Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/R U Professional/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 promoted by Graham Beards via FACBot (talk) 20:30, 15 October 2015 [1].

R U Professional[edit]

Nominator(s): — Cirt (talk) 21:42, 29 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"R U Professional" is an article about a satirical song and a form of parody music using sampling. After being promoted to WP:GA quality, the article had a peer review where I received helpful feedback from Onel5969. Subsequently it went through a copy-edit from the kind folks at WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors. Then John performed two more copy-editing passes, and I'm grateful to John for that assistance.

I appreciate your time and consideration, — Cirt (talk) 21:42, 29 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Talk:The Mae Shi, User talk:John, User talk:Satkara, User talk:YumeChaser, User talk:Onel5969, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Songs, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rock music, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Media, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Internet culture, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Film, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comedy, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California/Los Angeles task force, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California, Talk:R U Professional, User talk:Cirt. — Cirt (talk) 21:59, 29 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by West Virginian[edit]

Support. Cirt, thank you for submitting this article for FAC. Following my review, I find that it meets the criteria for FAC. I just had a few minor comments, and made a few minor tweaks to the inline citations and some wiki-links. -- West Virginian (talk) 13:54, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by West Virginian (talk) 13:54, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Lede and overall

Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section, the lede of this article adequately defines the song, establishes the song's necessary context, and explains why the song is otherwise notable.
The info box for the song is beautifully formatted and its content is sourced within the prose of the text and by the references cited therein.
All images included in this article include alt captions per Wikipedia:Alternative text for images, and standard captions.
The image of Christian Bale is PD, the first two images of Mae Shi are CC BY-SA 3.0, and the third image of Mae Shi is PD; all are acceptable for use here.
I took the liberty of reordering inline citations in numerical order throughout the prose.
The lede is otherwise well-written, consists of content that is adequately sourced and verifiable, and I have no further comments or questions for this section.

Background

In the third paragraph, I suggest using one inline citation at the end of the paragraph since all the content is sourced from Citation #7.
This section is otherwise well-written, consists of content that is adequately sourced and verifiable, and I have no further comments or questions for this section.

Inspiration and composition

I de-linked sampling, as it was wiki-linked above.
This section is well-written, consists of content that is adequately sourced and verifiable, and I have no further comments or questions for this section.

Release and reception

I de-linked new wave music and The Arizona Daily Star as they were both linked above in the prose.
This section is well-written, consists of content that is adequately sourced and verifiable, and I have no further comments or questions for this section.

Done. Thank you for the Image review, and thanks very much for your Support. The kind words are most appreciated, — Cirt (talk) 13:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cirt, you are quite welcome! Everything looks in order. Thank you again for your extraordinary work on this article! -- West Virginian (talk) 10:04, 6 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Squeamish Ossifrage[edit]

Comments by Squeamish Ossifrage (addressed)

Prose:

In §Background, TMZ is the name of the website at TMZ.com; there's no need to refer to it by URL. Similarly, later on, I don't think MTV.com is the correct styling. You should be good with just MTV. In general, very few websites are actually named their URL (Phys.org is a counterexample off the top of my head). To some extent, that applies in the references also.
There are some inconsistencies in the spacing of line breaks in your quoted lyrics in §Inspiration and composition. Sometimes you line break with a slash, other times with a slash and a trailing space. MOS:SLASH indicates these should be spaced on both sides.
§Release and reception does not read to me as compelling prose. Mostly, the problem here is that it is just a series of statements of the form "Media outlet said observation." Now, obviously, there aren't scholarly retrospectives to cite for general statements, so to some extent that's unavoidable. But it might be preferable to make certain that the observations are arranged into logical groups, and provide some sort of introductory statement letting the reader know what to expect from that group of observations. For example, something about how several media outlets attempted to categorize the song by genre, followed by the various cited sources which did so. Likewise, comments about its rapid production. And so on.

My singling out of genre is especially on-point, because the infobox calls this piece "experimental rock"; you've got a number of media outlets making pronouncements about genre, but none of them call it that.

References:

I believe that "Christian Bale's Verbal Attack Draws Today's Attention" was bylined by Adam Bryant. This was also probably distributed via one of the wire services, although I can't confirm that. I say so only because TV Guide appears to have an identical article here. You don't ever attribute material from this article to the newspaper directly, though, so there's no problem with citing it where you found it.
If a source doesn't have a listed author, there's no need to cite it to "Source staff".
There's sort of an art to when you need to include publishers for web sources, and the MOS doesn't provide any hard rules to go by. In general, that's necessary only when the publisher is both relevant and not obvious from the website name. So, for example, MSNBC and BBC News don't need a cited publisher because they are obvious from the website; CNN doesn't need a publisher because it's not generally relevant that CNN is owned by Time Warner. On the other hand, noting that Pop Candy is a publication of USA Today is probably correct.

