Wikipedia:Featured article review/Spring Heeled Jack/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 18:24, 17 July 2007.

Spring Heeled Jack

Review commentary

Messages left at Shauri, JeremyA, Allen3, and WikiProject Paranormal. Resurgent insurgent 01:16, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Prose is choppy with many short paragraphs (1a), and poorly cited (1c). In particular, the line "One of the guards shot at him, with no visible effect; some sources claim that the soldier may have fired blanks at him...." has been tagged with {{fact}} since February. Lastly the article is unbalanced; about 1/4 of it is devoted to appearances of Spring Heeled Jack in popular culture. Resurgent insurgent 01:05, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I believe this is the best article we have on Monster in my Pocket #46. The popular culture could do with some trimming (it shows a lack of balance between the different elements at the very least), but, bearing in mind the subject, I would think a large amount of the article should be dedicated to it. Citing will be difficult as I'm sure reliable sources are hard to come by. I'll come back to it if I get time and nobody else has picked it up. Nudge me if it's headed for Remove. Yomangani ^talk 00:30, 26 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A jolly article, pleasantly illustrated. The slightest examination, however, shows that it's a complete mess.

Consider this one passage: In Linby village, just outside the city of Nottingham, Spring Heeled Jack is referenced to ["referenced to"?] on a Linby public service map printed by Ordnance Survey, [What's a "public service map"? Did the OS really print it and not map it; and if it did print it how is this important?] opposite the Horse and Groom public house in the centre of the village. [Oh, we're back to the village again. Did the writer lose his way within this sentence?] A map [Another one? Or "The map"?] describes the local area and the many stories and myths surrounding the village. The exact comment regarding Spring Heeled Jack is: "Spring Heeled Jack, in the months of winter, Spring Heeled Jacks [As this is the "exact comment", I hesitate to add an apostrophe.] footprints are left in the snow along the route of Quarry Lane." Quarry Lane runs for about 3 quarters of a mile until [Until what?] on the map stated as only "[a] site of scientific interest": a large enclosed forested area bordering with the grounds of Newstead Abbey, which is known locally as "Devils wood." Admittedly, this is at the crappy extreme of the article, but it does not stand out: much of the rest of the article is little better (and about as long-winded).
The article is stunningly under-referenced. The referencing system is horrible, using some system of footnotes that should be killed and buried. A lot of the notes that do exist say just "Peter Haining, op. cit." No, no page number. This suggests to me that Peter Haining's opus will be explained in an earlier note. It isn't. (It is explained below.)
Yes, "Peter Haining" is a book written by this writer about TV shows and published by Frederick Muller, which I hazily remember as somewhere near the bottom of the barrel of London publishers. I haven't seen this book or any of the other "references", and thus may be doing them a huge disservice when I say that they all sound more or less trashy: books written less to inform than to entertain. The article mentions sociological or social-psychological notions of mass hysteria but there's not a single reference that seems sociological, seems psychological, or (with the possible exception of the one book from Dodd, Mead) comes from a publisher (e.g. a university press) whose name inspires respect.
Poor logic, even on its own (I suspect underinformed) terms. Thinking that I shouldn't just complain about this article but help it, I've tried to do some rewriting. But I can't satisfactorily rewrite passages that make no sense. My (crappy) ending (after link-stripping): Although lacking durable literary value, the Spring Heeled Jack series exerted an important influence as a predecessor of modern day pulp magazine and comic superheroes, taking into consideration that they began to be written over fifty years before the first Zorro adventure and almost eighty years before other fictional characters like Batman or the Lone Ranger were created. Such lasting influence and its consequent cultural importance were, for most part of the 20th century, practically forgotten. Yes, he's a predecessor of the 20th century's miscellaneous spandex-clad caped crusaders. No, I wouldn't be surprised to see a demonstration that he was influential. But in this article there's no evidence whatever that he was influential; rather, it seems that we're supposed to think that if X preceded similar Y, then X simply must have influenced Y. At best, this is shoddy writing. At worst, this is amazingly shoddy thinking: unfortunately unexceptional for Wikipedia as a whole, but utterly inexcusable for something touted as a "Featured Article".

In short, nothing like FA material. (My previous edit was to the FA S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, a world apart.) Do a thorough reworking, with good sources; or demote. Morenoodles 11:13, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

PS I printed this article out and read it in the train home from work yesterday. I don't want to ridicule the work of my fellow editors, but this article is stunningly, even hilariously bad. I've posted a long but certainly not exhaustive list of problems on its talk page (voilà). I wish its authors well, but suspect that the only way to improve it in the short term is to delete most of it. Morenoodles 05:53, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have quite a strong interest in anything to do with the paranormal, however, how the article on Spring Heeled Jack could have made it to "Featured article" status is beyond me. It lacks too great an amount of citations - I would try and help in finding such citations, but possess no material relating to Mr. Spring Heeled. Frankly, I have my doubts whether an article about an alleged creature which has never been studied, or documented with any significant degree of scientific backing can ever be a feautured article. It's akin to trying to write a featured article on The Bell Witch. MaxCosta 18:19, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are prose (1a), referencing (1c), and balance (4). Marskell 17:45, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Remove, numerous tags. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:01, 8 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Remove per 1c. LuciferMorgan 19:56, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Remove—1a. Is it all like the second sentence? "Later alleged sightings were reported from all over England, from London up to Sheffield and Liverpool, but they were especially prevalent in suburban London and later in the Midlands and Scotland."
- I suppose that if they were reported, they were alleged.
- "But" is illogical.
- "Later" has no antecedent, which is uncomfortable.
- Remove "they". Tony 15:38, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.