Talk:Angolan pavilion/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Kingsif (talk · contribs) 07:00, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Style

• In the first sentence of lead, shouldn't "international art exhibition" be capitalized?

  Nope since it isn't a proper noun. czar

• "The national pavilion displays in Venetian palazzos outside the Giardini" this is unclear on several fronts:
  • Displays is an unfortunate choice of word, being both noun and verb, confusing the meaning from the start
    • "Displays" is probably in the wrong tense, continuous present, since I don't think the pavilion is continuous nor currently present
  • Needs explanation why one pavilion would be in multiple palazzos, or to be rephrased a bit more

  The pavilion is continuous between iterations of the biannual event. Rephrased. czar

• By the third sentence, three different words are used to describe the pavilion: "exhibition", "pavilion", "show". Not very clear. Also changed up the spelling of biennale (and not capitalized it, either) a few times through the lead - please edit for consistency

  It is common to use synonyms to avoid repeating the same phrase. It is at once an exhibition, pavilion, show, and national representation. If it is unclear in specific instances, that can be improved. Biennale and biennial are two similar but different things. The (Venice) Biennale, which is an art biennial, occurs biannually. czar

• The third sentence also is a bit grammatically wonky
• "Chagas displayed poster-sized photographs in giveaway stacks" - what's a giveaway stack? ... oh, a stack, where the items are being given away. This isn't a common term afaik.

  See my general comment below, but I think a "giveaway stack" is understandable in context and there is no "common" term for the concept. I'm removing the phrase because it isn't vital for the lede. czar

• First sentence of "2013" could be reworked to focus more on Angola rather than making it a sidenote to 9 other countries.

  It's not a side note, though; it's signposting the paragraph's contents, that it was their first show. czar

• Also, is there not a better section header than "2013"... and a better article name? "Angola pavilions at the Venice Biennale" comes to mind.

  Not sure I understand. This is one of many national pavilions. A nation's representation is referenced as a group: the "Angolan pavilion". Additionally, the WP standard is to use singular titles and there is no need to further disambiguate when the shorter version is sufficiently recognizable (the name most people will call it), natural (reflecting what it's usually called), precise (unambiguously identified), and concise (not longer than necessary to identify), per the naming criteria (article titles policy). "2013" is completely appropriate for the section's title, considering how the article is based around Biennale years. czar 21:27, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

• "The exhibition, held in the Palazzo Cini near Venice's Accademia Bridge, Chagas placed 23 stacks of poster-sized photos from the series for visitors to take" is poor grammar, as the sentence is malformed around the clause.
  • Also, the "23 stacks" is unclear, especially with "editions of 4000" that follows - how many of what were there?

  The missing preposition was a typo. czar

• "Editions of 4000", "situated in a room", "crafts" in the context it appears, are all unusual enough that though the sentence seems correct, it doesn't read very well.
• The note "as other African nation pavilions had been" after a detailed quote is jarring, it could at least have a "before it" or "in years when they had seen success" or whatever is relevant in context from the article added at the end.

  Not sure I understand. That portion was in relation to the end of the quote, in that other African national pavilions has "reified otherness", according to Frieze. czar

• "While the idea of recontextualizing a space was not novel, Frieze found interesting the thought that the cheaply produced, unwieldy posters would likely end up as street or canal debris, another step in the cycle of consumerism" I can appreciate this as a formulation I would use, and a high academic standard in e.g. the UK, but I also know that, in general, Wikipedia editors find it odd. It would hurt me to change up this lovely sentence, but it might have to be.
• "ambiguous value differential" whereas this phrase just seems overly technical, please simplify.
• "She"... who is she? Reviewer of Frieze? Does she have a name? Can we add that? The pronoun comes out of nowhere.
  • Actually, this whole sentence is weird. If you're going to give the narrative of the reviewer, please restructure.
• "recommended purchase at"... purchase of what? Currently it refers to the pavilion, which I doubt people could do.
• "The prominent German art magazine" so prominent it doesn't have an article, though the website that the info is actually cited to does.

