Wikipedia:Peer review/Running to Stand Still/archive1

Running to Stand Still

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I think it is well-written, with a lot of detail regarding its conception and its various lyrical interpretations. In preparation of nominating it as a Good Article, I'd first like some fresh eyes to take a look at it and help revise it. I think that overall, there is no specific section to focus on, but rather, it needs a good amount of copy-editing as a whole (e.g. editing for concision and clarity).

Thanks, Y2kcrazyjoker4 (talk) 20:48, 4 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: This is very good, interesting from beginning to end, and I enjoyed it. I don't think you'll have much trouble making GA. Here are my suggestions for further improvement.

Thanks very much for doing a review! Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lead

The lead should be a fair stand-alone summary of the whole article. I like to ask myself whether a lead I've written would suffice if the rest of the article were deleted. The existing lead is a bit shorter than normal for an article of this size. I think you'd be wise to expand to about three paragraphs that include more of the salient details. It's possible to go too far into detail; moderate expansion is what I have in mind.

I personally like light leads for shortish (this is less than 3,000 words) cultural articles, because to fully summarize about everything the article says will make it feel repetitive to actually read the article. (On long, 10,000 political BLPs I favor four long paragaphs in the lead, because there I think the situation is reversed.) I may be in the minority on this, though, so we'll see what others say. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:02, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Background

The Manual of Style deprecates fancy quotation marks. In the case of the two lines of lyrics, ordinary quotation marks would be preferred. I think you could simply say, "The lyric "I see seven towers / But I only see one way out" to start the sentence after the colon (which would then become a terminal period).

I've switched it from {{cquote}} to {{cquotetxt}}, which is supposed to provide 'ordinary' quote marks, as I understand it. But it's big formatted because it's the central quote of the article and the one that has caused all the mainstream press and book commentary on the song. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Writing and recording

"Bono heard a real story about a couple living in the Ballymun towers, with both the man and the woman being heroin addicts." - "With" doesn't make a very good conjunction, and sentences like this are often better if re-cast. Suggestion: "Bono heard a real story about a pair of heroin addicts, a man and a woman, who lived in the Ballymun towers."

So changed. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"in a room together without overdubs" - Wikilink overdub?

Done. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Composition

"This compositional technique relies upon delayed gratification and is heard in a few other popular songs, such as The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" and George Michael's "One More Try"." - This may be true, but without a source it sounds like original research.

I had the cite at the time, but couldn't find it, but now I have and I've put it in the article. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Legacy

The first paragraph here appears to be original research (original thought in the sense described by WP:OR); that is, you seem to be treating the books and newspaper articles as primary sources in which you identify patterns. This differs from finding a secondary source containing the original thought.

I respectfully disagree. The linkage of "running to stand still" to Through the Looking-Glass is done by a secondary source, the Drake book. The NYT and Google counts and 'dates to' ranges aren't research, original or otherwise, but just data counts of the kind I've seen in a half-dozen WP articles that are showing when words or phrases have been in use. No claims to etymological certitude are made or intended; the purpose is just to give the reader a sense of the usage of this phrase. The recent use of the phrase in drug-related contexts is directly related to the subject of the article; the reader is left to decide if the song's impact has led to this use. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:56, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"By mid-2000s, the Ballymun towers were in the process of being torn down... " - Tighten by deleting "in the process of"?

The teardown has happened over six years and in fact one is still standing. That's why I think "in the process of" is warranted, even though it's a few extra words. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"whose 2006 memoir The Mun: Growing Up in Ballymun detailed her raising there in the... " - Maybe "life" rather than "raising"?

Well, she left there in her earlyish 20s, so most of the time there was while she was growing up. But we can see what others say. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

References

The date formatting in the citations should be consistent, either yyyy-mm-dd or d-m-y but not a mixture of the two.

