Wikipedia:Featured article review/Go (board game)/archive1

Go (board game)

 * Article is no longer a featured article

Review commentary
I find that this article falls short of many FA criteria, most important one being insufficient referencing. I raised my concerns on the talk page of the article nearly two weeks back, but did not find any progress.

Quantifying the concerns, the major concerns regarding this article are as follows:
 * 1) Article lacks enough references.
 * 2) Article has over-whelmingly large external links section.
 * 3) Section "Go variants" has a lot of stub-sections (very short sub-sections).
 * 4) The article can also lose a bit in size, as a lot of trivia is present in sections like "Other board games sometimes compared with Go".

— Ambuj Saxena (talk) 17:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Message left at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject China, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan, and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Board and table games. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 17:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd add that the "Other board games sometimes compared with Go" thing seems like not only trivia, but a real magnet for off-the-cuff original "research". -Stellmach 13:30, 7 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Go_Variants now exists as a seperate page, there remains a seperate link in this article which lists games that can be played with Go equipment. Hopefully this may resolve some of the problems mentioned above. What exactly needs to be referenced? -Zinc Belief

I note that the "chess" article, like this one, contains only five references, and more than thirty external links. Yet that article is not on the FAR list. Is some anti-go POV at work here? kibi 17:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree that the article is insufficiently referenced (I would object on these grounds to a GA nomination, in fact). I also think it is clear that it contains far, far too many external links, most of which do not fall under the guidelines expressed in WP:EL. The external links section is over 100 lines and nearly 12 kilobytes in size; this is exactly what is discouraged by the proscriptions against "link farms" in articles. I would add to these concerns that there are a number of stylistic problems, particularly relating to the use of capital letters and redundancy and capitalization in headings. For example, "go" is not a proper noun, so why is it capitalized? I think the article could benefit from significant copy editing. As for the number of references in chess, well, I think that's a problem there too. That's not really relevant here, though. &mdash;ptk✰fgs 19:25, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


 * There are indeed far too many links. I may see if I can page off these later. However what exactly should be referenced? If somebody could point out some sections it would help in improving the article. As for Go being capitalised, I am sure you can find out why that is the case if you do some research :) - ZincBelief


 * I can't find anything. If the name is always capitalized (and this does not seem the be the case), that makes it significantly different from other board games whose names are common nouns, and should be expressed and referenced in the article. &mdash;ptk✰fgs 19:10, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Eight references added, some of which (such as The Go Player's Almanac) support many facts thourghout the article. Are the reference-seekers satisfied? kibi 01:39, 14 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Please remember not to compare to another FA, which might also need to be FAR'd. The External Links seem to be a link farm.  The article has external jumps, which should be corrected.  The footnotes contain NY Times references, which should be expanded to a bibliographic or footnote format.  The footnotes do not use correct punctuation (see WP:FN).  Without looking yet at other issues, I checked the article for inline citations - a few examples (there are others) of uncited statements from a random section in the middle of the article are:
 * Go had reached Japan from China by the 7th century, and gained popularity at the imperial court in the 8th century.
 * In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu created Japan's first unified national government. Almost immediately, he appointed the then best player in Japan, Honinbo Sansa, head of a newly founded Go academy (the Honinbo school, the first of several competing schools founded about the same time).
 * The government discontinued its support for the Go academies in 1868 as a result of the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate.
 * (POV, OR ??) It is a perfect information, deterministic, strategy game, putting it in the same class as chess, checkers (draughts), and reversi (othello).
 * (Weasle words, screaming for a citation) It is commonly said that no go game has ever been played twice, and this may well be true:
 * Those are just some samples. Move to FARC for further work. Sandy 17:32, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Suggested FA criteria concerns are referencing (1c), organizations and size (2 and 4). Marskell 20:14, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Weak remove. A lot of improvements have been made since the FAR started, but the article is still short of FA standards with large parts of the article unreferenced and stubby sections. The problem with external links is resolved, IMO. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 12:58, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove. Many listy sections that should be turned into prose. Some stubby sections and an obvious problem with referencing.--Yannismarou 16:59, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove. Weasle words, undercited, possible OR or POV, listy and stubby, and although I somewhat cleaned them up, External links/Further reading seems to have become a link farm/advertising for books for sale section.  Sandy 15:43, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Remove grammatical problems, particularly the unexplained and repeated capitalization of "go", a common noun like chess, draughts, and backgammon. thin on references. otherwise an excellent article. EL's still a bit heavy, but are a significant improvement over the situation prior to FAR. Possible non-free images &mdash; is Jago open-source? What is its license? Is it okay to use screenshots of this software to show go positions? Or should they be marked 'fair use' only for discussion of Jago? I have no problem with the number of books listed per se, but if their info is so valuable that they need to be listed here, they could probably be worked in as references for some of the unsourced statements. &mdash;ptk✰fgs 02:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't understand why Ptkfgs is offering unreasearched opinions on a FARC review. Why not look up Jago's website to find this out? Why not look up every national Go website and find that it is the accepted custom to Capitalise the common noun Go. Is there some particular reason wikipedia shouldn't reflect normal practice, if so I would like to hear why? The perception that this is a problem is totally bizarre. If you want to troll please go somewhere else. FARC comments are also supposed to cite instances of problems, as detailed in the guidelines, which none of the reviewers so far have done. Pity. What specifically would people like referenced and why? Which sections are stubby? Why should listy sections be turned into prose, and what are these listy sections? I feel this FARC commentary is frankly woeful. Sorry.
 * Capitalized common nouns are a rare exception. The explanation that's been added is good, but it's one of the things I'd like to see a reference for. As for what else needs to be referenced? Well, I would start with the second sentence of the article, and then move on to referencing basically every claim in the first paragraph of "origin of the name". Then I'd look for references on the "internal tensions" paragraph the "nature of the game" section. I really don't think I need to list 70 different claims that need referencing. The article in general misses FA criteron 1(c). Sorry you feel this is woeful. &mdash;ptk✰fgs 00:00, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If you just read the article you can find a reference for the second sentence. I think you do need to list references if you want to make a review. That applies to everyone by the way. Otherwise you're not doing a proper review. I think FA status should be reapplied pending a proper review.