  (1) The article used {{ill}} to link to the magazine's German version. (2) The epithet of "prominent" is supported in the source. (3) The epithet was used as a narrative device to introduce a (prominent) magazine that we should have an article about, if not for the language barrier. The epithet introduces the topic without requiring the reader to click-through and translate another language. So I don't see why its introduction here would be a point of contention. I've since started the magazine's article, but that shouldn't have been necessary. czar

• "The photographs on display came from Chagas's larger series, "Found Not Taken",[10] which included conceptually similar photographs from cities besides Luanda[11] that were excluded by request of the curators. The artist found the request acceptable since it didn't take the series out of context." this is very clunky and feels translated. It would be better to separate the first sentence into parts and then find a way of incorporating the second sentence into one of those.
• "the cities, which were each preparing to host major events" is this part relevant? It's about the symbolic nature of the images excluded from the pavilion. If it's deemed relevant by way of their deliberate exclusion in some way, please expand: which cities, what events?
• Last sentence of 2013 section is NOTRECENT.
• In 2015, are Vidal's mixed media work and "Utopia..." the same thing? Please clarify.
• Also NOTRECENT issues here
• "vessels with layered images floating in tinted water" - what kind of vessel, what size, was it a model? - this is a very unclear description of a piece that could be flowers projected onto the USS Lincoln in a St Paddy's day river for all we know.

  Yes, sometimes art sources are ambiguous. Note how little the source says about it. czar

• "The show mounted in Venice's" mount is definitely the wrong word

  It isn't; to "mount a show" is a common usage. czar

@Czar: Yes, but that's not what you used. To mount a show would become 'the show was mounted' - some other thing is mounting a show. To say 'the show mounted' is saying that a show did some mounting, which it can't. Also note on internationalization: I've taught English (as a subject, in England) and never had to use, read, or hear that word before. It's strange. I don't see need to comment on other things, since I think some of the poor style elsewhere was fixed. Kingsif (talk) 22:36, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

re: mounted, also see these uses; same for internationalization (to make known internationally). Perhaps it's less known in the UK? czar 03:33, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Well I studied in the US and never heard it... the word 'globalization' may be what you're looking for? As for mounting a show, lots of people breaking a verb doesn't mean Wikipedia has to follow. Kingsif (talk) 04:22, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

• "Internationalization" is a strange word, I would replace with one of "international acclaim/recognition/notoriety".
• Could the short sections not be merged into "other" to not be overlooked when juxtaposed with the wall of text that comprises the 2013 section.
• Fail poor English throughout, would require a restructure and rewrite.

Coverage

• Lead heavily focused on the 2013 entry rather than an overview, also goes into too-deep detail on the artwork for a lead, especially considering article length.
• Waits until the end of the long 2013 section to actually name the photo series used in the pavilion.
• Article overall has similar coverage issue as lead: mostly 2013, some 2015, and such a brief line it's easily overlooked for both 2017 and 2019.
• Fail - might as well be a poorly written article on only the 2013 edition

  The lede is meant to be proportional to the text, hence its focus on the 2013 section. See below re: scope. czar

Verifiability

• Issue with a large chunk in 2013 not having footnotes, only for OVERCITE to come at the end. Please spread refs throughout the prose so readers can access the appropriate source for each claim.
• All sources on the lower end of reliable - magazines, SPS. And several African sources that are thus hard to judge the reliability of for me.
• n/a I would have done more research on the quality of sources if it wasn't a clear fail.

  ? Everything in the article is footnoted. If a sentence doesn't have an immediate citation, it is sufficient to have one at the end of the passage unless there is some controversial circumstance that requires an immediate citation. The article uses the most reliable sources available. Have a little faith... czar

Neutrality

• Refers to something as prominent without any reason to believe that.
• Dishes out many good reviews, to barely give six words to a bad review (from the only magazine that gets an adjective, oddly) and then say this view is challenged... by a tabloid from the home country that probably had some vested interest to do that.
• Fail - though not much, there is evidence that the article wishes to present a positive view of the subject

  "without any reason to believe that": Really? Did you check the source? It called it "Germany’s leading art magazine", which is fair.

