Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/September 25, 2019

Is it fair to say that Solrad itself was unsuccessful? It never had a chance to prove itself or be found lacking. "SOLRAD 2 was an surveillance and scientific satellite developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory that was destroyed in an unsuccessful launch." Kevin McE (talk) 16:36, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I would suggest pinging the FAC nominator on this for the proper use of the word. For example, Apollo 13 was a failed mission because it did not land on the Moon, despite the heroics.--Wehwalt (talk) 16:58, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

It is fair to say that Apollo 13 was a failed mission, but not that the items on it that were to be deployed on the moon were failed items. The subject of the article, as defined in the opening sentence, is the physical object, not the project. Kevin McE (talk) 19:36, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Kevin, we're at 1014 characters now, so there's no room to add what you want (given that we've done a blurb review). Would it work for you to remove the word "unsuccessful"? - Dank (push to talk) 20:19, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Sure: I don't think it can be right to say the object that was never tested was unsuccessful. If character count means simply delete the word, that seems fine to me. The rest of the extract describes its fate sufficiently. Kevin McE (talk) 23:05, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Just noting that I'm aware of the comments on this talk page and for the next 3 4 TFAs after this one. See my latest comment at WT:ERRORS. I'm looking forward to the day when we can ping the FAC nominators and reviewers for their responses (when a blurb review exists, and it does in this case). But there are a couple of issues I'd like to get consensus on before we do that. Wehwalt, for the moment, I'm inclined go along with Kevin's suggestions unless they strike me as just wrong, as opposed to pinging people or arguing my case, but what you're saying seems imminently reasonable, too. - Dank (push to talk) 17:58, 21 September 2019 (UTC)