Talk:Frank O'Connor (actor, born 1897)/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 18:32, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Another interesting one! This article is overall in respectable shape, though I have some queries about context/souring/quoting. Running through now...

Lead

• "For several years" re. the ranch seems superfluous -- the idea it wasn't permanent is gotten across by their later move.

I can understand how you might conclude that, however I think noting the duration helps make "manage" sound less abrupt. Otherwise, the sentence states, When O'Connor and Rand moved to California [...] O'Connor purchased and managed a ranch in the San Fernando Valley. The move was a discrete event that happened once, and so was purchasing, but managing was an ongoing event that involved a duration. O'Connor didn't only manage a ranch at the time of the move; he managed a ranch for several years thereafter. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

• Robert L. Campbell and John Galt both have linkable articles (curiously, Roarke doesn't). Considering just how many substrains of psychology there are and that clinical and counselling psychology tend to be the most familiar to the general reader, it may also be worth giving Campbell some context; I believe "cognitive psychologist" would be most accurate (he identifies himself as cognitive and developmental).

Thanks for pointing that out; I have linked both and identified Campbell as a "cognitive psychologist". Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Early life

• the brothers moved to New York -- on a first read, this seems like it's referring to O'Connor's brothers rather than O'Connor himself. Would "the four of them moved" be accurate, or is it unclear if they all moved?

Burns on page 23 is clear about it being all four of the O'Connor brothers, so I have rephrased that to "the four of them moved". Thanks for that catch. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits)) 03:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

• When filmmaking moved to Hollywood, he moved there as well, sometime around 1926 is a "sources are wrong" conundrum. The West Coast became the centre of American film about a decade before this. If this is synthesis between "Rand arrived in 1926" and "O'Connor followed the studios", it's possible Burns is the one misunderstanding a primary source; is it possible to chase up what sources she used to get a sense of when he actually arrived? If nothing can be found (I'll take a look myself if you can't find anything), some rephrasing is probably worthwhile.

Burns doesn't provide specific sources for her sense of when the film industry shifted from New York to California; most of her footnotes focus on the information about the focus of her monograph, Objectivism, American conservatism, and the people in Rand's life. In this case, I think my phrasing implies more than she actually said. "O'Connor followed the studios" could be Burns meaning that O'Connor went to where the studios had already gone. I have rephrased that as O'Connor moved to Hollywood, where most American film studios were by then, sometime around 1926. How does that revision sound? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm happy with "where most were by then" (and am willing to accept the argument re. the ranch). I've gotten hold of Burns' book and was a little annoyed to see the setup of the bibliography didn't make this easier to chase up, but these sorts of tricky "someone who is an expert on X makes an inaccurate statement about Y in passing" come up a lot. I'll be able to go through the rest of the article soon -- hoping to look at a couple of the other sources too to cross-reference. Vaticidalprophet 05:16, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

More to come. Vaticidalprophet 18:32, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Remaining biography

• this dismayed his wife Rand -- she's established to be his wife by this point :)
• highly complimented the film's entire cast in its review -- do we need 'highly'?
• There are a couple cases of attributing statements to specific authors that may not need attribution. It's a better tendency than the opposite, but when discussing something other than an attributed opinion, it tends to disrupt the sentence without gain. "Journalist Anne C. Heller reports" stands out to me most of these uses; it gives the impression of a celebrity-interest story sneaking into an encyclopedia article. If there's a desire to keep that specific attribution due to its direct-quote status (not required for this specific quote, I'd say), it's probably better to just not quote the "imaginatively and beautifully" line -- it's a little peacocky and doesn't get across anything more than the rest of the sentence does.
• summer stock theater -- is there a reason to go out of one's way to avoid the direct link here?
• Should Massed evergreens be capitalized (rather than, if it's the beginning of a sentence, just rendered as [m]assed)? I've made a few minor copyedits, but haven't touched this in case I'm missing a term of art.
• Could the parenthetical sentence regarding the end of Rand's affair be restructured into the text, or turned into a footnote?

I find I don't have any comments on other sections, and I don't see any content issues, having read some decent chunk of Burns in the last week. An excellent article on a not-well-recognized figure (I liked the Atlas Society quote about him not having an article in 2016). I suspect this is not too far from FAC, even; it would need more prose work, but I've little doubt it's comprehensive. Vaticidalprophet 05:56, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Good catches all around. I've trimmed "his wife" to "dismayed Rand"; trimmed the "highly" that preceded "complimented"; trimmed "imaginatively and beautifully" and "Journallist Anne C. Heller reports""; de-piped "summer stock" so as to just make "summer stock theater" a direct wiki link; swapped "Massed" to "[m]assed" (it was not a term of art; it was as you suspected quoted from the beginning of a sentence in the original source); and brought the parenthetical sentence about the end of Rand's affair into the preceding sentence.

I had been under the impression that any direct quotation of words from a source requires attribution to the source or author. I trimmed the direct quotations from Anne C. Heller per your feedback that "imaginatively and beautifully" was excessive. I had included it as a case of attributed opinion about the quality of O'Connor's decorating. Attributed opinion is the reason for other attributions, such as, for example, Lisa Duggan's attributed opinion that O'Connor was "mesmerizingly handsome" (possibly not something we would say in Wikipedia's voice, or so had been my impression, but relevant to understanding O'Connor's acting career and relationship with Rand and therefore worth including via attributed opinion).

Thank you for your compliments about the article and for taking the time to review. With the page having been revised per your latest suggestions, is there anything else needed, or is it ready? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 06:21, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Quote attribution is complex, and the style you go for is certainly better than not attributing, though as noted in the Heller sentence it's often a red flag of "I probably shouldn't have quoted here". There are contexts where quotes can be made without specifically in-text attributing the individual, however -- you see this most often in leads, where naming an individual might be out-of-scope, but the quote is repeated with full attribution in the body (the lead of Elisabeth Geleerd does this, to pull the first example I see in my own articles). But certainly I don't penalize an abundance of caution.

Great to see the work here, and happy to pass. Vaticidalprophet 06:27, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.