  "a tabloid from the home country that probably had some vested interest to do that": Where is the evidence for this claim? The German mention was short because the source had little to actually say about the show besides gossip. And we do not report on rumors as an encyclopedia. "there is evidence that the article wishes to present a positive view of the subject" strikes me as exceptionally unfair. What evidence? If you have any other reliable sources about this show, positive or negative, would love to see them, as I simply used what I could find. It should not be surprising that the prize-winning show had positive reviews. I didn't purposefully ignore any source, nor should an article be docked for lacking negative reviews that do not exist. czar

Stability

• No big edits in several years, seems to win on consistency
• Pass

  fwiw, this WP:GACR criterion has more to do with daily edit warring than whether the article saw any edits at all. czar

Illustration

• There's no illustration unless you count the related template at the bottom. For being an art topic, it could do with at least one image. Or a table.
• Fail

  WP:GACR: "The presence of media is not, in itself, a requirement." What parts of this article do you feel are necessary for illustration and would meet the WP:NFCC? Something like [1][2][3] could show the position of the photo stacks in the room, but what does such a non-free/fair-use, low-res illustration really add over that which the text explains on its own? WP:NFCC#8 czar

Copyright

• Check - nothing out of the ordinary except the phrase which includes the word "internationalization": it's a strange word so it definitely feels copied. In any case, strange enough alone to propose a style change to "international acclaim/recognition/notoriety".
• I also feel that some of the text reads like a rough translation from another language, though the main editor really does not seem like the kind to plagiarize, which assuages these doubts.
• Pass

  "internationalization" is a common word czar

Overall

• Easy fail for exceptionally poor writing and coverage. Very far from being a GA. Kingsif (talk) 07:00, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

  Hi @Kingsif, I figured I had some time to respond since the review was failed without discussion. With respect, I think a few points of background would clarify this review. (1) It's a contemporary art exhibition, so beyond physical descriptions of the artwork, the language is not going to be exact. Peek at the sources to see what I'm working with. (2) The scope of the article matches the sourcing. The options are to either write an article solely about the 2013 Angolan pavilion show, which I felt would be inappropriate, or to write about the pavilion as a whole, which meant minimal coverage of the non-2013 participation, which was not nearly as widely covered in sources as 2013's. The result is an article with coverage proportional to that of reliable sources. (3) Some of the review's conclusions were quite presumptuous in light of the extant sourcing and its paucity of detail. There were many points that could have been more charitably asked as questions rather than incorrectly assumed.

  I've addressed the review's comments either through edits or as replies, where relevant. I've also tightened for temporal changes since I first wrote it and added an "Overview" section to give background on the parent exhibition. I'm relisting, if you have time/interest in re-reviewing. Otherwise thanks for your time with this one. czar 21:27, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: Sure, I'm always happy to re-review something, I'm here for improving article quality - which is also why I can be stricter, so an article isn't promoted when it deserves further improvement. Let's work on it together! Of course, if there is very little sourcing for anything but the 2013 pavilion, an overview article becomes poorly weighted. I could suggest making another article about the 2013 edition and reducing its coverage here accordingly? Kingsif (talk) 21:39, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

@Kingsif, nice! I think I said this above, but I found this scope arrangement to be the best compromise for due weight. Spinning out a separate article on 2013 in addition to this one would be gratuitous, since the 2013 article would barely meet notability guidelines and be even shorter than this one. If such a 2013 article would replace the pavilion article, then we'd essentially be throwing out the info since 2013. I think of this article's scope as on par with San Marino at the Olympics: a smaller player in an international event whose split article will be significantly smaller than that of its peers but still justified over merging or throwing away the content. Eh? czar 21:55, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I myself improved Venezuela at the 1948 Summer Olympics to reach GA. Shorter, but with good coverage; there is truly a difference. I think articles like this one really walk the line. Kingsif (talk) 21:59, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, for a historically underrepresented country showing at an international festival, I think the article is weighted accordingly. The WP:GACR doesn't ask for sources that do not exist but to address the main aspects of the topic. I'm trying to get a sense of how to move forward and it doesn't look like splitting is the best route. czar 22:22, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

I might give a few informal comments if I read through it. I am surprised that, since you've been active in the past four months, you haven't responded before, though. It does give me fresh eyes for reviewing again, but if you've waited this long, maybe you want somebody else or something? Kingsif (talk) 23:28, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

As I said, I figured there was no rush if you already moved on. I would, of course, appreciate your thoughts/review, but if you feel the scope is impassable then I would prefer that it go back on the queue. Up to you! Just let me know what you plan to do. czar 23:35, 5 January 2020 (UTC)