Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jesse Jackson, Jr./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 not promoted by Raul654 04:12, 19 February 2009 [1].

Jesse Jackson, Jr.[edit]

Nominator(s): TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM)

I am nominating this for featured article because this article has been through WP:GAC and WP:PR. In addition it has endured extensive public scrutiny due to recent scandal. The article represents a synthesis of all exposure in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, Harper's, and Atlantic Monthly prior to the Rod Blagojevich corruption charges scandal and a good summary of his involvement in the scandal.TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:51, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose Not ready. Simplistic sentence structure, grammatical errors, odd word choice, etc.
    • Odd chronology in the lead; paragraphs 2 and 3 would be better switched.
    • "Jackson had been mentioned" Perfect tense because?
    • "Jackson admitted that he is ", "and a spokesman says " Odd tense shifts.
    • "His pet issue " pet issue?
    • "In his 40% white district..." Grammar errors in sentence.
    • "Although he was supported and encouraged ", "he did not strongly support Gore" Support in what?
    • "In Illinois, he has become a strong political ally of President Barack Obama while having..." Why "in Illinois"? "Having" is weak.
    • "sway support of " Grammar.
    • "earned support" From whom?
    • "earliest memories of "Jesse Jr." was a speech" "of "Jesse Jr." is ambiguous. Whose earliest memories? Jesse Jr.'s memories of himself? Why is Jesse Jr. in quotations?
    • "so his time with his father was often on his way to the next meeting." Ambiguous. Grammar. BuddingJournalist 17:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • How is it now?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:18, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • Some of the above issues have been addressed, but others remain ("While being an antagonist of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley...", "His father was actively pursuing media attention..."). And the above were just samples; in all honesty, the prose issues are widespread, and fixing them will be time-consuming. Take, for example, the first paragraph of Early years:
          • "Jackson claims that at the age of 16 he rallied support..." Why "claims"? Word choice has a negative connotation. "Rallied support" is quite vague.
            • Fixed.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:08, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
              • How is "organized support" any less vague than "rallied support"? BuddingJournalist 22:46, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
                • Here is the quote from my secondary source: "...Jackson's campaign biography said that he rallied support in 1981 for striking air traffic controllers who had been fired by President Ronald Reagan; he was 16 years old at the time." What do you think should go in the article? The secondary source is more of a primary, so I say he said as opposed to saying a secondary source said he did so.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:19, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
                  • Then I think you need to do more research to find out what they mean by "rallied support". Isn't very informative to readers as it is. BuddingJournalist 00:24, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
                    • I am limited by my source.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:41, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
                      • Not sure what you mean; I meant find other sources to figure out what is meant by "rallied support" and what involvement he had. If you can't find any other sources to corroborate the campaign biography, then it makes little sense to include it in here (not only because of reliability concerns but also due to readers wondering what the heck "rallied support" or the like means). BuddingJournalist 16:16, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
          • "As a teenager, Jackson and his brother Jonathan, were involved " Grammar. Also, vague use of "involved". What does that mean?
          • "During the 1984 Democratic primaries, the three Jackson brothers sometimes made appearances together." Made appearances where? What is the significance of this sentence?
          • "While in college, Jackson" What is this Jackson and White citation? I didn't see any full citation of this before this point. If it's a primary source, this sentence as phrased is not an acceptable use of a primary source.
          • "Then during the 1986 United States House of Representatives elections he attempted to support" Unnecessary "then" Attempted to support? Was he prevented from supporting? Name dropping Robin Britt and Howard Coble isn't exactly helpful. Explain the significance of his involvement in this election.
            • I don't currently possess the source. I did what I could.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:49, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
              • Support is quite vague still. What was his involvement? "Robin Britt, but first-term Congressman Howard Coble won re-election by less than 100 votes." Too much information awkwardly crammed together into a single sentence with the odd choice of "but" as the connector. Unless you have some anecdote about how the narrow loss affected Jackson, you can safely omit this last part ("supported the failed bid of Robin Britt to return to office").
          • The entire paragraph lacks a narrative flow (why, for example, is "His first job after graduation was..." the last sentence in this paragraph?); reads like a bunch of miscellaneous facts cobbled together.
            • O.K. I have tried some editing of the problem sentence. Obviously at the end of this college experience with poitical activity this is a logical last sentence.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:49, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • This is all from one paragraph. Because FAC is not peer review, I'd actually suggest withdrawing this article for now. BuddingJournalist 01:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
          • I could not get almost any attention at PR. I will withdraw this around the 19th if it does not close before then. I would appreciate any further assistance that you may lend and I understand if you choose not to help this one any further. The thing about this article is that the research is fairly comprehensive, which gives the article a much stronger breadth component than many FAs. However, I concede many points you make in terms of its weaknesses. If you don't mind I would kind of like to see what other feedback I can get over the course of a week.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 07:59, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
