Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Netball/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 SandyGeorgia 13:47, 27 March 2011.

Netball

 * Nominator(s): LauraHale (talk) 21:03, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because it is a comprehensive overview of an important international women's sport. LauraHale (talk) 21:03, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

N.B. This article was nominated for GA on March 5 and reviewed by User:Bill william compton starting on March 6. The nominator then asked for a replacement reviewer and the call went out for a second opinion. I volunteered and started providing substantive comments around March 13. Meanwhile another editor, User:KnowIG, who had made substantial edits, started a detailed critique. When User:Bill william compton clarified that he had handed off the review to me, KnowIG made uncivil remarks for which he was indefinitely blocked. I got to the point where I had discovered some close paraphrasing and discussed a plan to check the entire article further. At that point, the nominator withdrew the nomination, and no other editor wished to pursue the GA review. Hence, Talk:Netball/GA1 failed. Yesterday, the nominator renominated the article and it was quickly reviewed by an editor who had already made many substantial edits to it. Twelve hours after the nomination, User:Hawkeye7 passed it as meeting all GA criteria without any comments. Talk:Netball/GA2 I am providing this general background in case the recent history arises in the discussions which may follow. Thanks, Racepacket (talk) 01:56, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

MOS work needed, and overciting-- this is not a controversial statement, hopefully: Sandy Georgia (Talk) 02:47, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * School leagues and domestic competitions emerged during the first half of the 20th century,[6][7][28][29][30][31][32][33] and in 1924 ...

Oppose - unfortunately I don't feel the article currently meets the FA criteria. A sampling of issues:
 * As Sandy mentions, WP:MOS work is needed - "%" should be spelled out in article text, numbers under 10 should be spelled out, etc
 * Prose needs work - lots of short choppy sentences, paragraphs and sections, needs copy-editing for grammar, clarity and flow, etc
 * ToC is quite long, and many of the subsections are quite short. Also, "Globally" is IMO a bit too long in proportion to the other sections
 * Multiple problems with reference formatting (example: "Parliament of New South Wales, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly,, columns 11179–11179, (Alison Megarrity, .") and reliable sources (example, why are you citing a children's alphabet book?) Nikkimaria (talk) 03:04, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Oppose by Cryptic C62. Lots of work still needed. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:29, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Lead balancing: As far as I can tell, Variants and Demographic appeal are not mentioned in the lead.
 * I am of the opinion that the various tables in International competitions should be replaced by prose. While detailed statistics may be helpful in the relevant competition articles (such as Netball World Championships and 4 Nations Netball Cup), they don't serve any real purpose.
 * The excessive details on passing technique should be removed per WP:NOTHOWTO.
 * The caption for File:Netball Court.JPG says "A netball court", but the picture only shows very little of the actual court.
 * There are lots of one-sentence paragraphs and very short sections. Fun Net is particularly devoid of content, and should be removed unless more can be added.
 * The Globally section is far too large. The need to limit the depth of the TOC is often a good indication that an article has become bloated.
 * Prose:
 * "Netball rules do not permit players to let their landing foot touch the ground again if it is lifted at all while in possession of the ball" What is a "landing foot"?
 * Avoid unencyclopedic phrasing such as "Netball began to take off". Planes take off. Sports grow in popularity.
 * "Netball is the favourite women's sport in Jamaica," I assume that "favourite" means "most popular"? The two terms have distinct meanings.
 * "Spar – “Good for You” Netball League is the most important national netball competition in Botswana. Naming rights for the league were given to Sar in 2010." Are "Spar" and "Sar" the same thing?

Oppose—I suggest that the nomination be withdrawn to address issues with the article. As a secondary reason, this article has been the subject of discussion at a RfC/U. In full disclosure, I am a certifying party to that RfC for other, unrelated issues, and is the subject of that discussion.

