Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/William McGregor

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 promoted by Raul654 04:11, 19 February 2009 [1].

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William McGregor

Nominator(s): ChrisTheDude (talk), Oldelpaso (talk)

This is a joint nomination by myself and User:Oldelpaso. The article is an existing GA and has had no less than three PRs, so hopefully there are no significant issues unresolved..... -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 09:24, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

McGregor was an influential association football (soccer) administrator in the 19th century, best known for creating The Football League, the first football league competition in the world. The article summarises pretty much everything that is known about him. Oldelpaso (talk) 09:32, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Comments - Great article overall on an interesting person who I knew nothing about before reading this. These are all the issues I found during a full reading.

• "he became involved with local football club Aston Villa and helped establish the club as one of the leading teams in Italy." A little repetition with "club".
• Association with Aston Villa: "He became interested in joining Villa due to the strong Scottish contingent in the club's ranks, the team's exciting style of play, and the club's connection to a Wesleyan Chapel were also factors." Remove the last three words; if you read the sentence from start to finish, you'll see why.
• Founder of the Football League: FA Cup link is the second in two sections. Also two Preston North End links in this section.
• For N.L. Jackson, should there be a space after the first period? That's usually what people with initials have in the titles of their articles. Same for J.J. Bentley.
• The article we have states that Mitchell St. George was Mitchell St. George's.
• Hyphen for "first ever"?
• I think the photo in this section needs a period.
• Death and legacy: "with clubs sharing ticket revenues and working together in their mutual best interests" is a noun plus -ing sentence structure. To find out why this is not great, and how to fix it, please see this.
• Comma after "father of The Football League".
• The before Aston Villa Supporters' Trust?
• Italics needed for the publishers in refs 6 and 43, assuming that the Birmingham Mail and Post are newspapers. Giants2008 (17-14) 04:19, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
  • Many thanks for your comments, all addressed now apart from the photo caption - as it's a sentence fragment it does not in fact need a full stop (what we in the Old World call what you call a period). Not sure where the reference to Italy in your first point came from though ;-) -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 07:59, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Support - A charming, high-quality article that meets FA criteria. Giants2008 (17-14) 01:13, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:02, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

• Comments: All three images are good (PD) - unknown author, age 100+. --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 13:54, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Support high-qualityJALK (talk) 12:39, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

• Comments: Support Issues resolved.

I enjoyed reading this article and look forward to supporting it soon. It was well written, I did not see any prose issues to correct but I do have some comments that need to be addressed in order to meet the comprehensive criteria.

1)The section "Outside Football" should be merged with "Early life" section and renamed to something like Personal life or the like. I also think it should be expanded a bit if able to find more info on that. A biographical article is about the man also, not just his most notable achievement.

I have merged the paragraphs, but as set out in the nomination, everything that is recorded about McGregor is already included, nothing else about his personal life is known. Although, as details of his wife, children, religious and political views, business interests, and other sporting interests outside football are already included, it seems fairly comprehensive to me already.

2)The section "Founder of the Football League" looks like it does not have any paragraphs. I counted four paragraphs but the last one is all one large paragraph and needs to be split up a bit.

Big paragraph split

3)

"McGregor himself had little interest in the business aspect of football, and was adamant that the Football League should not challenge the longstanding authority of the Football Association"

This sentence introduces the Football Association for the first time. Some explanation should be given, at least a sentence as to what this association is and how it related to the Football League. Did it exist before the League? Was it created in response to it? What purpose did the Association serve? Is it still around today?

Actually the FA is introduced in the section above :-) I've added a clarification on what the FA is and when it was set up. Don't feel that making a point of referring to it as still being around today is relevant to an article on the life of a man who died 98 years ago.

4)The section "Death and Legacy" could be expanded to discuss how that first football league transformed the sport into what it is today. I think this would make the article more complete and comprehensive.

Most of the first paragraph already talks about the impact the creation of the League had on the sport. I'll see if I can turn up anything more, but it probably won't relate specifically to McGregor and might run the risk of rambling off-topic.....

Update: Added a bit..... -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 09:04, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

5)Also, I think it is confusing to those of us in the US who consider "football" a different sport than "soccer". Since this is English Wikipedia maybe this could be made more clear - maybe a sentence explaining that people everywhere except the US refer to the sport of soccer as "football". I won't hold up your FA on this last point if my suggestion does not fit in well, I saw the wikilink in the first sentence addresses that issue but honestly, I read the whole article thinking it was about American football not soccer and then realized my mistake afterward. NancyHeise ^talk 02:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but I disagree. WP:ENGVAR says that articles should be written in the national form of English appropriate to the subject. It doesn't say that subjects written in UK English should have to include extra chunks essentially saying "for the benefit of Americans, X is what you call Y". As you pointed out, the very first sentence specifically refers to the sport as "association football" as opposed to simply "football" for added clarity.....

Many thanks for your comments -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 08:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It looks better now, thanks. Changed to support. NancyHeise ^talk 16:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

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