Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/A Tale of a Tub/archive1

When can this move to voting stage?
It would seem that there is little to be accomplished in further discussion. When can we begin truly deciding whether this wonderful article needs to be de-listed? -- Bellwether B  C  04:41, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Personally I would rather leave it open in the hope that someone with access to the referenced works is kind enough to bang out some page no. refs, at which point all this OR nonsense will disappear. I've always accepted there is an issue with the referencing under current standards, but I have no doubt they are easily found in the refs. They could also be found in other works, I'm sure, but this would involve messing up the article, which would be a great pity; it would probably be better to let FA status go - I'm not an enthusiast of the "burn the village to save it" school of FAR. Johnbod (talk) 05:00, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It would be a very brave person that would step in to work on this FAR considering the bashing being doled out by the mob. Ceoil (talk) 09:48, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * He has bought it all on himself imho by his absurd, unpleasant and continuing accusations of OR everywhere, when he just means unreferenced. What is needed is referencing, some expansion to the lead, & a little reduction in the essayish tone in places. I don't see the mob objecting to these, except maybe for the last, which some might object to.  I suppose Awadewitt is too busy to help out with the refs...  Johnbod (talk) 12:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Fine, but many of the responces s/he has recieved have been needlessly aggressive. He raised issues that s/he felt needed work, I would like to think and I will assume, in good faith. The responces did not, in general, deal with the specifics the issues he (rightly or wrongly) highlighted, but formed a broad attack on Cirt and the FAR process in general. "Has the nominator ever read A Tale of a Tub?" I think is not a valid argument; Wikipedia articles are not specifically written for people who have intimate knowledge for the subject matter. As for "absurd, unpleasant", well, that's not engaging with Cirt arguments, thats engaging with Cirt as a person. Ceoil (talk) 13:02, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I've pointed out continually that the "have you read it" argument isn't made for general readership (as proved by my middle school students reading and enjoying the article) but for those who would want to nominate it to be de-listed as FA. General readership of WP reads and enjoys this article with no issues, with or without having read the actual piece of literature. A nominator for de-listing should have at least read the book before nominating, which would have led to not nominating it based upon the 30+ issues s/he cited, as those "issues" would have been cleared up (for the nominator) by simply having read the actual book. -- Bellwether B  C  13:22, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * [Edit conflict with Johnbod below] Citations are not required to merely verify the article for other wikipedia editors. Anyway, if we required that level of knowledge before making comments, the whole process of PR/GA/FA - and yes FAR ;) - would grind to a halt for want of qualified reviewers. I reviewed an article on a Pixies song a few months back, having never heard the song itself I have to admit. Ceoil (talk) 13:51, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't happen to agree myself that you need to have read the work to comment on or review the article, but several experienced editors have commented on the aggressive and rather personal tone of Cirt's initial review, which has not been modified at all in subsequent exchanges. He/she shows a remarkable lack of AGF towards the original editors, even to the extent of appearing unprepared to believe that "according to X" statements have not been invented by them, eg:

"'Ehrenpreis argued that each digression is an impersonation of a different contemporary author.' Because without knowing more, e.g. a quote from the book, a page number, something, this appears to be the original opinion of whichever Wikipedia editor initially wrote this sentence. Cirt (talk) 23:15, 14 January 2008 (UTC)." Johnbod (talk) 13:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I can see how that could be taken as disparaging to the author of the article, though I don't think it was intended that way. The point could have been more clearly phrased -Without a quote from the book...this could be taken as the original opinion of..... Ceoil (talk) 14:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * We don't even know which sources to look in, to find the necessary page no. refs... Cirt (talk) 05:13, 17 January 2008 (UTC).
 * This is, again, a place where you lose me completely. What do you mean you don't know which sources? The article has a References section with a list of seven secondary sources. That's where you'd look, right? And it's not like you'd have to read every page of every book listed before getting started. None of these works deal exclusively with Tale of a Tub and most or all of them will have an index where you can quickly find the most relevant pages to read. And some of these sources are really short. Farrell's essay just goes from page 174 to page 195 in the book it's published in. If the article listed 50 tomes devoted exclusively to its particular subject I can understand you'd be at something of a loss, but the actual References section seems very manageable. Haukur (talk) 10:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Exactly! Johnbod (talk) 12:31, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

"I'm not an enthusiast of the 'burn the village to save it' school of FAR". You too, eh? :) From what I've seen of FAR, it's like surgery that kills the patient. I wouldn't like to see this great article trashed by the FAR "improvers". --Folantin (talk) 09:30, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * As to the process of the FAR itself, I think that is up to and . Cirt (talk) 05:14, 17 January 2008 (UTC).
 * I have responded to Folantin's most unfortunate comment on his talk.
 * Normally, reviews of this sort do get left open, even though it's somewhat masochistic. The content inevitably does improve in some respects and content improvement is all that matters. (Again, a very simple thing to do here is to give it a real lead.)
 * However, the heat to light ratio is bad enough on this, that closing may be better. The larger issue of what to do with the patch of '04 articles that continually cause this drama can be workshopped elsewhere. Marskell (talk) 15:41, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * "I have responded to Folantin's most unfortunate comment on his talk". And I've deleted it because I found it immensely impertinent coming from someone who failed to assume good faith on the main page here (the "off-wiki communication" comment). If you run a "review" criticising people's work, including quality articles like Tale of a Tub, then you can expect to deal with a little criticism in your turn. --Folantin (talk) 16:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Fine, then I'll post it here for the record:
 * "From what I've seen of FAR, it's like surgery that kills the patient. I wouldn't like to see this great article trashed by the FAR 'improvers'." I must take the bait on this one. Some of the "improvers" include User:Casliber, User:Ceoil, User:DrKiernan, and User:qp10qp. User:BuddingJournalist has been doing great reviews recently. These are absolutely outstanding content providers and generally very nice people. Slighting what's already thankless work (TFA is gone, star isn't "yours") is not especially nice.
 * If you have evidence of articles being "trashed" by the process, point them out. In general, the worst outcome is that nothing happens.
 * I have apologized to Bellwether for my casting aspersions on the review page, and I'll apologize to you as well, Folantin. Marskell (talk) 16:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * "If you have evidence of articles being "trashed" by the process". The History of Russia FAR fiasco, for one. An article that might have been fixed with a bit of surgery and some references where needed, but which was trashed by "citation paranoia" with people demanding inline cites for things like "Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812". Then the nationalists turned up... Fortunately, WP:SPOTLIGHT now seems to be defunct so no article need fear being encumbered by their help in future. Anyway, I'm going to follow Nandesuka's lead and say I won't bother wasting anybody's time by participating further here. --Folantin (talk) 16:36, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The History of Russia FAR was not a fiasco—the article greatly improved, I'd thought. People said the NPOV wasn't there, however; you commented delist yourself.
 * Anyway, I'm closing this. It's achieving nothing and isn't going to. Marskell (talk) 17:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)