Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jennifer Connelly/archive5

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by Ucucha 15:58, 23 November 2011 [1].

Jennifer Connelly[edit]

Nominator(s): GDuwenTell me! 17:02, 14 November 2011 (UTC)--Gunt50 (talk) 19:04, 14 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article was expanded since the last nomination, in order to reinforce the comprehensiveness. Copyediting has been performed and the article is ready for a new review.GDuwenTell me! 17:02, 14 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. From the section 2008 onwards, the article gets choppy and lazy, with a laundry list of movies in which the actress has appeared. An example, "She then voiced the character named "7", an adventurous warrior in the animated film 9." And that's a paragraph within itself--no context, no year, no idea of what the movie is about, or its critical or commercial success. Absolutely nothing. Another: "Parisian fashion house Balenciaga and Revlon cosmetics signed Connelly as the face of their 2008 campaigns." End of story. To the writer, please contrast with the featured article about an actor. Orane (talk) 08:23, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose with considerable regret. This article is important, if not intrinsically then because it has around 1.5 million annual viewings, so it needs to be of the best quality. It is troubling that the article has had so much attention here at FAC (this is its 5th nomination) and at peer review (four reviews), yet it still does not seem to hit the mark. I have just read it for the first time, rather quickly, and these are examples of my immediate concerns:-
- Trivial detail: I realise there may be little information on record about Connelly's childhood, but is the following really notable: "Her father suffered from asthma, so the family moved to Woodstock, New York in 1976 to escape the city smog.[1] Four years later, the family returned to Brooklyn Heights, and Connelly resumed her education at the same school."?
- Overlong and over-complex sentences, e.g. "Her first leading role was in Italian giallo-director Dario Argento's 1985 film Phenomena as a young girl who uses her psychic powers to communicate with insects to pursue a serial killer who is butchering students of the Swiss school where she has just enrolled,[19] followed by the lead in the coming-of-age movie Seven Minutes in Heaven, released the same year." (there are other examples)
- Missing background: "Balancing work and school, she studied English for two years at Yale University in 1988 and 1989..." Well, I don't know the American University system, but is it that simple to get into Yale? And then to move on to Stanford? The impression given here, that Connelly was able to use the top US colleges to "balance work and school", is surely incomplete and needs more research, or better presentation.
  - Ummmm, I haven't looked at what the sources say, but it certainly is possible for some people (perhaps exceptional, ahem), to balance work and Stanford, and I don't see how that relates to being "simple to get into" (although Yale's drama program probably is). Just sayin', but the sources should be consulted. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:17, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    - Well, as I said, I don't know how the system works. I do know that to study English at, say, Oxford, you'd have to overcome a great many academic hurdles first. Maybe Connelly did, too. This point is fairly marginal, however; it's the prose issues that mainly need to be sorted out. Brianboulton (talk) 21:12, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Overdetailing: Is it necessary to mention every screen appearance? There seem to be quite a few sentences such as "In 1995, director John Singleton cast Connelly as a lesbian college student in Higher Learning" , or "During 2000, she appeared as Catherine Miller in the FOX drama series The $treet, about a brokerage house in New York City", which basically tell us nothing.
- Poor prose flow: The jerky prose style, with repeated single sentence paragraphs, becomes acute in the later stages of the article. Partly this arises from the problem mentioned in the previous point - the desire to get some mention of every screen appearance, no matter how insignificant.

The article has clearly been the subject of considerable effort and perseverance. However, I agree with the previous reviewer that at present it does not compare well with, for example, Angelina Jolie, and cannot yet be said to be an example of Wikipedia's "best work". Brianboulton (talk) 12:42, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support—I previously reviewed and supported this article, and my concerns were addressed. It seems comprehensive in terms of her career. Her personal life is a little sparse, but that can be the result of a lack of suitably reliable sources. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:33, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It's not only the lack of reliable sources. Some user is asking us to compare this article with Angelina Jolie's, who I don't need to say is a celeb on the media's spotlight. You should also consider Connelly's low profile and her reluctance to talk about her personal life which is visible in some interviews.--Gunt50 (talk) 14:50, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - Thank you for your comments, Gunt50. I have indeed read the above reviews, and I agree with you. I don't think one should expect an exact one-to-one mapping between articles about entirely different people. To me this article just needs to satisfy the FA criteria; it does not need to transform Jennifer Connelly into Angelina Jolie. Angelina Jolie is much more of a public figure, and hence there is more information available. If suitable sources aren't available to specify certain facts about Jennifer Connelly's background, then I'm not going to expect them to appear in the article. With regards to the criticism about "overdetailing", well this seems like exactly what needs to be done in order to satisfy the comprehensiveness requirement. The only criticism I might agree with is regarding some of the prose. Regards, RJH (talk) 15:57, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    - Both of you are missing the point. No one is proposing a "one-to-one mapping" between Jolie's and Connelly's article. But a comparison between both article reveals Connelly's article to be lacking. The problem for me arises in the very first sentence of the introduction. The first sentence of the article should give the most precise and direct information about its subject. If someone asks you "Who is Jennifer Connelly", what would your answer be? a) "Jeniffer Connelly is an American actress" or b) "Jennifer Connelly is an American actress who began her career as a child model"? I'm tempted to think option "a" would be a more concise choice. You can mention how/where she began her career in later sentences. The mechanics of the prose is quite good. But, as I said, in the later sections, it seems as if the writers of the article were constructing a list of appearances from the actress. It is ok to expand on her movie roles: how did they do at the box office? Varitey may praise a performance, but what did another critic say about it? What motivated the actress to take a certain role? Just something more than "she appeared in this movie, then in the next year, she appeared in this one, and then a few months later she appeared in this one." That's what I was getting at when I suggested the Jolie article: the paragraphs are developed; ideas are fully fleshed out etc. Orane (talk) 05:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      - Garamond, thank you for expanding upon the "point" that was perhaps not made fully clear in a single, brief sentence. :-) I'm sure this will be more useful. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    - Also, maybe it was decided in earlier FACs but is there a reason her filmography is not placed in the article? Orane (talk) 05:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.