They were all d-m-y when I wrote it, but another editor changed half of them (and did a lot of other citation formatting churn that meant nothing to readers). I didn't want to get in a dispute so I let it be. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to make the dates consistent, but I wasn't sure which format to use. Most dates are in yyyy-mm-dd format, but given this is an article about a song by a UK artist, shouldn't the dates be in dd Mmmm yyyy format? — John Cardinal (talk) 05:10, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The other editor's changes were only explained as "fixing up the refs", so it's hard to know what the goal was. I suspect it was to make them more like other U2 articles, but I don't know. A lot of editors hate the yyyy-mm-dd format and would never change an article that consistently used written-out day month year to that. This is why I think editors should focus on content improvement and not cite churn. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:35, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch, your bite hurts. Given our other discussion, I can only assume that you think I should focus on content and not "cite churn." I was only trying to help: the reviewer says the dates in the citations should be consistent, that's a common critique during article reviews, and it is usually heeded. One can't make the dates consistent and please editors who prefer different date formats, and one can't make the article consistent without editing the dates. In your view, that's churn, but I see no reason why date formatting in the article (for example) is important but date formatting in the citations is churn. I suspect it stems from a point of view that citations aren't important because they aren't part of the content. I think citations are as important as the content and high-quality articles should have high-quality citations. In any case, I'll slink off now, and you can do what you will. — John Cardinal (talk) 14:12, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at the original version of this article, all the cite dates were consistent, in day month year form. Per WP:Mosnum/proposal on YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates, there is a lot of disagreement about whether YYYY-MM-DD should be used in footnotes. The result of that discussion was that they are allowed, but to replace most but not all consistent d m y formatting with YYYY-MM-DD seems like churn to me. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:05, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If that was me who made all of those alterations (as I admit it could have been as I did a lot of reference formatting around that time) then I apologize since it wasn't my intent to create any hard feelings over the type of date formatting used. If it was another editor who did it then I guess I should butt out of it since the above doesn't have any impact on what I have said; but instead of bickering, wouldn't our time be better spent in changing one to the other and leaving it at that? This is a relatively simple issue that takes minutes to solve at the most. Does it really matter if we use 2009-11-18 or 18 November 2009 in the citations? It's the consistency that's important, not the form. MelicansMatkin (talk, contributions) 04:22, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't you. I'm of the school that thinks original authors should get some deference in matters of style, but like I said in the beginning, I'm going to let this one be. Wasted Time R (talk) 04:50, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

<outdent>Wasted Time had it right. WP:MOSNUM#Format consistency says, "Dates in article body text should all have the same format" and "Dates in article references should all have the same format." However, the formatting of the body text and the formatting of the references do not have to be the same. UK-centric articles should use d-m-y format in the main text, and yyyy-mm-dd is never used in the main text. This leaves two possibilities for the citation date formatting for this article. It can either be yyyy-mm-dd, or it can be d-m-y. Because this is all a little crazy-making, when I write U.S.-centric articles, I use m-d-y (not the same as UK-centric formatting) throughout, and I don't use yyyy-mm-dd for anything. In this article, d-m-y throughout is fine. Finetooth (talk) 05:19, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure what you mean when you say "Wasted Time had it right." Had what right? The dates in the citation section are not consistent with each other: most use yyyy-mm-dd, but some use dd Mmmm yyyy. That's not consistent even according to your separation of prose from citations. Personally, I think date formats should be consistent across both the body prose and the citations, but I don't know what the policy/guideline is and I wouldn't make a stink about it for any particular article if the two sections were consistent within themselves.

All the worry about churn in citations is enervating. Should we accept a non-standard infobox because fixing it would be "churn"? Should we accept a track listing that is inconsistent from track to track? Citations should be given the same care as other parts of the content: without citations, WP is no better than a user-contributed forum. Change for change sake is churn; fixing a consistency issue is not. — John Cardinal (talk) 14:50, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wasted Time said above, "They were all d-m-y when I wrote it... ". That followed the guidelines and was perfectly acceptable. Finetooth (talk) 19:21, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Umm... so? The reviewer said the citation dates were not consistent as of 4 January 2010 (or if you prefer, 2010-01-04 ! <g>), and they still aren't now. — John Cardinal (talk) 20:02, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Other

The "Edge on piano" image needs alt text.

Now done. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The dabfinder tool at the top of this page finds two links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended target.

Both now fixed. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 23:34, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]