Talk:Octopussy and The Living Daylights/GA1

GA Review

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

Reviewer: Moisejp (talk · contribs) 15:57, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Hello. I will be reviewing this article for GA. I should have the review finished within a week at most (likely less time, though). Moisejp (talk) 15:57, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
No disambiguation links or linkrot. Moisejp (talk) 06:25, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   The prose is very well written.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   All the sources I could check seemed OK, except for the points below.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   It covers the topic well

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   No problems.

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   Stable.

6. 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):

   The one image used has a FUR and is suitably captioned.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Overall, very nice work. Here are a few issues:

• The year for Barnes & Hearn was 2001 in References and 1997 in Bibliography. I presumed References was the most recent and more likely correct, so I changed Bibliography to 2001, but please check that this is correct.

• Yes, 2001 is the correct date and I'm not altogether sure why 1997 was in there!

• A few of the books in Bibliography (Linder, Comentale...) aren't referenced. Would it be better to put these in a Further Reading section?

• Done

• The sfn link doesn't work between McLusky et al. Horak in the References section and the book in the Bibliography section. (Not a big deal, but might as well be smooth and consistent whenever possible.)

• Done

• In the first line of Plots#The Living Daylights, should 272 be in quotation marks? I imagined it to be similar to 007, which isn't.

• Done

• Your text states "Fleming had already used Blackwell as the model for Pussy Galore in his novel Goldfinger". The source says "Blanche Blackwell, the love of his later life, was supposedly a model for the Sapphic pilot and martial-arts expert Pussy Galore in Goldfinger." "Supposedly" doesn't sound as certain as what you have written.

• Done

Hmm, I'm not really comfortable with having "supposedly" in an encyclopedia article. It sounds too gossipy. Sorry, I guess my comment above wasn't clear—that wasn't necessarily the solution I was thinking of. I think if you want to keep the sentence you need to find a way to have just the right balance that shows that this is not definitely a fact. But it's tricky because if the statement shows too little certainty of fact, it invites the question of whether it should be included at all. Would you consider removing the sentence? Or, if you feel strongly you'd like to keep it, yeah, I'm not sure what the best solution would be... Is there any possibility of finding another source to back it up? Moisejp (talk) 17:05, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Another idea: "Journalist Ian Thomson writes that Fleming may have used Blackwell as..." Moisejp (talk) 18:13, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I've found a better source, which frames it in a more succinct way, I hope! If it doesn't, then I'll take it out altogether - SchroCat (^ • @) 19:14, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• The biggest issue is this: in the lead you mention "007 in New York" as being a later edition to the book, but I couldn't find any mention of it in the Release and reception section.

• Largely because I cannot find any good references as to when it first went in! It certainly wasn't in the early editions but it is in the later editions, although when it first went in in unverifiable at the moment...

Moisejp (talk) 07:23, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

About, "007 in New York" would one idea be to write "By (19--), '007 in New York' had been added to the book." and you could write the year of the earliest edition that you definitely know includes it. It's not a perfect solution, but sometimes we are limited by our sources. ;-) Moisejp (talk) 16:42, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Done - British Library reference to 2002, which I think may be about the right date... - SchroCat (^ • @) 19:55, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• I've covered a couple of the straightforward ones and I'll sort out the others slightly later today. Thanks very much for the review - much appreciated. - SchroCat (^ • @) 09:37, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• I think I've covered it all, but please let me know if there's something I've missed, or something you'd still like to see worked on. Cheers - SchroCat (^ • @) 19:55, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

About the Blanche Blackwell reference, the problem with "joked" is that we really don't know whether he actually believed that it was true or not. If it was "Coward recalled with amusement how..." then that would be better, but I don't know what your source says. If you can't write that, then I'd prefer either taking it out, or my suggestion of "Journalist Ian Thomson writes that Fleming may have used Blackwell as..." (which sounds OK to me). I'll leave it up to you how you want to deal with that. In the meantime, I'm passing this article. Good work! Moisejp (talk) 23:25, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I took it out altogether: it was not central to this subject and I wasn't happy with the phasing anyway, so out it came. - SchroCat (^ • @) 05:31, 5 December 2011 (UTC)