Template:Did you know nominations/Will White
- The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was: promoted by Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:27, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
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Will White[edit]
- ... that Will White (pictured), the first Major League Baseball player to wear glasses, holds the records with 75 complete games and 680 innings pitched in one season?
- Reviewed:
pendingCongo Crisis
- Reviewed:
5x expanded by Cbl62 (talk). Self nominated at 05:35, 8 August 2014 (UTC).
- A1:
the article was expanded by more than 5x on Aug 5th. - A2: it's way more than 1500 characters now
- A3:
the article is generally well-written and sourced. It's quite long so I just spot-checked for copyvio/plagiarism. I had some trouble with the sources being offline but found one case where I could view the source. The original has "he ran into a road block when one of his chief weapons -- intimidation" while our article has "Baseball historian David Nemec wrote that White's career hit a roadblock in 1884 when the American Association began awarding a base to a player who was hit by a pitched ball. According to Nemec, the new rule deprived White of one of his chief weapons -- intimidation." The material is well-attributed to Nemec but I'm not comfortable with us borrowing his phrasing so literally - "roadblock", "chief weapons", "intimidation". The article is long so please could the nominator comment on how much more of this level of close paraphrase there is to find.
- A1:
- H1: the hook is technically ok but...
- H2:
I find the hook confusing as it jumps from the interesting point about glasses to some confusing stuff about records. It's not clear to me what the records claimed are. Are they for a player with glasses or what? The hook seems to be trying to do too much and might be better if it stopped after the first comma, e.g.
- H1:
- ALT1 ... that Will White (pictured) was the first Major League Baseball player to wear glasses on the field?
- O1: there's a QPQ review pending
- O2: the picture is old enough to be public domain
- O1:
So, there's several issues requiring attention, please. Andrew (talk) 16:22, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
- @Andrew Davidson: I have completed the QPQ. As you point out, the article already included a double attribution of the point to David Nemec, and I have now rewritten it with six key words ("one of his chief weapons -- intimidation") in quotation marks. I do take care with attribution and believe that good historical (and encyclopedic) writing benefits greatly from occasional use of direct, limited quotes, with proper attribution as here, from the work of leading historians like Nemec. The previously "confusing stuff about records" is actually the most significant and interesting bit. Bear in mind that pitchers in modern baseball have never come close to White's records. As shown here, no pitcher in the last 100 years has thrown more than 34 complete games (actually, nobody's even thrown more than 6 complete games in the last three years), and sources refer to White's record of 75 as one of the records least likely ever to be broken. That said, I have tried to simplify the hook, eliminating the added bit about innings pitched, with the following alternative. Cbl62 (talk) 21:23, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
- alt 2 ... that Will White (pictured) was the first Major League Baseball player to wear glasses and holds the major league record with 75 complete games in a single season?
Thanks for the update. I'm currently away at a convention (Gencon) so don't have time to check this in detail again but am happy to take the attribution issue on trust. The hook seems better, thanks, but still doesn't read quite right to me. I'm not sure if this is a matter of American vs British English but I'd say it as:
- alt 2b ... that Will White (pictured) was the first Major League Baseball player to wear glasses and holds the major league record of 75 complete games in a single season?
