Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The X-Files/archive1

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 01:11, 7 July 2007.

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The X-Files

good work --Miwanya 21:37, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose Naked URLs are not acceptable, nor are URLs surrounded by nothing but brackets. WP:CITET should show what your citations need to look like. Retrieval dates, publisher and author information are a must.--Rmky87 21:43, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose
  • Pop culture legacy section written in list form. Also, some connections here are pretty weak/unsourced.
  • Citations aren't all properly formatted.
  • Some non-neutral statements like "One of the most chilling episodes."
  • The article feels very long. The TOC doesn't even fit on my screen and there are a lot of images.
  • Season links in Plot and mythology section all link to same page.
  • Unofficial mythology episodes need citations...and lose the quotation marks.
  • The taglines may not be notable.

- Zepheus <ゼィフィアス> 22:50, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

• Strong oppose: Do we really need more than two dozen fair use images to make this article work? Foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy says fair use image use "must be minimal". Not to mention that the fair use images all lack rationale for their use in this article. Certainly we can do better than this. --Durin 18:28, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose but only because it needs some cleanup work. Yes some NPOV work is needed. I don't think the images are overused; they add a nice touch to the article, that lets you get a feel for what the show looks like as you read the description. I often wish I could see examples like that when I'm reading about other things. The pop culture section is just a list of pop culture references. I just renamed it as such to avoid confusion. The article feels long because it's comprehensive, and that shouldn't be considered a negative aspect. I changed the season links so that they anchor to their corresponding points on the episode list page. You're right about the quotes, I removed them. I think the taglines should stay. The changing taglines were significant to the show, and fans especially want to be able to see a list of them. As for the unofficial mythology episodes, maybe they don't belong, since I'm not sure how we can add citations for something unofficial. They reflect a general consensus, somewhat. I'm not sure what to do about those. Refs also do need to be converted to standard web citations... I started doing this, but there are a LOT of them. Equazcion 20:42, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I've converted more references into standardized web citations, but many many more are left. More importantly I divided up the "History" section further, into smaller, more manageable bite-size bits. Yeah, they did feel pretty damn long. I don't think anyone was even reading them. I've also been copy-editing, and a lot more of that needs to be done. As a frequent editor of the article I feel complimented that it's a candidate for being a featured article, but still... have you read this thing? It's sort of a mess. The grammar alone is gonna take a while to clean up. Equazcion 13:12, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose Formatting fixes are needed, and the "Pop culture" section needs to be organised and changed from being a list. LuciferMorgan 19:40, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Be more specific please. What kind of formatting fixes? What's wrong with the pop culture references being in list form? Equazcion 01:57, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose Heavily underreferenced, and below standards for encyclopedic writing. This is a PARTIAL LIST of problems; there are way to many to list here:
  • The lead does not really summarize the article; it provides an analysis of the show which is not expanded on in the main article. Much of this information is unreferenced as well.
  • fans as well as the show's producers commonly divide X-Files episodes into two categories - According to whom? Unreferenced claim...
  • Anatomy of an episode section contains what appears to be an original critical analysis of the show; since it lacks any references at all it would appear that this is the original work of the author of this article.
  • Some episodes were omitted from the official mythology DVD release, even though many fans consider them to be essential to the mythology. - What fans? Where is this information published? References please.
  • Overall, the article spends WAY to much columnspace rehashing the plot of each individual episode. There are articles for each episode, n'est ce pas? Why does this article spend so much time in-universe dealing with it. There is little attention given to actual critical review and reception, instead it is largely a hige plot synopsis of the entire series.
  • Pop culture references section is simply a trivia section masquerading under a different name. This random list of facts should be pared down to important, well referenced, facts and then those facts should be incorporated into other parts of the article where they belong, not segregated into a bullet list of random trivia, which is decidedly below the professional standards one would expect of a Featured Article.

That's a start. This article needs a heap of work. I would like to see an article about the X-files reach feature quality. This one ain't it. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 05:54, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmm... I'm still lost about this pop culture thing. It's labeled "pop-culture references," and it's a list of references made to the show in popular culture. I'm lost as to how it's "masquerading" as anything but exactly what its label states. I suppose the information could be incorporated into a non-list section, but I think it wouldn't flow well: "blah blah blah, and by the way, around this time the X-Files was parodied by The Simpsons"? Is that how that information is supposed to be presented? I don't think it fits well that way. It seems too unrelated to the show's history. And "Trivia" doesn't describe this at all. Trivia is about the show itself, behind-the-scenes informational tidbits, not references made to the show from outside.

• Most of your criticism is about references, and I agree, there are a lot of references missing.
• As for the in-universe thing... I disagree. The article certainly is long but if you read it, it's mostly about what went on behind-the-scenes. There are short summaries of what happened in some episodes, never more than one or two sentences, and those are only presented in the context of a critical review or of behind-the-scenes production information. Yes the sections are labeled according to their season, but only for chronological purposes — if you read their content you'll see that they have little to do with the "in-universe" story. Equazcion 20:13, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.