Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Ugetsu/1

Ugetsu

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted The main issue appears to be broadness concerns, in particular the legacy section and reception in Japan (which is more a broad issue than a neutrality one). AIRcorn (talk) 08:08, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

The original review was insufficient and should probably be undone. Some examples of problems that were missed despite being present in the reviewed version include:

• an entire paragraph (made particularly prominent by its being the last piece of running prose in the article) of textbook OR;[1][2]
• a fairly clear copyvio image (tied to the above OR, also prominent because of its positioning);[3]
• a prominent, and reoccurring, misuse of a diacritical mark;[4]
• an unsourced claim, in the unsourced plot summary (i.e., implicitly attributed to the film itself, which is explicit that it takes place between 1467-ish and 1568-ish[5]), about the historical setting of the film "in the late 16th century";[6]
• a plain English (as opposed to romanized Japanese) spelling error;[7]

The OR and copyvio image should have been autofail material, and the lack of anything beyond a superficial illusion of stability (the nominator was involved in an edit war over the page back in 2013,[8] the page saw only fairly minor tweaks in the four years thence,[9] and the nominator alluded to the edit warring when they returned to the page a few days before nominating their version of the page for GA[10][11]) is also concerning.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:49, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Surprise, surprise. There's been a lot of bad blood over this article (see here for example), and I hoped when I endeavoured to expand and reference beyond what the nominator had ever attempted, it was all in the past. It turned out that he was topic banned during the expansion and when that lapsed, he went right back to disrupting the article with verbose complaints on talk. [12] [13] The hints of the old grudge: an inexplicable mention of JoshuSasori, who Hijiri (under his old username Elvenscout) got banned years ago. He's made clear he associates me with Josh and how little he thinks of me [14] The above points are petty since many of them have already been edited. If he disagrees with a diatric, he can edit it. Like I said, I hoped this was all in the past, but I have little faith now that collaborative editing can maintain stability on this article anymore. Ribbet32 (talk) 02:24, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

I hoped when I endeavoured to expand and reference beyond what the nominator had ever attempted, it was all in the past I've written literally hundreds of articles on Japanese culture topics, almost none of them less than 3kB in length, so even if your sticking a jab at my article creation/expansion in were not off-topic it would be simply wrong. On top of that, this has nothing to do with "bad blood": your expansion made the article worse, not better, and the GA review that followed immediately after should have noticed this. It turned out that he was topic banned during the expansion and when that lapsed, he went right back to disrupting the article with verbose complaints on talk. I appealed my TBAN almost a year ago, and I have just been gradually noticing the problems with this article since last December; I have no idea what that could have to do with any of this. The hints of the old grudge: an inexplicable mention of JoshuSasori, who Hijiri (under his old username Elvenscout) got banned years ago. Umm ... he got himself banned (without even any direct involvement on my part -- I had already left the project because of his harassment, which in turn was after my change of username), but continued to harass me for years after that. Nothing inexplicable about it: you criticized me for OR (same as he always did), when in fact you were the one engaging in OR (same as he always did); but what any of that has to do with the good article criteria I do not know. The above points are petty since many of them have already been edited. Yeah, I fixed some of them (with not-insignificant opposition from you), but they should not have been there in the first place. The original GA reviewer either passed the article because of the content that should not have been there but missed the problems (the current article includes en entire section called "Legacy" that is only four short sentences), or didn't care to check closely enough that the article had these problems; unless there is community consensus that the article, despite these problems with the initial review, still happens to meet the criteria by accident now that I have fixed the few that I noticed, it should be delisted. Like I said, I hoped this was all in the past, but I have little faith now that collaborative editing can maintain stability on this article anymore. Your battleground mentality is showing through; can we please focus on content? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:41, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Off-topic response to off-topic "you're holding a grudge against me" accusation. Posting here only because it kinda needs to be addressed and I'm pretty sure I'm not welcome on Ribbet32's talk page.

BTW: I just went back and checked, and I actually told you last September that I had only the faintest recollection of who you were, while you indicated the previous December that you remembered me quite well. I also apologized to you 56 months after the fact for any offense my gruffness at that time may have caused. So it would make damn-near no sense for me to be the one still nursing a grudge here, if anyone is. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:18, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Leaving the past aside, as the page stands right now Hijiri88 which of the GA Criterion, listed below, do you feel that the page doesn't satisfy? I'm having some trouble seperating past issues that you've already corrected with those that you think remain. I'm hoping then there can be a discussion about the state of the article meeting those criteria and/or action taken to bring the article up to GA standard. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 05:53, 1 July 2018 (UTC) GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   C. It contains no original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

@Barkeep49: I can say with confidence that it currently fails 2, 3, 4 and 5. I am less certain about 1 (I fixed the prominent reoccurring misspelling of the protagonist's name -- I think! -- but I didn't notice "sceenwriter" until an IP fixed it, which was the last straw for me filing this GAR) and 6 (the article does contain a reasonable number of images, which if they don't have copyright problems means it's probably OK, but the initial review found the final image to be okay and it clearly wasn't; I'm not the best with image copyrights, which is one of the reasons I don't do GA reviews myself, but I don't think it's safe to assume that everything is okay now that the most blatant copyvio has been removed). As for 2, 3, 4 and 5:

The article still does contain a bit of OR that I missed; I don't want to remove it, though, because it's probably WP:TRUE and verifiable, but not currently verified, which is a problem.