The various cases where a URL has been used as a publisher are definitely wrong.

I'm neutral on promotion at this time. I don't think there's anything here that's fatal to promotion, but I'd prefer to see some reworking of §Release and reception and reference format tidying before I'm comfortable dropping my name in the support bin. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:02, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, no worries, I'm going to try my best to be responsive to above helpful comments. :) — Cirt (talk) 16:19, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Response to comments by Squeamish Ossifrage

Thanks very much to Squeamish Ossifrage for these helpful comments, I've made some responsive changes to the page and I think thanks to you the article is much better for them.

Done. I've gone ahead and removed that cite, as suggested.
Done. Changed TMZ.com to just TMZ.
Done. Likewise with MTV.com, to just MTV.
Done. Fixed issues with spacing before and after the slashes, per recommendations, above.
Done. Removed "Staff" from cites, as suggested.
Done. Fixed or removed "publisher" fields, kept a couple only in specific cases as recommended.
Done. Fixed infobox field to reflect cited sources in article body text.
Done. Rearranged section as suggested, to group sources together by Genre and Production speed.

Thanks again, — Cirt (talk) 16:52, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Things looks much better. A couple follow-up notes:

§Release and reception is much better than before! I might reword the introductory sentence to the last paragraph though; not all the sources seems to say that it was an "odd" tribute, so that adjective has something of novel synthesis about it.
"Outburst reveals Christian Bale’s ‘Dark’ side" appears to be a doubly-dead link. The archive has been suppressed via robots.txt, and the original isn't resolving. Probably need to check them all, since archive dates are back in 2009 here (and I lazied out and didn't do it).
You have a few cases where you're not consistent about whether you're using {{cite news}} or {{cite web}} for web-news references. Normally, that's irrelevant, but when combined with

Support. Making my position clear. Everything has been admirably addressed; we're good here. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 15:10, 6 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your helpful feedback and very useful suggestions, and for your Support. — Cirt (talk) 16:42, 6 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Maile[edit]

In the time it took me to read the article and check out the references, the two reviews above covered anything I probably would have touched on. I was wondering why there is not an image in the Infobox, but that doesn't affect my comments here. Personally, I think this was quite well-written, and the tone stayed neutral. The article appears to have stability. The sourcing, as far as any I'm familiar with, seem to be reputable. The style of inline citations is consistent throughout. Certainly well researched.

Support. - — Maile (talk) 15:54, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for checking out the references and quality of sourcing, and thanks for your Support. — Cirt (talk) 16:19, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Tim riley[edit]

Just one comment, probably showing my ignorance of the pop field: is "the The AV Club" meant to have two definite articles? – Tim riley talk 21:04, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for stopping by, Tim riley, and thanks for picking that up. Fixed. Although I did enjoy how Stephen Colbert used to say, "The The New York Times... — Cirt (talk) 21:22, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by FrB.TG[edit]

Comments by FrB.TG (addressed)

* "The piece was made available on YouTube" – what does "the piece" exactly mean?

Sentences after fourth line of second para are quite repetitive – xxx described it as, xxx praised its...
Suggestion for image caption of Christian Bale: Christian Bale in July 2008.
"but rather an homage to Bale" – why is it an homage?
TV Guide can be linked in ref 1.
I don't see why you should italicize publishers like MSNBC and CNN as they are television networks.
Ref 14 – Digital Spy does not need italics and can be wiki-linked.
Ref 16 and 17 – ditto (no italics).
London is a well-known geographic location. I don't think it should be linked, per WP:OVERLINKING. -- Frankie _talk 13:30, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Changed from piece to song.
Done. Copy edited these a bit to increase variation, I'm also quite thankful for the two (2) copy editing passes performed by John.
Done. Changed image caption, as suggested.
Done. Fixed this, as suggested.
Done. Linked TV Guide here.
Done. Removed italics for these, as suggested.
Done. Removed italics. Added wiki-link.
Done. Removed italics.
Done. Removed link to London.

Thank you for these helpful suggestions, FrB.TG, the article looks much better for them! — Cirt (talk) 18:21, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Support – I posted my craps above. -- Frankie _talk 20:44, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for your helpful comments, and your Support. — Cirt (talk) 20:52, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from John[edit]

Where we have "Bale was filming with actress Bryce Dallas Howard when he yelled at director of photography, Shane Hurlbut, for walking into his line of sight.", could we substitute "berated" for "yelled"? I was uneasy about "yelled" when I copyedited this all these months ago. Other than that, I think it looks good. --John (talk) 20:16, 4 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Changed "yelled" to "berated", as suggested by John, above. Thank you for your comments and your copyediting help, I think the article is much better for them. — Cirt (talk) 20:18, 4 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Support on a second read through. --John (talk) 20:17, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for the Support and the copyediting assistance, most appreciated. — Cirt (talk) 20:26, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, 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. Graham Beards (talk) 20:30, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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