Talk:The Polyester Prince

Plot summary

Hi, I undid the plot summary as it's an inaccurately hagiographic summarization of what is a highly critical biography. In particular, it elides most of the description of how Dirubhai Ambani used market manipulation and irregular financial accounting - including declaring an 18-month fiscal year - to abuse his own shareholders and the trust of the capital markets. It also elides numerous instances of anticompetitive and corrupt behavior that Dirubhai exhibited while he sought to scale RIL.

Lostromantic (talk) 14:32, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Student Project Article

Hi I am a student enrolled at the University of Sydney and as part of one of my courses I have been assigned to improve this stub. I have made several additions to the article (Background, Synopsis and a Sequel section). I will be continuing to edit this article for the next two weeks and would much appreciate any tips, advice, reviews, etc to help me improve the grading of this article. Thanks! --WaTErMelON690 (talk) 02:13, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Please read MOS:OVERLINK and MOS:REPEATLINK and unlink as appropriate.

Please also link to your course page. PamD 04:25, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Hello WaTErMelON690, thank you for your work on this article, and for communicating about what you are working on! I see some great contributions and improvements in your work so far. And it looks like some of the comments I was going to write about organization are being addressed even as I write this message! Since you asked on my talk page about what areas of the content could use expansion, these are my suggestions about information to add:

• I would like to know more about when and where this book was published.
• I would also like to know more about what, specifically, was considered defamatory: this might be difficult to write while maintaining a neutral point of view, but if you can provide a quote from each side, that would clarify the controversy.
• As you say, a section about the book's reception would be welcome, discussing the number and kind of reviews it got in various sources.

Once the rest of the article has been fleshed out a bit, you can revisit the lead to add to it a bit too. Typically, some information from each of the sub-sections should appear in the lead, so the reader gets a summary of the whole article before they read. I don't personally think the sequel needs a lot more fleshing out.

I also think the article is a little confusing about the sequence of events, especially since some of the background is not in chronological order. I can see that you're rearranging things into sections-- I think that will be very helpful. I wonder if suitable sections are "Background" (for events that occurred before the book was written), "Composition", and "Publication". Maybe, because of this book's history, those could be "Composition and legal injunction" and "Publication and controversy"?

Finally, I think the article needs to be more precise about the banning of the book. I haven't read the sources so these details are probably obvious to you, but I am frankly a bit confused. What did the injunction do? The article makes it sound like the publishers had a choice about whether or not to withdraw the publication, but wouldn't the injunction have taken the choice out of their hands? Is it forbidden to buy or sell the book in India? The article should really say who banned the work, and in what context, or it should avoid the language of "banning". In the article on Kafa Al-Zou'bi for example I wrote about a banned book where the Media Commission in Jordan forbade the sale of a book and instructed bookstores to get rid of any copies they already possessed.

I'm looking forward to seeing the article improve as you continue to work on it! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 04:42, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Added Details and Sections

Hi, I'm the student currently working on this wiki page. I added new sections and more detail regarding the background, release and reworked the synopsis to make it a bit more clear. I still want to find media and other visual aids to help the article along with a navigation box, etc. However I was wondering if someone could read over what I have added so far and give me any advice. It would be much appreciated. --WaTErMelON690 (talk) 03:57, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

• A few points of Wiki style:
  • Use straight apostrophes not slanted/curly (see WP:APOSTROPHE)
  • Some overlinking eg chronicle
  • You call the 2nd book a "novel". Is it fiction?
  • Remember you can simplify links by adding letters to the link eg for a plural [[link]]s rather than [[links|link]].

As for the content ... "WP:TLDR", I'm on my phone. PamD 04:52, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Another point: you've lost "reflist" in your editing. PamD 04:54, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

And check the section headings: don't use caps after first word except for proper nouns, don't use ampersands. PamD 05:20, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

In addition to those style points, I started writing some advice about content and ended up editing the background section myself... I think that section was the most confusing/overloaded with detail but the article would still benefit from an edit for concision. The basic information now appears to be in place -- I have a sense of why the book was considered defamatory, and how and where it was published, which is a big improvement from where it started! -- so now further improvement is about style and WP:TONE. Because Wikipedia is never finished (WP:NOTDONE), there are lots of different kinds of improvements that could be made. If you would link your course's page, that might help identify what makes sense to tackle next. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 08:04, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@Oulfis: I would normally have just gone in and cleaned up the article on the points I've made above, but I'm getting weary of doing students' course work for them. PamD 08:14, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@PamD: I feel you on that. I spent literally a year working my way through Beachy Head (poem) after a class project bloated it to this. It's so dispiriting that so few profs seem to read WP:ASSIGN. But I still hope that the students will stick around after the end of the semester and improve over time... please feel free to tap out on this one and I'll keep poking my head in. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 08:29, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@PamD: Thank you for the advice for future edits. I was wondering if you could help me better understand some of your suggestions as im still learning about wikipedia.

I have replaced "novel" with book as it is a further biography of Ambani. The quotations seem to be straight now, I am not sure if you changed it (as I have yet to read any changes from the "view history" tab). Finally I have changed the section headings as per your capitalisation advice.

Regarding the simplification of links for those that are plural say "allegations" would I only assign a hyperlink to "allegation" and leave the s unlinked? is that what you are saying, im not sure if i understand.