2. I didn't notice until just now, but the paragraph of OR that I removed from the body was also summarized in the lead. Currently, It is credited with [...] influencing later Japanese film is not currently supported by anything in the article body or any external reliable source. Thing is, I don't actually doubt the "truth" of this statement and consequently don't want to blank it, but it needs a source that actually verifies it, without resorting to OR/SYNTH as the reviewed version did. Additionally, the fact that the article included the problematic OR/SYNTH in the first place makes me really suspicious about the other parts of the article I haven't examined in as much detail (I don't have access to a lot of the sources). The default assumption should always be that the article doesn't meet this criterion, with the burden being on those who wish to include the content and get past GAN (or in this case GAR) to get sources that verify it.

The article gave the impression of being broad during the initial review, but with the OR gone this is not the case.

3. The film almost certainly does have a legacy that deserves more than four lines of coverage in our article, and a GA-standard article would describe that without resorting to OR. The article says nothing whatsoever of the film's critical reception in its native Japan, either in the 1950s or later, and has very little to say about its initial critical reception in western countries. Another key aspect of the topic that is mentioned nowhere in the article is the film's title, which literally translates to "Tales of Rain and the Moon", but neither rain nor the moon appear to be mentioned anywhere in the article. I know that it's named after a book which itself had an abstract title, and so the film's title is, in effect, meaningless, but our readers do not know that.

Does ignoring the film's reputation in its native country count as "non-neutral"? If it doesn't then I guess this can be lumped into the above.

4. It's perhaps more a problem of systemic bias than neutrality, but the above lack of anything to say about its reception by Japanese critics and audiences (the studio's anticipation of a domestic commercial failure is not the same thing) is concerning. It's also not clear why the title of the article gives pride of place to the film's US home media title when it hasn't been seen in English-speaking countries outside North America under that title in decades, if ever. (Weirdly the article is written with British spellin -- "popularising", etc. -- despite this.)

Stability is an illusion.

5. All low-vis articles have an illusion of stability because no one ever makes significant edits to them anyway, but in this case any time the article has been the subject of significant attention it was either in the form of edit-warring (as with the variant titles in the lead back in 2013, or the period in which the film is set in 2017) or the nominator adding a large amount of material that on examination is quite problematic. That he hasn't reverted any of my fixes since December would be promising, except that he complained about it above, which indicates that he doesn't actually acknowledge that the content was problematic and would reinsert it if he thought he could get away with it: and technically, since that content passed GA review, he can claim consensus and WP:STATUSQUO against my "unilateral" changes. Undoing the original, inadequate GA review would prevent that. (And the frankly desperate seeming step of aligning himself with an editor who was site-banned five years ago, going so far as to repeat the same memes that were popular among said banned editor's allies back then -- that I "got JoshuSasori banned" and that I changed my username, as though that were some kind of policy violation -- makes it really look like the nominator is either nursing a years-old grudge against me or is deliberately trying to get under my skin so I will give up and walk away so he can have his article back; that kind of OWN behaviour would indicate the article is really unstable.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:23, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: Thanks. I have deleted the criteria which don't seem to be under discussion. Let me know if that's correct. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:10, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: Yeah, that about matches. :-) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:43, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Great. I'm going to thread them so that we can have parallel discussions without any confusion about which part we're talking about.

So I have finished creating threads for areas identified as concerns. Some of the concerns do seem valid but also seem fixable by interested editors (perhaps Hijiri88 or Ribbet32. It would seem like a shame to delist given what seem like resolvable issues. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:26, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

5. Stability

I have always viewed this criteria narrowly. There is either edit warring or there isn't. The claim here is actually one of WP:OWN By definition Good Articles have room for improvement and so a claim of WP:STEWARDSHIP is going to be weaker than with a FA. Regardless of whether Ribbet32 liked the changes that the three different multi-edit editors have made since January there has been no revision and Ribbet has been active the whole time on Wikipedia. Since this is a talk page discussion it strikes me as completely with-in WP:CONSENSUS to express disagreement about content. In the end I just can't see issues with this criteria. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:56, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

3a Broad in Coverage

This seems like the best claim of a shortfall for GA status but also fixable. Are there sources which can be found to remedy? While I am not ignorant of Japanese film (especially of this era) it feels like other editors would be better positioned to find high quality sources to add context. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:56, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

1a Well Written

I admit that spelling/grammar proofreading isn't my strongest area as an editor but I'm not seeing any issues with the article in this criteria. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:26, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

4 Neutrality

This is tied into 3a but does concern me given current composition of the article. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:26, 12 July 2018 (UTC)