Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Stanley Marcus/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:GrahamColm 10:02, 6 October 2013 (UTC).

Stanley Marcus

 * Nominator(s): Lawikitejana (talk) 21:27, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because the content seems similar in quality and documentation to that of many current FAs. Peer review was conducted a while back, and the changes made as a result are documented, along with rationales for any changes that were declined. The page is immensely stable, having never attracted any edit wars. Given the difficulty of finding any free-use images of the subject &mdash; from his youth he was member of a prominent retailing family and thus every photo of him I have yet found, even those of SM as a child, are protected by copyright, and his participation in government doesn't seem to have yielded usable images &mdash; the images used have had to be confined to those of places associated with him and one book-jacket, placed in the section of the article that discusses the book. The article's content seems to be that of an FA, although there might ways of dividing it that might yield a more substantive TOC for navigating the text. Lawikitejana (talk) 21:27, 27 September 2013 (UTC) Addendum: After looking through other nominations, I see they generally also discuss the notability of the subject. Stanley Marcus was a major figure in fashion retailing and a major contributor to the world-recognized brand of Neiman-Marcus. He appears in Harvard Business School's list of "20th Century Great American Business Leaders" and in the Houston Chronicle list of 100 influential Texans, as well as the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Retailing Hall of Fame. Lawikitejana (talk) 21:35, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Comment it is perfectly valid per WP:NFCC to have a non-free (copyrighted) infobox image of a deceased person, given no free alternatives. On the other hand, the book cover will have to go, as the cover itself isn't being discussed.—indopug (talk) 01:58, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Oppose for the moment. This article has not been formally reviewed since it was made a GA five years ago, and the edit history doesn't indicate that there has been a concentrated effort to prepare it for this FAC, which  suggests that the nomination may  be premature. I have not had time to read more than the lead at present, plus a quick scan through the rest and some reference spotchecking:
 * Lead does not seem to be a summary of the whole article. There are sections in the TOC which aren't mentioned in the lead – including "Presidential connections" which I should imagine is pretty notable.
 * As noted above, you may use an image of Marcus in the lead, on a fair use rationale basis, for the purpose of identification. There are several Google images from which to choose. As it is, the infobox looks pretty inadequate. The book cover later in the article has to go, however.
 * What is the purpose of citing Marcus's name to the Dallas Morning News?
 * I'm not sure why so much information is cited in the lead. If the lead is doing its job of summarising the article, this information ought to be in the main text and cited there. If the information is not in the main article, then the lead is not doing its job.
 * However, if you use a direct quotation in the lead ("There is never a good sale for Neiman Marcus unless it's a good buy for the customer.") that does need to be cited.
 * Inappropriate capitalisation in "American Business Leaders"
 * Outside the lead there are uncited statements: "Personal life" paragraph 2, and "Early years" paragraph 1
 * There are better, neater, more up-to-date ways of enclosing quotations than using giant ornamental quote marks; I've not seen these in a FAC for years.
 * In the references, no. 29 is unformatted
 * It would be much more convenient for readers if the publication details of multi-cited sources, e.g. Minding the Store, and Biderman, were listed separately, under "Sources" or "Bibliography". As it is, someone wanting to check, say, ref. 46 has to search through the references section to find details of the book.
 * References to newspapers or journals where no online link is given should have page references. This is done in some cases but not others.
 * I have not checked out the referencing in detail, but ref 63 source appears to have no relevant information. Nor does 73. I suspect that these, and possible other cases, are due to the age of the article and lack of updating—I note that many of the retrieval dates are for 2007 or 2008, and of course websites and their contents can change considerably over time. I think you need to check out all your online references.

I think your best course of action might be to withdraw this nomination to give yourself time for some serious updating of content and refs. Although the article obviously has merits – it looks comprehensive and well-researched – it looks in need of modernisation and is not, at this time, ready for FA promotion. Brianboulton (talk) 10:38, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

(Added note): the external link checker indicates that several links are dead and that in several other cases the source content has changed. Brianboulton (talk) 10:48, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Note for delegates: I rather think this editor has lost interest in the nomination and the article. Maybe consider closing the nom? Brianboulton (talk) 00:20, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Graham Colm (talk) 15:32, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.