Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Dorothy Parker/1

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • GAN review not found

Result: Delisted. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:58, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple uncited passages, use of unreliable sources. Z1720 (talk) 20:08, 12 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a little puzzled by the complaint about "unreliable sources". I notice a reference to "Encyclopedia Titanica", which appears to be a user-generated wiki; but what else? Not saying there aren't any, but rather than spending time wondering what Z1720 might have in mind, it would help if they straightforwardly listed what they have in mind.

There certainly is at least one problem with references: a host of references to "Meade" and page number ("Meade 12", "Meade 329", etc) -- does each refer to what's currently in reference 4, i.e.

Meade, Marion (1987). Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?. New York: Penguin Books. p. 5. ISBN 0-14-011616-8.

or to what's currently in reference 10, i.e.

Meade, M. (1987). Dorothy Parker: what fresh hell is this? New York: Villard Books.

? If the Penguin were indeed available from the Internet Archive, I'd take a look; but it isn't: "Book available to patrons with print disabilities"; however, not to me. But even without borrowing it, one can see the copyright page, which shows that no publication by Penguin in 1987 occurred: The book was published by Villard in '87 and by Penguin in '89. I wouldn't be surprised if the Penguin were a simple reproduction of the Villard (and therefore has the same pagination); but I wouldn't be surprised if it were not (and therefore did not). Somebody with access to a copy of this or that edition of Meade's book is going to have to do the tiresome job of checking, and very likely altering the page numbers so that they are correct for that edition. -- Hoary (talk) 23:10, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Got your ping above. Some other examples of unreliable refs, using this version of the article:

• Refs 43, 87 is to IMDB, which WP:IMDB says not to use.
• Ref 61: In 2020, RSN deemed the Jewish Virtual Library unreliable in this RfC. I don't know about this source so I do not have an opinion.
• The External links section has some sources listed, and I wonder if a look through WP:LIBRARY and Google Scholar will yield additional sources.

While going though the article, I noticed that there are lots of small additions that do not make the article cohesive. I have a feeling that many contributors have added things to the article over the years but no one has gone through to make sure the prose is organised and of a good quality. Z1720 (talk) 23:21, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Z1720, it's hard to know whether to put the current state of this article down to editorial laziness or editorial incompetence. Also, there's quite a bit of silliness in this article, notably an attempt to tabulate all (or just the best-known among?) her individual poems ("List of poems"), complete with bibliographical details of their early appearances: a wildly inappropriate goal and one that reached a grand total of two poems and has remained that way since. (For a sense of scale: She's just one among dozens of poets sampled by John Hollander in his 2003 book American Wits; at a quick and perhaps faulty count, this book has 22 of her poems.) I'd be inclined to zap the table (even though a greatly augmented table could be worthwhile, if only somebody would (i) dedicate many hours to it, and then (ii) upload it to some other website). I'd also want to delete some of the trivia/coat-tails section. I hope that I've already made this article slightly less horrid (e.g. by removing IMDb references). But only slightly: it needs a lot more work, and I wouldn't be able to devote that kind of time/effort to it until November. -- Hoary (talk) 01:46, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One option is to delist this now, and then bring this back to GAN in November/December when it is ready. Z1720 (talk) 01:55, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible that somebody other than me would be interested in improving this thing during summer? -- Hoary (talk) 02:13, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that it isn't, no. Not unless/until the subject matter is somehow propelled to the talk shows (if only Ron DeSantis would suggest that Parker's writings risk corrupting innocent Floridian minors...). Or if Parker were found to have been an invention/pseudonym of JRR Tolkien. ¶ The discussion of whether a 2007 version of this article should be "featured" was oddly rancorous; but K72ndst argued against promotion citing at least one defect that I think now, sixteen years later, is a major hurdle to GA status for the article we have now. That is, Parker's notability -- in the normal sense (not the Wikipedia sense) of the word -- is that of a writer; yet the article says little about her writing. At this point I'm ignorant of Parker scholarship, but a quick look in Worldcat shows four books: Kinney, Dorothy Parker (conveniently at archive.org, and already cited once); Pettit, The critical waltz; Pettit, A gendered collision; Melzer, The rhetoric of rage. An efficacious fixer-upper of this article surely ought to be familiar with two or more of these. And then there'll also be papers about her writing. ¶ This really isn't a job for me, even in/from November. Even if I had the needed time, the fate of this nomination of an article on a related subject suggests a disqualifying incompetence. -- Hoary (talk) 08:11, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Z1720, the longer I look at this, the less promising it seems. The organization is poor; though to be fair to its main creator (unfortunately now blocked indefinitely for sockpuppetry), no simple solution to this problem is at all obvious. As is extremely common in WP articles, a reference may follow a pair of sentences in a paragraph, leaving it unclear whether the reference is for the content of both sentences or only for the latter one; sampling these, I find that a reference might fail to back up the latter part of the latter sentence: the job of checking the references I haven't looked at, moving them where necessary, and splattering "citation needed" templates would be arduous, and even if completed the whole thing would have to be rearranged and augmented (and, of course, referenced). This article is not particularly bad, but it's not good, or close to "Good". ¶ Incidentally, although at the top of this reassessment we read "GAN review not found", the (desultory) review may be found in the article's talk page. -- Hoary (talk) 21:42, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hoary, I note you've been working on this article; do you think it now meets/could meet the GA criteria? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:43, 10 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

AirshipJungleman29, I'm sure that it does not. I had believed that Parker was at least moderately well known and her work rather popular, so I've been surprised as well as disappointed not to see other editors doing something to improve this article. As for me, I've only made minor changes (in part because I've had no access to any book or similar about Parker), and I've had to stop these. I won't be able to restart until November. A thoroughgoing revision is needed and, if I could do it at all, I can't imagine finishing it until summer next year (!) at the earliest. -- Hoary (talk) 22:03, 10 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]