Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Malvern, Worcestershire/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 14:55, 3 December 2016 [1].

Malvern, Worcestershire[edit]

Nominator(s): Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:43, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the town of Malvern in the county of Worcestershire, England, in a UK area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), the Malvern Hills. In its time, it was a major Victorian inland spa town famous for its water, and later the location of many of the country's prestige private schools. During WWII it was a large centre of secret radar and avionic research. I greatly expanded the article and brought it to GA several years ago. The other contributors who provided some assistance with the GA, especially the referencing system they devised, have long since retired from Wikipedia and in RL. All help is welcome. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:43, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A straightforward Oppose[edit]

Several paragraphs don't terminate with a citation; a few paragraphs have no citations at all (Suburbs and neighbourhoods; Ethnicity; Transport). Singora (talk) 13:02, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Might need a bit more work[edit]

I think it might still need a bit of work before reaching FA quality. Examples include:

It needs a consistent citation style - this is a problem for both the online and offline sources being cited.
It needs a major check for broken links.
Some of the references are quite dates for the claims they support (e.g. the bus details are now four years old, but presented as if they are current).
It could do with a decent copyedit in places. As an example, "Victoria County History describes how a hermit Aldwyn, who lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor, had petitioned the Earl of Gloucester for the original site (of the Priory) in the wood, and cites his source as "Gervase of Canterbury, Mappa Mundi (Rolls ser.)"" - for me, this sort of writing is sub-par at FA level.
As noted by Singora, some sections lack references. Hchc2009 (talk) 16:17, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Harry Mitchell[edit]

Hey Chris, great to see you're coming back to this and spending a bit of time in the mainspace, but as others have said, this needs work to bring it up to FA standard. I haven't read the whole thing, I've just skimmed it, but a few things stand out:

As a rule of thumb you need an inline citation at least at the end of every paragraph, and more for anything controversial or direct quotes.
The history section is quite extensive in places, but thin in others, and the 20th-century history is basically non-existent. If it was my article, I'd split the whole thing out to History of Malvern, Worcestershire and summarise the key points here.
You need to know the source material inside out and back to front, and you need to have it in front of you during the FAC (my coffee table gets very crowded when I go through my article-writing phases)
It's not a requirement to separate out multi-page sources like books in the references section, but it does make like easier when you want to cite various pages of the same source.
Several of the sources under "further reading" look like they should be cited as references if the article is to be a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature (FA criterion 1c); several others make me wonder what they're doing there at all
There are no page numbers for several of the books cited; where there are page numbers, the formt for providing them is inconsistent
There's a lack of bibliographic information for a lot of the references, and the information provided in others is inconsistent
I'd expect more detail on the architecture for such an historic town, including links to articles on important buildings and perhaps the number of listed buildings in the town

We have quite a few excellent FAs on English towns and cities; I'd suggest using one of them as a guide. These issues aren't insurmountable, but it's going to take a lot of work to get this up to featured standard. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:17, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Harry, I thank you all for your comments. I've never proposed a FAC before and I assumed the two previous peer reviews more or less gave it a green light. Unfortunately although I am the major contributor with ove 600 edits to it, there have been snippets with sources added over the course of time and I also had no part in creating the referencing system and I don't understand it at all. The guys who developed it and converted all the traditional sourcing methods to it have long since retired and don't even answer emails. I would never be able to dedicate an estimated 100 hours to getting this single handedly without any help to FA, so please consider this as a very regretful withdrawal.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:40, 1 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Kudpung. I hope that it will return here at some point in the future... and thanks for all your efforts on the article so far. Hchc2009 (talk) 19:31, 1 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung, as the coord closing this review I also hope that you can continue working on the article and perhaps bring it back to FAC one day -- if you feel it might be beyond your capacity to invest the necessary time for a solo effort, you could perhaps take advantage of our recently introduced mentoring scheme... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 14:53, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Jim[edit]

In terms of content, this looks pretty comprehensive, but the comments above summarise the difficulties. It will take a lot of work to fix it, and you may want to withdraw for a while if you don't think you have time to do it here. There is plenty of goodwill, so please do keep working on this Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:00, 1 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Closing note: This candidate has been withdrawn, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Ian Rose (talk) 14:55, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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