What does Reflist refer to? my references? --WaTErMelON690 (talk) 01:49, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@PamD: and @Oulfis: once again thank you so much for taking the time to read and give me recommendations to better my work. I can't link my course page itself as it can only be accessed through a login however the main parts of my criteria are that its verifiable with no original reasearch, it keeps with wikipedias encyclopaedic style and neutral tone of writing and that it contains a breadth of information and has essentially improved the article a lot compared to the beginning of the course. I was wondering if theres a way I could potentially have the wikipedia article reviewed over and potentially be graded up from "stub" level as I think I have improved it quite a bit. What are your reccomendations for getting people to review it?

I had a question regarding how you think the article is in terms of the neutrality of the tone. I found it difficult and I am still unsure if i have managed to explain the injunction and publication issues in India without sounding biased towards McDonald being in the right and making Reliance seem to be the "bad guy." I would like to ensure that this is not the case so I thought getting your opinions on this topic would help me a lot.

I will continue to edit as per your suggestions and I am currently in the process of looking for open source media to add to the article as well!--WaTErMelON690 (talk) 01:49, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Student projects

Please read Wikipedia:Student assignments. Show it to your tutor if they don't know all that information. See the section Wikipedia:Student_assignments#Course_pages,_user_pages,_and_user_names. Follow the link that article provides to Wikipedia:Training/For students and encourage your tutor to follow the link to Wikipedia:Training/For educators.

I see that another editor has kindly replaced all your slanted quotes with straight quotes, but they shouldn't have had to spend time doing so: I was leaving you to do that yourself. You shouldn't have to ask us how to add the reference list to your article. You are editing here for course credits: most of us are here to improve the encyclopedia and to make knowledge more widely available. Sorry, I'm just feeling a little grumpy about academic staff who expect the wider editorship of Wikipedia to do the teaching they ought to be doing themselves before they use an international encyclopedia as the setting for their coursework assignments. Happy Editing, and perhaps you'll become one of the tiny minority of students who come back to editing after their coursework and stay around here to improve the encyclopedia, rather than ticking the box "Wikipedia assignment done" and moving on. PamD 06:07, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

That said, I can't now find which version of the article seemed to be missing {{reflist}} or <references /> in the "References" section - I said that it had got lost among some edits, but I may have got that wrong (I sometimes work on my phone which can make it difficult to keep track of things). Sorry if I got it wrong and added to confusion. PamD 06:14, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Advice to go from C to B class

Hello WaTErMelON690, as you requested I've taken a look to try to identify the next steps for this article to be improved further. I think the article has improved a lot and is pretty close to the border between C class and B class (though I don't do a lot of article assessment so others might disagree). I like the image you added, it helps contextualize how major a figure Ambani is. In order of importance, I think the following would have the biggest impact on improving the article further:

• Add a "reception" section discussing reviews of the book. This will involve a lot more research but is a major category of information missing from the article. I recommend, first, identifying & making a list of as many reviews as you can find. Then, see if they naturally belong to categories like "Indian press" vs "Australian press", or "at the time of publication" vs "after Ambani's death". Summarize the substance of the major reviews in these categories: were they positive, negative, ambivalent? What specific features of the book did reviewers find most important? It can be hard to avoid WP:OR when writing a reception section so I recommend not trying to connect the reviews to each other too much -- avoid, e.g., 'Indian newspapers said X, contradicting the Australian newspapers that said Y.' To help maintain WP:NPOV I also suggest minimizing your quotations from the reviews. You might find it useful to look at the brief reception sections I wrote for The Cuckoo and Daughters of the Samurai.
• Edit the prose of the article for a concise, encyclopedic tone. This is more difficult to break down into a to-do list. But, a lot of the article still feels like it is trying to do too much storytelling and it has a lot of details that don't always seem important. For example, I'd revise "In 1997, before McDonald finished his final manuscript of The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani he was met with a letter from Kanga & Co, the lawyers of Ambani and Reliance Industries." --> "In 1997, before McDonald finished the manuscript, he received a letter from Ambani's lawyers." Look for details that are not absolutely necessary in order to understand the main point. There's no need to repeat the title of the book, for example, since the whole article is about the book, and we probably don't need to know the legal firm (unless it's going to matter later which specific firm was used). Frankly I'd be tempted to go even farther, since I'm not sure the letter itself matters; it could be "In 1997, before McDonald finished the manuscript, Ambani's lawyers warned him that any attempt at publishing it would be met with legal action in the form of injunctions."
• Consider whether slightly more background would be valuable. I personally feel like there's a lot not being said about RIL and the history of India's industrialization & garment industry. It might be nice to have another paragraph in the "Background: Dhirubhai Ambani and RIL" section explaining the context. Really basic stuff like the fact that today RIL is a large and important company.

I also see a few small things to tidy up:

• Remove the blockquote formatting -- the quote is short enough that it can just appear normally in the paragraph.
• Clarify the phrase "the attempted murder allegation of Nusli Waldi" -- I can't tell if Nisli Waldi was accused of committing a murder or being murdered.

Overall, I think you've done an impressive job of maintaining a neutral point of view even when writing about a clearly controversial book. I'm also impressed to realise the article now has 33 sources! As you have improved the article is has become clear to me why you found it so interesting, when at first I was surprised it was getting so much attention. I might do some poking at the article myself to think about the structure / organization of sections, since it's capturing my interest. If you have any questions about my suggestions above, please feel free to ask, and happy editing! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 20:02, 5 June 2021 (UTC)