I haven't seen a proper review yet.

There's nothing "good" about the explanation that "go is sometimes capitalized to differentiate from the common verb." If that made sense, then bridge would also be capitalized when it refers to the game. Why is this important? Go is an ancient game with deep cultural roots. It is not just some game that somebody invented and copyrighted. Capitalizing go treivializes it. BTW, the AGA web site is one site that does not capitalize go (although there are errors there.) It is not capitalized in the The American Go E-Journal either. And those that do are just plain wrong, as the example of "bridge" should make clear. Readers who cannot differentiate between a noun and a verb should seek remedial education. kibi 13:38, 10 October 2006 (UTC) 13:36, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually the policy on the USGO site is totally inconsistent, so I am not impressed with your argument there. You can find numerous instances of both go and Go there. The E-Journal's editor clearly prefers to use go. The IGF site uses Go. The BGA site uses Go. Canada uses Go. EGF uses Go. France uses Go. Belgium uses Go. Australia uses Go. Ireland is inconsistent. Anyway this is just one issue, an unresolved dispute. What about the other areas? Anything which has been requested to be changed has been changed. The unspecified problems are still unspecified. Unless reviewers specify what they dislike about the article I don't see how they expect people to change it. When you review and find problems you are supposed to specify what they are, if you are not prepared to do that, then don't review an article.

The process is described as ''Articles are listed as FARCs only after undergoing a review. 'Reviewers may declare "keep" or "remove", supported by substantive comments that focus on the outstanding deficiencies in relation to the FA criteria. Reviewers who declare "remove" should be prepared to return towards the end of the process to strike out their objections if they have been addressed. If, after a period of review, the deficiencies have not been addressed and there is no obvious momentum to do so, the FA status is removed. If consensus has emerged that the changes have brought the article back to standard, the review is closed.'

Now after objections were raised the article started to be edited and improved. A clear sign of obvious momentum. In my opinion, it is not acceptable to just say Weasle words, undercited,- that is a not a substantive comment. I only see superficial comments, with the possible acception of the unresolved dispute over Capitalisation. Is it acceptable to capitalise go to improve readability, or do we want an encyclopedia that adheres to strict grammatical rules at that expense?

We can examine the original problems
 * 1) Article lacks enough references.
 * 2) Article has over-whelmingly large external links section.
 * 3) Section "Go variants" has a lot of stub-sections (very short sub-sections).
 * 4) The article can also lose a bit in size, as a lot of trivia is present in sections like "Other board games sometimes compared with Go".


 * 1) References where added, although no indication of what needed to be referenced was given.
 * 2) external links section was trimmed as some reviewers indicated
 * 3) Section Go Variants was hived off into a seperate article
 * 4) the article can also lose a bit in size, well it did. Other board games sometimes compared with Go is no longer there.

I really do object to how this review process has ended. I will request arbitration if this is not adressed.--ZincBelief 10:45, 12 October 2006 (UTC)