Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Red Barn Murder


 * 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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 18:52, 24 February 2007.

Red Barn Murder
A notorious case in 19th century England, this murder sparked an early "media frenzy". The comments at peer review were very positive, so I'm putting up here in the hope they continue. Yomangani talk 18:28, 19 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Support. An informative, accurate, well-cited and engagingly-written article. Trebor 18:43, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment, the referencing would be a little more accessible to the reader if abbreviated titles were added to the notes: that is, "Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.13" instead of "Gatrell p.13". semper fictilis 18:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * IMO, the employed style is OK. Lots of articles and editors use it. CMS is fine with it. qp10qp 05:04, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Further comment. I wonder whether the afterlife of the story in 20th century literature and film couldn't be given its own section and receive further elaboration.  semper fictilis 18:57, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure there is enough to merit breaking it out. There's a quite a bit on the Tod Slaughter film (enough to bump up that article beyond a stub), but info on the rest of the films is thin on the ground, even from unreliable sources. Yomangani talk 17:37, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Support Well-written, comprehensive, verifiable, and properly formatted article. Great work. Jay32183 20:10, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. Read it again; enjoyed it again. Excellent work. qp10qp 05:04, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Support per Jay32183. Yono 00:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Excellent article, but to my mind, the veritable littering of redlinks detracts from it. --Dweller 10:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm in favour of redlinks: they provide an opportunity to expand the encyclopedia. In the past it has been suggested that it is a problem that can be solved by creating stubs, but this seems to be solely to change the colour and gives the misleading impression that there is some content behind the link. Most of those redlinks are on my list to be filled at some point, but I prefer to write a decent article rather than, for example, replace the redlinked mole-catcher with a link to an article which says "A mole-catcher is a person who catches moles", or something equally pointless. Removing the links in the article is equally bad, that gives the impression that there are no articles to be written, and when an article is written there is no link to it. As a point in fact, this article was written as the result of a redlink in the featured Spring Heeled Jack, and wouldn't exist if that link had been removed or a stub created. Yomangani talk 11:26, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Other articles I've seen criticised at peer review for redlinks. No matter, I'm happy to Support regardless. --Dweller 11:56, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Support. Looks pretty cool. Some style changes. In the lead, "huge crowd" might be better as "large crowd". "in the newspapers, and songs and plays." could be better as "in newspapers, songs and plays." I'm a bit thrown off by the "Citations" section. Coming from a scientific background, I'm not sure how appropriate it is to have incomplete entries for the per-page in-line citations. Aside from those minor points, the article looks good. Shrumster 17:22, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It was a "huge" crowd for the time: between 7,000 and 20,000 people; "a large crowd" doesn't seem to cut the mustard there. The problem with dropping the first "and" from "in the newspapers, and songs and plays" is that the proceeding words are "The story provoked numerous articles", and it didn't provoke numerous articles in songs and plays. I'll look at rewording it some other way and I'll also look at the citation format (although other articles use this format it seems to be a bit of a sticking point). Yomangani talk 18:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * "The story provoked numerous articles in the newspapers, and songs and plays" is one of those awkward little sentences: "...articles in the newspapers, songs and plays" doesn't work because it miscues to "articles in the...songs and plays". It's not reversible, either: you can't put "numerous songs, plays, and newspaper articles" because that offends the time sequence. "Newspaper articles" would not really be much better, which would cue "newspaper...songs and plays". I thought of "...newspaper articles, as well as songs and plays", but it's clunky. My best suggestion is "The story not only provoked numerous articles in the newspapers but also songs and plays." The trouble is that, strictly speaking, the "not only" should go before "numerous articles", but there it sounds unharmonious. I'm the sort of language nerd who enjoys this type of problem, but I admit I'm a bit stumped here. qp10qp 18:42, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * On the shortened note references, I believe the method used in this article is the best one for Wikipedia. It is the style the Chicago Manual of Style regards as satisfactory for journal articles since those are short enough to make it easy to locate the full reference. All the more reason to use the method on Wikipedia, which is not paper, and where the full reference is located a few inches down the same page. I see no difficulty in this author-page method at all, except where two different works by the same author are cited, in which case the title or shortened title should of course be added. qp10qp


 * The inline citations are formatted perfectly, there is no need to change them. I'm very surprised there was a complaint from a "scientific backround" since it's identical to the format used in scientific journals, at least for geology, geography, and biology. American high schools actually teach that inline citations should include the author's last name and the page numbers while listing the full book information at the end of the paper. The only "Wikipediaism" involved is making them footnotes rather than spelling them out within the body of the text. Jay32183 19:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Support - great prose. Some aspects might be considered POV in a different context on other articles but they are entirely in keeping with the spirit and prose of the article and make for a great read.cheers 04:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.