Talk:Firestar's Quest/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

I am failing this article because almost every source is unreliable. I would suggest that you spend some time familiarizing yourself with our reliable sources policy and then beginning your search for sources anew. Two places I would check: Google News and Lexis Nexis. A good local library will have access to Lexis Nexis.

• This site does not discuss the release or promotion of the book. It is not a secondary source, as it seems to be an actual advertisement for the book. This is not a reliable source, which should be fact-checked and removed from the promotion of the book. We want to present as objective a view of the book as possible.

• This source does not support the statement that the book was successful. More seriously, it is not a reliable source because it is a promotional site designed by the publisher, not a third-party source. This site should not be used to source any part of the article, yet it is used many times throughout the article.

• This source does not support that the book has received good critical reviews. Barnes and Noble is a bookstore - it is therefore a commercial website. It does not list every review that a book has received or even a representative cross-section. To establish that the book received positive reviews, you need to either cite a review which states that fact or you need to amass a group of citations to several positive reviews.

• This source is unreliable because it is a chat transcript. It is not edited or fact-checked. It is "published" by an unreliable site. I cannot even find basic information on the site about who runs it.

• You cannot source B&N for reviews. You need to find the original publication and cite that. Usually B&N only publishes excerpts, so you are probably missing part of the review.

• This is a blog and therefore not a reliable source. You might be able to make an argument to include it under WP:SPS, but considering the problems with the other sources in this article, I would advise you to exclude this.

• The bulk of this article is plot summary and character description. I would dispense with the character list, integrating the essentials into the plot summary.

I hope these suggestions are helpful. I recently wrote a featured article on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a contemporary novel, using only newspaper stories and websites. While there are probably more articles on that particular book than on this one, it might give you a good idea regarding the kinds of sources we would expect in an article like this. Awadewit (talk) 23:25, 10 April 2009 (UTC)