Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1927 Chicago mayoral election/archive1

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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) 26 March 2019 [1].

1927 Chicago mayoral election[edit]

Nominator(s): John M Wolfson (talk) 23:50, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the last time a Republican candidate won a Chicago mayoral election. William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, who had previously served from 1915 to 1923 and had kept himself in the spotlight since then, took advantage of incumbent William Emmett Dever's unpopular enforcement of Prohibition. He lodged a campaign against him full of demagoguery, going on such tangents as the United Kingdom. He eventually won the election, much to Chicago's humiliation on the national level. This is my first FAC, and I have User:Coemgenus as a mentor. I also believe this nomination is of interest to User:SecretName101 (EDIT: who was a significant contributor to the page's contents). I look forward to hearing from and responding to your feedback! -John M Wolfson (talk) 23:50, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely would appear to be amongst the best-researched and assembled articles for a municipal election. Would be hard pressed to find a more prime example of one, particularly for any municipal election that happened nearly as long ago as this one. SecretName101 (talk) 21:25, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the requirements for verifiability in this article. Books are cited, but no page numbers given. For example, Melvin and Holli's 333-page The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition is cited 23 times without once providing a page number. Per WP:PAGENUM, cites to lengthy sources must specify page(s) or page ranges where we can find support in the source for the statement(s) being made in the article. Factotem (talk) 08:39, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I only added two of the books cited, but I looked through them and added the page numbers. I'm also going through and reformatting the dates to make them all consistently American style. -John M Wolfson (talk) 10:30, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That's a start, but there are still some serious issues even after adding a page number; you've added p. 199 to the Teaford source, but checking through the cites to that page, there are a couple of statements in the article not supported by the source. Teaford nowhere states on that page that Thompson was "colorful, charismatic" or that he was called Big Bill "for his towering height and large girth" and makes no mention of Thompson's "promise of lax enforcement of Prohibition". Also, the publication year for Teaford's book is missing. Factotem (talk) 12:07, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The "colorful" was not intended to be included within the citation, and I have removed it. I would argue the "charismatic" part comes from "Thompson's ... message thrilled thousands of Chicagoans," although that might be OR, and the Prohibition part comes from "Chicagoans opted for booze and balderdash," ditto, although there's another citation for Thompson's anti-Prohibition stance if it's insufficient. John M Wolfson (talk) 12:35, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I would also recommend adding a bibliography sorted alpabetically by author as a separate section and using short citations inline in the main body of the article; it's a better way of organising the sources and how they are used, though I don't believe this is mandatory. Today's featured article uses this style; the bibliography is presented in the References section with each source presented using cite book and cite journal as appropriate (there's also a cite news template for news articles – see Wikipedia:Citing sources for more info). The Notes section is (much like your article's References section) an automatically generated list of inline citations that have been placed in the article, though in the TFA example they are in short form format. In that example, the article uses the sfn and sfnm templates, but it's perfectly valid to use the same <ref>...</ref> style used in this article (so, for example, you would cite the first sentence in your second paragraph as <ref>Teaford 1993 p. 199</ref>). Another thing worth pointing out is that, although ISBN numbers are not mandatory, you'll likely attract negative comments if they are not provided for the books. Hope this helps, but sorry to say I don't think this article is ready for FAC. Factotem (talk) 12:07, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the suggestion, and your comments in general. I'd like for this review to keep going, but if consensus is for withdrawal then I'll see what I can do with a peer review. -John M Wolfson (talk) 12:35, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Given recent turn of events, I believe that a peer review would be better for now, and as such would like to withdraw this nomination for now. I can't wait to hear your feedback the next time I nominate this! (I am aware of the waiting period.) -John M Wolfson (talk) 15:17, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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