Wikipedia:Featured article review/Ban Ki-moon/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed. Dana boomer (talk) 16:42, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Review commentary

 * Notified: JayHenry, Illegitimate Barrister, Saintjust, Andy Marchbanks, all WikiProjects listed on article page

I am nominating this featured article for review because it appears to fall short of FA standards for prose (1a), comprehensiveness (1b), sourcing (1c), neutrality (1d), and MOS compliance (2a). This one doesn't seem to have been watched for a while; half of the lead section had been deleted at some point and no one noticed. I've restored that, but issues remain. I left a note on the article's talk page a week or so back, but got no response.


 * Prose: Some parts of the article lack flow, as in the choppy one-sentence paragraphs of "Middle East".
 * Comprehensiveness: Although comprehensive at the time of its 2007 review, the article hasn't been sufficiently updated since, particularly to cover Ban's second term. To cover the 23 months of his second term so far, there appear to be only two sentences on a speech he made on gay rights. In contrast, Syria doesn't appear to be mentioned in the article, though this has been probably the most dominant crisis of this year, and Ban and the UN have been repeatedly involved (e.g., ). Sentences like " is expected to continue until at least 2010" clearly need updating. Ban's statement that the UN's role in Sri Lanka during his first term suffered "systemic failure" seems worth at least a mention here. It also seems like some assessements of Ban's successes and failures as a Sec-General should now be available, especially as he ran for re-election, beyond the scattershot attacks of the "controversy" section.
 * Sourcing: One quotation has been marked since September as needing citation. (" "that the UN practice what it preaches and respect labour rights"" ) Other information cites the German, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias as its source.
 * Neutrality: I'm concerned that the existence of a "controversy" section is inherently non-neutral per WP:CRITS. It seems like this material could at least be integrated into the chronological telling of his secretary-generalship, though some of it seems a bit trivial, or at least to get undue weight. "Question of bias" in particular seems gratuitous as a full subsection, since it's sourced solely to a single article in the UN Dispatch. (The "controversy" section didn't exist at the time of the original FA review, but was tacked on later.)
 * Lead: The lead has no information about Ban after 2007, and fails to summarize the article's major sections.

I'd love to see this one remain an FA, but it seems like this one will need a lot of work to get there. I'll ping the four top contributors to the article (who include the original nominator), participants in the original FA review, and all WikiProjects to which this article belongs. Thanks, Khazar2 (talk) 16:54, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment - the original nominator hasn't been active for over two years, so I haven't much hope of contact there. But, I'm somewhat interested in working on this if no one else is interested. -- Laser brain  (talk)  17:42, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Update - I've pulled a bunch of sources and just started to build out the second-term section. I'm going out of town for a few days so will resume working on it next week. -- Laser brain  (talk)  17:52, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear it! I'm considering working on Secretary-General of the United Nations after I'm done with United Nations and United Nations Security Council, so I might end up cribbing some of your work. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on Ban's page and see if I can lend a hand in some modest way. Thanks for being willing to update this one. Cheers, Khazar2 (talk) 20:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Another update: I've managed to start fleshing out Ban's second term section. I've pulled a lot of sources, but it's slow-going because he is mentioned in international news a lot and most of the mentions boil down to "Ban Ki-moon today commented on" some thing or another. He makes a lot of public statements so I've stuck to summary articles that talk about the general themes of his remarks and speeches, which in this term seem to be the Middle East and equality (i.e. LGBT) issues. Within a week or so I should be able to remove the "out of date" banner. Since Khazar2 has left the project, I'll have to rely on coordinators and other reviewers to determine if I've met the concerns of the FAR. -- Laser brain  (talk)  16:34, 8 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment. Referencing is a minor issue, but needs to be improved. I am concerned about the fact that the article has "update needed" tag; indeed it seems to be about one year out of date. A good example why we shouldn't feature articles on living people... or, at least, why we can expect them to be a common returnee here. Support delisting for if no improvement are made (for the next voting phase). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 02:27, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Featured article criteria mentioned in the review section initially included prose, sourcing, comprehensiveness, neutrality and MOS compliance. There has been significant work done on the article, but discussion seems to have stalled over the past few weeks. Hopefully a move to FARC will provide impetus for the final reviewing and editing that is needed to get the article back up to FA status. Dana boomer (talk) 15:48, 24 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Delist. I still have concerns over the prose (specifically, short sections, single sentence paragraphs, and the separate criticism section) and the sourcing (specifically, a reliance on news sources and the copying of unsourced material from other wikis). DrKiernan (talk) 19:39, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Delist. I'm sorry to say that I just haven't found the time to work on this. As DrKiernan mentioned, there are still significant problems and I don't think I'll be able to fix them. -- Laser brain  (talk)  14:48, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Dana boomer (talk) 16:42, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.