Wikipedia:Featured article review/Rudyard Kipling/archive1

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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 User:Marskell 12:04, 6 October 2008 [1].

Rudyard Kipling[edit]

Review commentary[edit]

Notified Dabbler, ‎WP Children's literature, WP Burma, WP Pakistan, WP India, WP Poetry, WP Books and WP Biography ‎

Rudyard Kipling is a 2004 Brilliant prose promotion, in need of review and tuneup. There are numerous citation tags, some prose issues, very poor image layout, and MoS cleanup needed. The lead is overcited and images may need review. The bottom of the article has taken on some listy cruft. Citation cleanup is needed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments I made some changes with the images to ease the formatting problems in the first section. The major problem is the use of "center" for poems, the overuse of block quotes with images near by, and the excessive image descriptions. This, if done throughout, will ease about 85% of the formatting problems. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:57, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Brief review of the lead by Eubulides

Alas I don't have time now to read the whole article, but here's a brief review of the lead.

  • The lead's first sentence is unwieldy and does not satisfy the criterion in WP:LEAD #Establish context. It doesn't establish context and it only poorly says why Kipling is notable. Ideally, the lead's first sentence should briefly cover the entire arc of Kipling, including India, his best-known works, his popularity, and criticism over his prejudice/militarism.
  • The lead should not mention relatively-obscure works like Puck of Pook's Hill, Ulster 1912, Life's Handicap, The Day's Work, and Plain Tales from the Hills. Kipling's fame rests on The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Kim, individual short stories such as "The Man Who Would Be King", and individual poems like "If—", "Gunga Din" and "Mandalay"; that's enough for the lead.
  • Poem titles like "If—" and short story titles like "The Man Who Would Be King" should be quoted, not in italics; see MOS:TITLE#Quotation marks.
  • Agree with SandyGeorgia that the lead is overcited. Try to stick with high-level relatively-noncontroversial stuff here.
  • The quote "innovator in the art of the short story" is out of place here. Reword using our own words.
  • The Henry James quote is not that famous. Really. It's not needed in the lead at all.
  • The Orwell quote is not needed in the lead. Reword using our own words.
  • The Kerr quote is way too long. Again, this stuff should be reworded in our own words.
  • Words to avoid: "However". "famously" (if it's in the lead, "famously" is implied).
  • What I sense from the lead is that there is a reasonably large amount of controversy among Wikipedia editors over Kipling, and that this controversy has been resolved by citing a lot of quotes in a sort of Simon-says style. That kind of style is not prose that is expected for featured articles; see WP:FA? 1a, which says the prose should be "engaging, even brilliant". Alas, this lead feels like it was written by a bickering committee.

Eubulides (talk) 17:38, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Swastika
A whole section certainly seems very odd. A mention somewhere might be nice (I remember being alarmed as a child when I saw the books). Perhaps one could work it in to a couple of sentences on his views on the Nazis. N p holmes (talk) 07:23, 7 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As one of the people who contributed to the Swastika section, I think that it should remain because before it was in place in its current form there were lots of comments/edits about Kipling's supposed Nazi sympathies mentioning the swastika. Also as N p holmes has pointed out, it was significant in his experience of Kipling when he came across it. Dabbler (talk) 10:51, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Problems

The introduction is a mess: the second sentence is a classic example of Wikiprose (shoehorning of a biographical detail into a sentence devoted to other matter, Borgesian category schemes). The biography seems reasonable, but we don't get much clue to what the major works were about or why they were interesting. The treatment of his reputation is bad: broad brush positions that it's hard to believe anyone could hold supplied without citations; the same material reappearing at different points in the article. N p holmes (talk) 08:21, 7 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Image problems

FARC commentary[edit]

Suggested FA criteria concerns are referencing (1c), prose (1a), MoS (2), and images (3). Marskell (talk) 11:25, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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