely high volume of short stubby paragraphs throughout - and having his relationships listed as a set of bullet points is something of a no-no. If the article is still here in a few weeks I'll review in full then, but I suspect it may be opposed by others if the reading experience isn't improved dramatically. - SchroCat (talk) 16:49, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose from UC
I notice that Dsiedler is fairly new to Wikipedia and that this seems to be their first major project; firstly, welcome to FAC and thank you for your hard work on this article.

From an FA promotion standpoint, I have quite a few reservations about this one; unfortunately. It's also a big article, which makes pulling out specifics difficult without creating an overwhelmingly huge list. Crudely speaking, the main issues fall under the following:


 * The article has quite an essayistic tone overall: charitably, we could call some of the phrases more poetic than encyclopaedic. A few representative examples that stuck out to me:
 * A gloss on Smith's account: "Ada had complete charge of Archie and stressed obedience... Determined to make sure that her nephew would not turn out like his worthless father, Ada exercised total control over him at home."
 * A gloss on Smith's account: "The story of the city’s progress, however, had little interest for Archie, who had come to Canada to live in the wilderness, near Indians."
 * Paraphrase of Smith: "Unfortunately — apart from this one letter — no other documentation exists on Archie in the winter of 1911-12."
 * Removed note.
 * Paraphrase of Smith: "For the first time in his life, the “part-Apache Indian,” who had supposedly been raised in Arizona, stepped on American soil."
 * Removed sentence.

Very puzzled here: The next point bids me use fewer direct quotations, but the last point objects to some of the paraphrases and glosses of sources as "poetic".


 * The article makes heavy use of direct quotation from non-free sources, potentially placing it in conflict with WP:NONFREE, which requires that the use of such sources be minimal. This also has a negative effect on the prose quality and readability, by causing the article's voice to jump around and the narrative to lose focus by getting dragged into whole paragraphs of primary sources. The majority of the "First tour" section, for instance, is simply lifted from a non-free source with no real analysis or attempt to do anything with it. In general, an encyclopaedia should synthesise these sources and move fairly lightly over them, directing interested readers to follow them up elsewhere.
 * The article is extremely long, but makes use only of a single level of heading; the logic to the organisation is also unclear (why "Posthumous recognition", then "Alcohol use", then "Grey Owl's names", then "Relationships with women"?) I would recommend looking at some other biographical FAs to get some ideas as to how a clearer order could be imposed on the material. Up to and including "Posthumous recognition" the logic is clear, with the article simply following the course of Grey Owl's life and aftermath. The existence of "Alcohol use" and "Relationships with women" predate the start of my contributions. "Grey Owl's names" is my sole contribution. While the material in "Alcohol use" could be folded into the other sections with no great loss, "Names" and "Women" are useful: The guy had a lot of names and a lot of women and children. Keeping track of them all isn't easy and providing the information in a succinct form is helpful for the reader. An idea would be to move these into subsections in a top-level Appendix section.
 * There are quite a few spit-and-polish matters that would be better looked at at peer review;
 * hyphens where we need endashes for page/year ranges, Hypens have been changed to em dashes for all ranges.
 * inconsistent capitalisation and punctuation in sources, punctuation before quotation marks where it should be after, round quotes instead of straight ones... None of these are themselves majorly serious, but the quantity of them says to me that the article hasn't really received the sort of preparation and mentorship it really ought to have before coming to FAC.

I notice that the nominator was advised to seek more mentorship and to take the article through other processes, such as GA and PR, and to seek advice from more experienced editors. I would echo that advice; at the moment, I think this is simply the wrong place for the article in its current stage of development. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:06, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Coord note -- This nom is underprepared for FAC, so I'll be archiving it shortly. Aside from the points raised above I note on a cursory glance several uncited statements, another serious issue that needs rectification. All the preparatory steps UC mentions in their last comment are worth taking; some of our most experienced editors still go through GAN and PR before FAC -- as a newbie you can also try the FAC mentoring scheme. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 20:23, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 20:23, 10 January 2024 (UTC)