Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Margaret Thatcher/1

Margaret Thatcher[edit]

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

Result: Delist per consensus below that there is much to fix to meet the criteria. Geometry guy 17:05, 9 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article fails GA condition 4. Neutrality, there has been an NPOV template on the whole article for over eighteen months with editors on the talkpage asserting large parts need rewriting and that the article is not neutral, as this situation has continued for such a long time and appears there are no attempts in all this time to rewrite a balanced article acceptable to the users claiming not neutral IMO the article should be delisted until the long term dispute is resolved. Off2riorob (talk) 15:58, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delist - Comments by RacePacket (see here for criteria)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):
"At the 1950 and 1951 elections, she fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford" -> "In the 1950 and 1951 elections, she campaigned for the safe Labour seat of Dartford"

There are spacing issues, e.g., "January 1978,on"

"when Britain reclaimed the Falkland Islands" -> "in which Britain reclaimed the Falkland Islands"

Unclear meaning: "The Labour leader Michael Foot was traditional Labour"

"the West doesn’t want German" - remove all curly quotes and apostrophes.

"returning to the backbenches after leaving the premiership." - most readers will not understand that this means the prime minster position.

"From 1993 to 2000, Lady Thatcher served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which was established by Royal Charter in 1693. She was also Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, the UK's only private university." - This requires some explanation.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
citation needed: "Thatcher appointed many of Heath's supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she had won the leadership as an outsider and then had little power base of her own within the party."
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
"With a mother climbing the political ladder, the children were left to a nanny. "My mother was prone to calling me by her secretaries' names and working through each of them until she got to Carol", recalled her daughter.[26]" - would similar details be included if Thatcher was a man? Is this an unfocused digression?

What was the role of Thatcher vis a vis the U.S. in brokering the Northern Ireland solution?
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
POV: "(The IEA, a think tank founded by the poultry magnate Antony Fisher, the man who brought battery farming to Britain and a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek, had become the ideas factory of a new British Conservatism. Thatcher began visiting the IEA and reading its publications during the early sixties.) Thatcher would now become the face of the ideological movement that felt the opposite of reverence for the welfare state Keynesian economics they believed was terminally weakening Britain."

"the Conservatives won a landslide victory with a massive majority." - better to specify the fact of its size than to characterize it.

"Overall, there was no clear pattern between the degree of competition, regulation and performance among the privatised industries." - scholars could disagree about this.

"Reagan, one of her closest friends," - given all of Thatcher's family and associates in Great Britain, it is difficult to believe that Reagan would be one of her closest friends. Perhaps as compared with other heads of state, they were close.

There are POV problems in the article
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
Quite a bit of back and forth on details of article.
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall:
Pass/Fail:
Racepacket (talk) 02:15, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments. I read the article today with great interest: despite its flaws, there is a lot of good, well-sourced, and readable content. It is unfortunate that an article on such a significant 20th century politician has become so bogged down. Wikipedia should have a great article on Thatcher, not one stalled because of an impasse/stalemate or disenchantment over neutrality issues. Hopefully the GAR principle to consider the GA criteria as a whole, not just the raised NPOV issue, will encourage renewed efforts aimed at article improvement.

So let me headline with two other GA issues.

The article is too long, and goes into unnecessary detail (3b). This is a biography of Margaret Thatcher. It is not a history of the last 30 years of the 20th century in British politics, nor is it an evaluation as to whether Margaret Thatcher was a "Good Thing" or not (that is for the reader to decide).
There are many poorly chosen sources: some are unreliable or inappropriately partisan or primary, while others are off-topic or tertiary, where better sources are available. This can be seen in the choice of references, the use of inline citation, and missing citations where they are needed (2a-c).

Trivia infects the article from the beginning of her career (while their father watched a Test match at the Oval) to the end (In 1999 Thatcher was among 18 included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th century, from a poll conducted of Americans. In a 2006 list compiled by New Statesman, she was voted 5th in the list of "Heroes of our time"), while the latter part of the article digresses considerably on the effect of her resignation, and her recent health.

Questionably used sources include www.globalsecurity.org, conservativehome.blogs.com, "When the Lights Went Out" (Andy Beckett), The Margeret Thatcher Foundation, Thatcher's autobiographies, Britannica and MSN Encarta, partisan newspapers such as the Observer and the Daily Telegraph.

There is a lack of NPOV in both directions. It is entirely appropriate for an encyclopedia article to present multiple (often opposing) views about a person or issue, but the article itself should not take sides, and the editorial voice should be encyclopedic and balanced. The early part of the article suggest editorial sniping and point-scoring, often unsourced. Examples from the first two sections:

Her school reports show hard work and commitment, but not brilliance.
[She] was only successful when the winning candidate dropped out.
she achieved a Master of Arts degree
She was also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers.
With a mother climbing the political ladder, the children were left to a nanny.
she advocated the Conservative policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses. The policy would prove to be popular.
Thatcher established herself as a potent conference speaker at the Conservative Party Conference of 1966, with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government

It is completely inappropriate to use Thatcher's biographies or Thatcherite websites to support unattributed narrative. A grievous example is using The Thatcher Foundation as a source for problems with the Heath government! On the other hand, her autobiographies should be cited to support quotations from them, and her own view of events (rather than e.g., Earl Aaron Reitan). There is a place for primary source material.

There isn't really a place for tertiary sources, though, in an article on such a famous person, except perhaps for the well-known and widely accepted statistics which tertiary sources summarize most conveniently.

Fixing the sources would do a lot to heal this article. Here are two suggestions.

Cut all material and all cites to The Margeret Thatcher Foundation, "When the Lights Went Out" and any blogs or sources without clear independent credentials. Ensure autobiographical citations are used only to support autobiographical material.
Use more than one biography to source the majority of the narrative (the article mostly uses Clare Beckett, but there are other biographies cited and uncited, e.g. John Blundell), to reduce or eliminate the dependence on Britannica and Encarta.

As one final suggestion: do not intertwine Thatcher's legacy with what she did. There is currently a huge section on her resignation, which is mostly legacy material: cut and/or move it. Her post-commons years, and later activities should likewise be cut drastically, so that they are in balance with what she did during the more significant years of her career. This change should also make it much easier to sort out what are the most important points to refer to in her legacy.

I could make finer points e.g., about the structure of the main sections 4-5 (including GA issues, unsourced material etc.) but these may well resolve themselves if the overall problems are fixed. Geometry guy 01:42, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]