Wikipedia:Featured article review/Rosa Parks/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 by Dana boomer 21:24, 6 January 2012.

Review commentary

 * Notified: Top five editors by edit count: Speedoflight, BanyanTree, Shanes, Jmabel, Ohnoitsjamie. Projects: United States, Women's History, Biography, Alabama, Politics, African diaspora

Soon after Parks died in 2005 this article was assembled and passed FAC probably in order to have TFA on 1 December 2005. In 2008 and 2009 there were calls to bring the article to current FA standards. Some effort was put in; there are various threads on the talk page where work was being discussed. Still, this article is far from current standards.


 * 1a Prose suffers from what I can determine to be editors inserting information but not taking into consideration continuity of the article. Several passages lack proper introduction and explanations.
 * 1c Source quality is acceptable but there are many paragraphs that lack citations. There are open maintenance tags such as cn and dead links.
 * 2a The lede contains statements that are either not in the article body or are not backed up in the article body with citations. One example is Parks' action was not the first of its kind to impact the civil rights issue, and there had been others, and etc which is not covered in the body. The lede should be reworked after the body is properly arranged and cited.
 * 2c Some of the sources are missing publishers and retrieved on dates.
 * 3 Review will be done once Mos Images is followed.
 * MoS MOS:IMAGES and associated policies are very problematic. WP:EXT should be enforced on the external links. WP:SEEALSO should be enforced. Brad (talk) 03:19, 12 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I believe I've adequately addressed the issues about placement of images. Let me know if you still see that as problematic. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 17:38, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes that's better though it's the least of the article's problems. Brad (talk) 06:01, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Can we have some specific examples, rather than a WP:IDONTLIKEIT kind of thing? It's an important article and I would very much like to help and improve it.  Volunteer Marek  06:25, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Who is we? When you read and or scroll through the article can you not notice which paragraphs are lacking citations? Do you not see the maintenance tags already there? You do this on purpose right? Brad (talk) 16:03, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Both of you, knock it off. Marek, I see nothing in Brad's comments that is IDONTLIKEIT, and he points out several specifics and examples. Brad, asking condescending/semi-insulting questions helps nothing, and reviewers are expected to (nicely) provide examples when asked. However, I would also like to point out that it is not looked favorably upon when only the examples are fixed and nothing else... Dana boomer (talk) 23:33, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I put about four hours into this, myself, mostly on references (and, as remarked above, on the placement of pictures). I don't see any sign that anyone else is working on it. I'm glad to be helping here, but not willing to work on this all on my own. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 06:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll do some work on it, but the article really DOES need a lot of citations.  Volunteer Marek   20:21, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Brad: do you think that the passages that need references are all marked as such (with tags in the text)? Or are there considerable other things that you think need references (in which case please tag them in the text sooner rather than later in the process, so people know what goal they are chasing). - Jmabel &#124; Talk 06:24, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Also: you say that "Prose suffers from what I can determine to be editors inserting information but not taking into consideration continuity of the article," but as far as I can see you provide not one tangible example. Examples would be useful (or, of course, fixing this yourself would be useful, since it's an editorial concern, not one requiring research). - Jmabel &#124; Talk 06:24, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Not all of the areas that need citations are marked, as it would be a futile exercise at this point. There are paragraphs after paragraphs with no citations. The Montgomery buses: law and prevailing customs section only has one citation in the entire section; Death and funeral only three. The total number of citations in this article is about 50-55 when it should likely have two or three times that many.
 * The prose problems are most apparent in the Later years section where it falls into a chronological listing of events marked by "in xxxx" and "on xxxx" etc. The same goes for the Awards and honors section where closer to the bottom it has been filled with trivial mentions of Parks and again resorts to the "in xxxx" and "on xxxx" etc.
 * More importantly I believe the article avoids further research on Parks. It mentions some disagreements she had with King but offers no further analysis or reasons why. The article relies on a lot of news stories instead of books written about Parks or the Civil Rights movement specifically. As I said in my original assessment the article was promoted in 2005 when standards for FA's were not as advanced as they are now. Seemingly the article was thrown together in a rushed fashion in order to make a December 1 main page appearance. Older FA's need constant maintenance in order to keep up with current standards and that has not been the case here. Brad (talk) 09:00, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I actually agree with Brad here. The article does need a good bit of work to get to FA status, beginning with citations. Note also that there is quite a number of "sources" out there which duplicate the article text, though best as I can tell they seem to be copies of our article rather than vice-versa.  Volunteer Marek   08:01, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

It's interesting to note that the version that passed FAC contains some of the information that I pointed out as missing. Brad (talk) 06:36, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Concerns raised in the FAR include prose, sourcing, comprehensiveness, and image use. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:46, 3 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Delist The article primarily suffers from 1c and 1b problems and no effort seems to be underway to correct them. However, a lot of cleanup work was done to the article and it's much more presentable than it was a month ago. Jmabel deserves the credit for that at least. Brad (talk) 22:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment - This article has been at FARC for a while... Can we please get some comments from the editors commenting above (or any other interested parties) on whether work is still ongoing or whether the article should be kept or delisted? Thanks, Dana boomer (talk) 18:52, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Delist per Brad. At least 6 large paragraphs without any citation, plus quite a few others with minimal citation. It has been nominated for two months without any major efforts made to address this problem. --Artoasis (talk) 09:37, 4 January 2012 (UTC)


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