Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/John Van Antwerp MacMurray/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 User:Ian Rose 08:37, 5 February 2013‎.

John Van Antwerp MacMurray

 * Nominator(s): Homunculus (duihua) 01:24, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because John V.A. MacMurray was a prominent American diplomat and China expert whose analysis of the events leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War were both novel and highly prescient. The page was promoted to a Good Article with ease about three months ago. Homunculus (duihua) 01:24, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. Please check the edit summaries. - Dank (push to talk)
 * Back in the morning, but I'll get started with this: "The school’s president, Woodrow Wilson, therefore encouraged MacMurray ...": See WP:Checklist. What does "therefore" mean here ... that everyone who was noted to be proficient in language was encouraged by Wilson? It's better to leave the word out if the meaning isn't clear. I made the edit ... see if that works for you. - Dank (push to talk) 04:30, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * All the changes you've made are agreeable to me. The source does suggest that Wilson's recommendation to MacMurray was directly related to the aptitude he displayed for language: "[MacMurray] also manifested a sensitivity for language and literature that led Princeton's president, Woodrow Wilson, whom he greatly admired, to urge him to pursue an academic career." But if we want to keep these two things separate, that's fine with me also. Homunculus (duihua) 16:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not that I want to keep them separate. "A, therefore B" tends to imply causality in careful prose: whenever A happens, B happens as a direct result. I'm not getting that from that quote. I've tweaked; does that capture the sense you wanted? - Dank (push to talk) 00:10, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, looks fine. Thanks. Homunculus (duihua) 00:18, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Support on prose per standard disclaimer. These are my edits. I didn't do a lot with the edit summaries, but please check the edits. - Dank (push to talk) 02:56, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Source review - spotchecks not done Some general cleaning up needed here for consistency. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:59, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Use a consistent date format, and pick one that works with WP:DATESNO
 * Be consistent in whether quotation marks in footnotes appear before or after other punctuation
 * FN10: page formatting
 * Be consistent in when you employ access dates
 * Compare FNs 1 and 11
 * Compare FNs 9 and 18
 * FN20: page?
 * Be consistent in whether you include publisher locations for books


 * This is very helpful. I'll try to take care of these issues tonight as time permits.Homunculus (duihua) 19:19, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Got to work on a few of these, and will address the rest tomorrow. My timing with the nomination was less than ideal; it's turning out to be a busy week. Homunculus (duihua) 05:06, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe I've now addressed all these issues, hopefully to satisfaction. Please let me know if you spot any outstanding issues. Homunculus (duihua) 03:53, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Comments as noted below: I'll try to come back and look at it some more later. GregJackP  Boomer!   03:25, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * No alt text on any of the images used.
 * It seems to me that the MacMurray text is relied on very heavily, perhaps too heavily. Are there any additional sources available? (to clarify, both the use of the subject's book and his papers are extensively cited, especially compared to other, secondary sources)
 * It would be good for someone with better knowledge than me to review the screen capture of MacMurray's film for compliance with Fair Use, as it is a copyrighted image.
 * There is no information to speak of concerning his life (16 years) after he retired from government service.


 * Thanks Greg. I am hoping to have more time over the next couple days to address these issues in some more depth, but as a point of clarification, the MacMurray book on the 1935 memorandum includes a lengthy introduction by UPenn historian Arthur Waldon, written in 1992. That part of the book, which I used to substantiate most of the analytical and many of the biographical details of MacMurray's life, is a secondary source (and a very good one at that). I hope that's useful. Homunculus (duihua) 03:37, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I've added alt text for the images. Hopefully they are descriptive enough.
 * I would also be interested to hear from someone more familiar with Fair Use rules. I'm actually not sure that MacMurray's collection of photos and videos were ever copyrighted. They were captured in the 1920s, and as far as I understand it, he left his collection to his family, which donated it to the Princeton University library (in the 1960s, if memory serves).  They might be in the public domain.  But if they aren't, I'm reasonably certain that a screen grab from one of the video reels should be alright.
 * I will see if I can find any information on his life post-retirement.
 * Is there anything else? And does my comment above assuage your concerns about over-reliance on the MacMurray book? There are actually one or two more secondary sources I've found that I could integrate to offer some alternate perspectives. I will get to that in the coming days. Homunculus (duihua) 03:53, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Delegate comments -- Open over a month with no consensus to promote, and no activity for over two weeks, this nom appears to have stalled so I'll be archiving it shortly. While I'm here I'll make some suggestions for improvement just based on one section, Film and photography: Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:31, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * A collection consisting of more than 1,600 of MacMurray's photographs taken in rural China between 1913 and 1917 is available through the Princeton University library. -- "available through" sounds like an advertisement; a more encyclopedic way to say it would be "held by".
 * "Video" is anachronistic here; "film" and "movie" would be the appropriate terms.
 * Unless your source indicates that "Motion Picture" is the actual name of that Cine-Kodak camera, the words should be in lower case.

Ian Rose (talk) 13:34, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.