            • OK. Certainly, a lot of research seems to have been undertaken, but the article seems to have been sloppily cobbled together. The lack of reviewers at PR is unfortunate but increasingly the norm; have you tried contacting editors directly to solicit help? That being said, I just don't see the necessity of reviewers to point out the numerous grammatical mistakes, puzzling and awkward sentence constructions, and uneven narrative and tone that mar the prose (at random: "delay the closing the roll, there by", "as well as one-third suburban when he first assumed it responsibility for it", "took more than crowd pleasing and rhyming(???)"). These are basic mistakes that, frankly, I'd expect an experienced editor such as yourself to be able take care of prior to FAC. There are certainly more subtle criticisms of the prose that I could lob that I might not expect someone close to the prose to pick up on, but start with a top-to-bottom copy-edit. I think you'll find plenty of work to do without relying on a paragraph-by-paragraph critique at FAC. BuddingJournalist 22:29, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Sorry, needs some more work. Some examples:
  • "part of the Chicago South Side and a small portion of the southeast side of Chicago" – Isn't the southeast side part of the South Side? And why is South Side capitalized, while southeast side isn't?
  • OK.
  • "he is one of five children of Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson:" – The sentence ends in a colon. Did you mean to list the children after that?
  • However, that might actually be a better point to introduce the children's names.
  • "One of the earliest memories of Jesse, Jr. for Chicagoans was a speech given at age five from a milk crate at the Operation PUSH headquarters." – I'm assuming this is a speech that Jackson Jr gave himself, but the passive voice makes this unclear.
  • "Jackson claims that at the age of 16 he rallied support for the air traffic controllers during the Air traffic controllers' strike of 1981." – Why "claims"? If there is a controversy about this, the article should say so. And what exactly did he claim to do? "Rallied support" is kind of vague.
  • "Says" isn't much different from "claims". Is there a reason we can't just state this as a fact?
  • Here is the quote from my secondary source: "...Jackson's campaign biography said that he rallied support in 1981 for striking air traffic controllers who had been fired by President Ronald Reagan; he was 16 years old at the time." What do you think should go in the article? The secondary source is more of a primary, so I say he said as opposed to saying a secondary source said he did so.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:41, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd recommend dropping the sentence altogether. Besides the claims/says issue, we still don't know exactly how he rallied support for the air traffic controllers. Zagalejo^^^ 07:30, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • "At the time, the Chicago Bulls had just traded the popular B. J. Armstrong and Michael Jordan was playing minor league baseball." – Actually, Jordan returned to the Bulls before Armstrong left. And Armstrong wasn't traded by the Bulls; he was left unprotected in the 1995 expansion draft. (This is more Jackson's error than yours, but still... )
  • OK.
  • "The speech was perceived as one that detailed the generational transformation of the challenges of the socio-political landscape." – I have no idea what this means. Try to simplify the language.
  • Better. But why do you have to say that it was "perceived" as such?
  • "Jackson, who has only missed two votes in his first thirteen years in Congress, says the Segway helps." – Helps with what? (And this is pretty trivial, anyway.)
  • Hmmm. I think that was just a cute response to a reporter more than anything else. The implication is that people routinely miss votes because they can't walk fast enough. That seems a little silly. (Remember that the Segway didn't even exist for the first half of Jackson's career in Congress.)
  • Also, you say that "Capitol Hill is participating" in the contest (my emphasis), but the NYT article says the contest ended in June. Zagalejo^^^ 19:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems like you've only used about a dozen Chicago sources (out of 225 total). Why is that? There's a wealth of good content yet to be mined. Zagalejo^^^ 23:18, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I listed my primary sources in the introduction of this discussion. The article is at the fringe of the limits of WP:SIZE. Keeping the content to issues that are notable on the international level is a good cutoff. If you want to write daughter articles then additional detail from local news could be useful. Adding, things not notable enough to be mentioned in any of the primary sources above will almost certainly be adding things less important and thus less encyclopedic from the perspective of this international project in an article that is at the size limit.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 08:05, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're assuming that the national sources will cover every important aspect of Jackson's life. You're also assuming that everything they cover is actually important. Have you at least browsed through the local newspaper articles? Zagalejo^^^ 19:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • For his political career, these sources should be fairly comprehensive. For other sources, I use things like Chicago Magazine and local. For more detail prior to elective service you might have to go local. However, this article has sufficient detail even for FA in that regard. I imagine if 20 years from now his Congressional service is a smaller part of his life history another source balance could be used. As a Chicagaon, do you feel any specific events are missing? I don't think the proper approach would be to look at the sources and say something must be missing for an article of this length and breadth. I think unless you have specific events of periods in his life you feel are overlooked that might be a complaint. For a person of his notability and higher exhaustive secondary source searches are not necessarily worthwhile, IMO. I think once you have gone through his life from the perspective of many sources, as I have done, it is in the ballpark for appropriate effort. We have to make simplifying assumptions in these non-professional biographies. I can tell you for certain, I am not going to read every local newspaper article that has mentioned his name. --TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:51, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can't think of any specific facts that are missing from the article, although I never really paid close attention to Jesse Jackson Jr, so I'm sure there are a lot of news reports I missed.
  • You make a point that this is a non-professional biography. While technically true, a featured article should try to conform to professional standards. I don't feel comfortable supporting this article knowing that you have willingly avoided dozens of potential sources. The national periodicals might have covered all the major events of Jackson Jr's life to some degree, but the local press can provide different insights and is attune to subtleties that the other sources often miss.
  • It wouldn't take an incredibly long time to skim through all the relevant articles in the Sun-Times and Tribune databases. I think it's worth the effort. If you're nominating an article for featured status, you really should try to be an expert on the subject. This will be one of the top Google hits for "Jesse Jackson Jr", so the article needs to be the best independent source available on the subject. Zagalejo^^^ 07:30, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Remember that these are just examples of problems. It would probably take several rounds of this to work out all the kinks in the article. Zagalejo^^^ 20:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments -

Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Tony, I KNOW I've told you about the capitals in the link titles and the newspaper titles before. And you've been at FAC a few times, you should know by now to use the link checker tool before you nominate an article. While I'm not opposing, it does get old to repeatedly tell you to fix the same things, over and over and over again. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:29, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose by karanacs. I'll echo Ealdgyth's comments above - it is a little demoralizing as a reviewer to realize that the issues I found in this article parrot the issues I've seen in some of your other biographies. It makes me feel like you aren't paying attention at all to the comments you receive in your many nominations. Please take the constructive criticism you are offered to heart, and please try to get these types of issues fixed in your future articles before you nominate them. Otherwise you are wasting our time as reviewers. Essentially, the problems I see in this article are the exact same ones as the last one (the Buffalo mayor): the prose is not up to FA standards and the article is full of inconsequential detail.

  • The lead is full of information that seems out of place in a high-level recounting of his life. For example, do we really need to have the list of his schools in the lead? Do we really need a listing of who he has/has not endorsed for office or whose favor he has/has not gained? Also, a full paragraph on the Blagojevich stuff seems overkill for the lead; a sentence or two should be enough here, with the rest in the body of the article.
  • The Early life section seems to have a lot of irrelevant detail. Do we really need to know what nursery school and elementary school he attended? There's a lot of information about his brother Jonathan which is not necessary in this article. Do we care that he was paddled?
    • This article is just reaching a length were WP:SIZE is starting to be a concern. If he takes on future major roles in world affairs, (Cabinet, Senate, Governor, even Mayor of Chicago) his article will quickly require sub articles. This article contains some details that are sub article level details and some that would stay when we get to that point. While the full detail of the early life remains here that info is WP:PRESERVEd here. When the article gets split, that can go to a separate Early life article.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • My concerns are not based on size, but on relevance. There is a great deal of information in this article that is essentially trivial or irrelevant to the subject of this article. Some of the information may be more appropriate in other articles; some of it should just be removed. A good question to ask yourself is "how does this fact impact our understanding of the subject?" If it doesn't, then there's a good chance that fact doesn't belong in the article (or any future spinoff article). We aren't writing a book-length biography, but an encyclopedia article. Please note also that the examples I gave above are only examples from the first section - there are similar trivial mentions throughout the article that need to be weeded out. Karanacs (talk) 13:48, 18 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The prose needs serious work. Here's what I noticed in just the first paragraph of Early life:
    • Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina four days after the Selma to Montgomery marches (known as Bloody Sunday). - what was known as Bloody Sunday? the marches or the day he was born?
    • One of the earliest memories of Jesse, Jr. for Chicagoans - huh?
    • His father sought media attention to shed light on important issues according to some accounts -- this is thinly disguised POV
    • His father sought media attention to shed light on important issues according to some accounts and as a result of his father's travels, his time with his father often occurred in the time between meetings - overly convulted and wordy
  • Sections should not contain only a main/further reading link. If you don't want to summarize the info, but it in the See also section.
  • per the MOS, don'tuse callout quotes; use blockquote instead
  • There's no information in the article about response to his books. What did critics think? Did they sell well?
    • There is no information about sales of Obama's books in his FA article. The book that was not co-authored with his father has its own article and critical commentary can be found there. I don't think any of it is appropriate here.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:55, 17 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • If sales information is not available, that is fine. This subject is also a writer, and there should be at least a little bit of critical commentary on his writing in this article so that we get the full picture. Karanacs (talk) 13:48, 18 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't think it appropriate to put his writing career in the same section with gastric bypass surgery. I don't even know if it is appropriate to include gastric bypass surgery in this article.
  • It seems a little odd to have the giant bulk of hte article rolled up into a single section, Political career. Why not get rid of the umbrella section?

Karanacs (talk) 18:15, 17 February 2009 (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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