Wikipedia:Featured article review/Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress/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 YellowAssessmentMonkey 00:19, 11 October 2010 [1].

Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress[edit]

Review commentary[edit]

Featured article review/Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress/archive1

Notified: Trevor MacInnis, Bzuk, Mark Sublette, Snowmanradio, Kyteto (all users with more than 100 edits to the article), MILHIST, Aircraft

A 2007 FA that has not been reviewed since its promotion. There are quite a few spots that need referencing, verification or clarification (see tags). a few dead links and some potentially unreliable references:

Ref 50, "Aviation Photography:B-17 Flying Fortress". This is a sales site, what makes it reliable?
Ref 92, "Kern, Chris". Self published website, what makes Kern an expert on the subject?
Ref 126, "Williams, Kenneth Daniel". What makes this a reliable source?
Ref 147, "University of Texas: Tom Landry". Link broken, although link checker doesn't show it.

The see also and external links sections are huge, these should be trimmed. See alsos that are already linked in the body of the article don't need to be repeated, and a truly comprehensive article should already have links in the body to anything that is really needed in the see also section. Anything that is already used as a ref doesn't need to be in the external links section. Web references missing information (publisher, access date, etc), inconsistently formatted book references. Gets really "listy" towards the end. Survivors section - no references, and the numbers don't match up. Also, the bulleted format doesn't really tell the reader anything - turn it into prose, give some more description, etc. Dana boomer (talk) 16:41, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I registered my opinion of this article three years ago. I see it's still citing Joe Baugher, which is not a reliable source. The article is also replete with MOS errors and unformatted citations. Also, too many images, too many lists, haven't looked at content. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kern has been replaced by a WP:RS.Nigel Ish (talk) 18:07, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Although I have not been a major editor on the article, I am trying to help out. I removed a couple images that were causing whitespace issues for me, and I started working on cleaning up up the web citations. As an aside, is it a common practice to put all the citations in a list in the "references" section and just use cite names to point to them in the article? It does make it hard to fix a citation becuase you have to find it hidden in the refs section... -SidewinderX (talk) 11:50, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The article is using a fairly new style of referencing called list defined references. I'm not a big fan of it either, but some editors love it. If you would like to change it, I would suggest asking on the talk page first, as it's considered rather rude to change the reference style without consensus. Hope this helps. Dana boomer (talk) 12:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, you learn something new every day! I don't have any desire to change it... it's not as annoying once you realize what is going on. -SidewinderX (talk) 13:38, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Since the featured version did not use list-defined references (and many of us hate them), the question is, was there consensus to change them to begin with, per WP:CITE? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:44, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well no-one objected when the change was made as part of User:Kyeto's improvements to the article, that eliminated most of the non-reliable sources that were claimed (and there arn't many left now) - so that implies consent.Nigel Ish (talk) 13:49, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The change was made here in September 2009, there was a note on the talkpage announcing it and there wasn't any dissent so "qui tacet consentire videtur." Woody (talk) 13:52, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh - I thought it was later than that - anyway - it seems that there was consent (or at least implied consent) for the change.Nigel Ish (talk) 13:54, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I had absolutely nothing to do with that change. I've found it, as an operating editor, a nightmare in comparison with how it is done usually, I certainly wouldn't have it the way it is right now by my own choice. I don't object to it strongly, but certainly wouldn't (and didn't) promote it or impliment it. Kyteto (talk) 18:32, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments I think that this article needs quite a bit of work to return to FA standard. My specific comments are:
- Some sentences and paragraphs are unreferenced
- The article contains some overstatements. For example: - "The aircraft went on to serve in every World War II combat zone" seems unlikely given that these aircraft played almost no role in the war on the Eastern Front in Europe or in China,
- Poor quality prose - for instance, the 'The RAF' section is confusing as the narrative jumps around and sentence structure is frequently poor (and Royal Air Force doesn't seem to have been abbreviated the first time it appeared in the article)
- The coverage of the air war over Europe seems rather generic, and isn't focused on the role B-17s played and their strengths and weaknesses
- The article contains unnecessary foreign language terms ('Jagdflieger' and 'fliegendes Stachelschwein' where only 'fighter pilot' and 'flying porcupine' are useful to readers)
- The 'U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard' sub-section seems greatly over-long given the small number of B-17s being discussed here

I agree, I had tried months ago to trim minor details from it, and found my revisions reverted. Considering how pathetically small the USAAF's section is in comparison, and how minor their usage in this hand-me-down context is, it is completely overboard. I've done a trim just now; still bigger than I'd like, but lets see how this floats. Kyteto (talk) 15:09, 25 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- The 'Other military achievements or events' and 'Civilian achievements or events' of the 'Noted B-17 pilots and crew members' section seem fairly trivial. The 'Civilian achievements or events' should probably be removed outright as these people explicitly achieved notability for things other than their wartime service in B-17s, and given the huge number of B-17 aircrew it's only to be expected that many of them either went onto achieve fame after the war or had some claim to fame before the joined the USAAF (Clark Gable seems an exception to this though as his wartime service is notable in its own right) Nick-D (talk) 02:39, 18 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary[edit]

Featured article criterion of concern are comprehensiveness, MOS, sourcing, list/trivia YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 01:31, 29 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delist for FA criteria concerns per above by Dana boomer and YellowMonkey. None of those issues are not addressed. JJ98 (Talk) 04:18, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delist per the unaddressed concerns raised above Nick-D (talk) 08:59, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delist In short, it simply isn't amongst the best content on Wikipedia, as the status it has now suggests. It has unreliable sources, tons of trivia, unbalanced sections, sketchy coverage (The USAAF section is tiny, there's more on Germany's usage of them than their primary user!), it doesn't meet the grade and that's been known for at least six months without revolutionary input other than my own TBH. I've tried my best to overhaul it, but it doesn't come up trumps now. Delisting is the right course of action. Kyteto (talk) 16:16, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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