Wikipedia:Featured article review/William Monahan

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 08:35, 21 May 2009 [1].

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William Monahan

Review commentary

Notified relevant parties and WikiProjects.

Article not stable - ongoing vandalism (or "ALTERNATE VERSIONS" if you prefer) from persistent sockpuppets, referencing issues (3 cite needed tags), plus some issues on talk page including unaddressed merge proposal. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 21:03, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

• preliminary comments

1. this article was the target of a fan of WM's,who went to great pains inserting absurdly detailed descriptions of exceedingly minor works, and trying to list every trivial miscellaneous publication. WM is known, in actuality, a very small body of work: a small number of short stories, some prize-winning, one moderately successful novel Light House, and three filmscripts: the unsuccessful original filmscript, Kingdom of Heaven, the moderately successful adaption of another writer's novel, Body of Lies, and the extraordinarily successful The Departed, adapted by WM from an earlier extremely successful Chinese film. WM won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2006.
2. It does not offer a NPOV view of WM's career. It is unclear--The discussion of the writing of his most important work, 'The Departed, starts off very confusingly: "While Monahan was on the set of The Departed his wife gave birth to a daughter. No discussion of the undoubtedly interesting negotiations involved in his being hired for the role, or the length of time, the successive revisions, and the manner in which he rewrote it,--which are never simple matters if a major film is involved. Particularly, since this is an adaptation of an already very successful film in which he modified a English translation of the Chinese script in transferring the action from Hong Kong to Boston, the originality of his contribution should be discussed,--it must have been commented on, given the awards. There is nowhere in Wikipedia a comparison of the two films.
3. It is an unresolved question to what extent a writer should have every minor work listed, and whether it should be in the main article or a separate one. I think it depends on the importance of the writer, and the importance of the minor works in his career. WM is a moderately important writer only, and the minor works are by and large extremely minor. His importance is not from his journalism. If even his book reviews are to be mentioned, they should be listed, but their publication need not be described in detail
4. This should never have been a featured article. It needs cutting, and the key sections need rewriting. I do not even consider it of GA level. DGG (talk) 22:01, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

I largely agree with DGG. As for Newsgoal (talk · contribs) he is without question another sock of banned User:Manhattan Samurai. Here he is editing in the first person one of Manhattan Samurai's "wiki letters to journalists" which he left on a variety of talk pages of articles of interest to him.[2] Never mind. Sock blocked. Bali ultimate (talk) 23:59, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Please provide links to the notifications. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean the parties I notified? -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 22:55, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concern is NPOV. Also note the recent change to WP:WIAFA (1c) requiring "high-quality" sources. YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) 02:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

• Delist, per comments by OlEnglish (talk · contribs), DGG (talk · contribs), and referencing issues. Cirt (talk) 01:15, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
• Delist citation needed tags. DrKiernan (talk) 11:43, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Why are the authors written in firstname lastname? YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) 00:32, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

• Not sure. 3 reference tags are not IMO a reason strong enough to delist a densely cited article. Are there any concerns about the verifiability of the current sources? I am also not fully convinced that there are POV issues. And the merge tag is about discussing a merge proposal, why should this entail de-featuring?--Yannismarou (talk) 10:47, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

  The primary concern brought up was the article's instability: Ongoing changes by persistent sockpuppets. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 11:02, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

  Instability doesn't apply to vandalism or illegal edits (banned users). The main reason about it being kept open is because of DGG's comments, although he hasn't returned YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) 23:36, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

  Mea culpa. Is that a quote from any official FAR criteria page? Because I didn't see that particular reasoning at Wikipedia:Featured article criteria 1.(e), which had only one 'exception' that I think doesn't apply in this case. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 01:52, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

  I'm not sure if it is in an semi-official FAQ, but banned users = vandals, and vandalism doesn't count as a legitimate content dispute/edit war YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) 03:19, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

• Delist I'm less concerened about the stability of the article then the fact that it shouldn't have been FA in the first place, and isn't of that quality now. Some of the prose is very clunky in patches and much of it is written in the tone of a newspaper article (for instance about what monahan "will do" at some unspecified point in the future). The "writing process" section is just, in my opinion, godawful when it comes to quality of writing and relevance.Bali ultimate (talk) 13:11, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

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