In looking through the article, it does not meet the FA criteria.
 * References:
 * Titles rendered by their publishers in ALL CAPS should be reduced to either Title Case or Sentence case per the MOS. The choice over which case style to use is up to the editors of the article, but should be applied consistently to all titles. "FREQUENCY OF ATTENDANCE AT MAIN SPORTS" should be either "Frequency of Attendance at Main Sports" or "Frequency of attendance at main sports". There are others that need to be changed as well.
 * Online references should denote their formats when they aren't standard webpages. New Zealand Indoor Netball (January 2008). "7-a-side Indoor Netball Official Rule Book" is a PDF and should have that indicated. (If using citation templates, add  to the template.)
 * Many citations are missing publication locations that I would expect to see. (I don't expect web-only sources to have publication locations, but books I do.) Just one example: Davis, Luke; Davis, Damien (2006). Netball. Getting into. Macmillan Education. ISBN 0732999871. OCLC 156762948. In this case, I'm confused by the "Getting into" section of the citation as well.
 * Newspaper or magazine titles should be in italics: Samoa Observer (18 December 2008). "Samoa prepares for World netball series". Samoa Observer. Retrieved 1 March 2011.
 * Tagg, Brendon (December 2008). `Imagine, a Man Playing Netball!' : Masculinities and Sport in New Zealand. 43. 409–430. doi:10.1177/1012690208099875. Retrieved 28 February 2011. Two issues: even with the doi link, I'd expect to have a publication's name for this source. Second, the quotation marks in the title need to be fixed.
 * A request: can you add ISBNs/ISSNs/OCLC numbers where they are missing, for consistency? This wouldn't be an absolute must, but since so many sources have them, it would be nice if all of them could list them where possible. (I'm not per se asking for both an ISBN/ISSN and a OCLC number, just one is sufficient.)
 * All book citations should now have oclc and isbn when that information is available. LauraHale (talk) 08:47, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * "United States of America Netball Association (USANA)": do we need the abbreviation in the citation? If not, cut it out to reduce the alphabet soup clutter.
 * In the version of the article I've reviewed, footnotes 7 and 165 are broken.
 * Content:
 * Until the discussions over netball's status with the IOC is cleared up, I can't state that I'm comfortable with that section of the article. Please note, I'm not taking a position in that discussion, but until it is resolved, that section of the article can't be called "stable" in my mind, and stability is part of the FA criteria.
 * "The Goal Keeper is a specialised defensive position. The player in this position is often the last person that can keep the opposing shooters from scoring.[40][45][47][48]" In my experience, no sentence needs more than two footnotes in most cases. In dealing with highway articles' history sections, we often need to cite to two maps that show the conditions before and after a change. In other cases, a second footnote might be needed for an inflation-adjusted cost figure. Beyond that, seeing multiple references for a sentence raises red flags about the information being presented. Please audit through the article to determine what sentences really require multiple references, and which ones really need only one footnote, even if the information is contained in multiple sources.
 * I don't think all of the boldface text in the "Passing" section meets the standards of the MOS. Please check that it does, or convert the boldface into regular roman text. Ditto "Fun Net", "Netta", and "High Five Netball". The boldfacing in "Fastball" probably checks out as part of a definition-style list.
 * Organization:
 * In the Africa section, the countries are not presented in any logical order. (I suggest reorganizing the subsections by alphabetical order.) I'd also move the main tags from the top of the section to each subsection as appropriate. Why are there not subsections on Lesotho or Namibia, yet they are listed in the list of main articles?
 * Australia should probably be moved to the Oceania section under the Principle of least astonishment, even though the international federation has put it in their Asia grouping.

I've only skimmed the article to identify these concerns. I have not actually read the prose, so I can't and I won't comment on the quality of the writing. Given various circumstances, I'm making a friendly suggestion to withdraw the nomination, let other issues subside and then come back to this article with a fresh state of affairs to consider nominating it. My own FACs are never nominated directly after a GAN review. I always let them go through our project's A-Class Review, WP:PR, or both first. Sometimes I even let them sit for a few weeks or months before the FAC is opened so I can skim through the article first with a clearer head before making the nomination.  Imzadi 1979  →   03:49, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Oppose. The article reflects a tremendous improvement in a short period of time, and is a truly impressive collection of information on a broad, interesting, and important topic. However, it bears many hallmarks of an article that has not yet achieved maturity. The text flow is adequate, but falls short of "engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard." Stability is difficult to assess, because of a number of ongoing debates with this article and related ones. The lead section is very short, and does not provide the kind of overview necessary for such a wide-ranging topic. The structure, while highly detailed and logical, contains far too many sections that are very short, some of them only two sentences. Finally, I believe the article is too long, and should be reworked to take advantage of the many sub-topic articles that exist; it may be necessary to create some additional ones, as well, to achieve the full effect.

That's a lot of critiques, so I want to reiterate: I find the work done here very impressive. One general suggestion: I have worked on one FA on a wide-ranging topic, Columbia River. For that article, it took I believe well over a year of hard work to get it to FA (and there were still many things to do during the review). During that year, a number of editors with backgrounds and interests in different areas came and went, and there was a great deal of discussion around each of the sections. Near the conclusion of that effort, we turned our attention to the lead section, and had a careful discussion about what needed to go in, informed by the in-depth collaboration that had preceded it. I don't want to suggest that every article on a broad topic needs to follow this model, but I present it to give an idea of the scale of effort I associate with the creation of an FA on a broad topic. Simpler topics do not require this level of effort; Stanley Green is one that comes to mind that was written by and experienced Wikipedian and passed in a pretty short amount of time. But for an article like Netball to achieve FA, I think a lot more work by a lot more people will be needed. And it will probably be necessary for some of the personal antagonism to be dealt with before effective collaboration is possible. -Pete (talk) 06:34, 27 March 2011 (UTC)


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