Wikipedia:Peer review/This Is the Sea/archive1

This Is the Sea

The only featured article about a music album, Smile (Brian Wilson album), was recently WP:FARCed, and was never a particularly good model for how to write an article about an album (having such an unusual history). A lot of our album articles are basically an infobox and a track list, and it would be nice to be able to demonstrate that one can follow the album project guidelines and get an article ready to take to WP:FAC. All of that said, I'm not bringing this here to simply pass through on the way to FAC. I don't think that this article is ready for the FAC process, and I'd like to get some editors' feedback on what still needs doing. What is in the article already represents a fairly comprehensive detailing of what has been published in reliable sources; there's not a whole lot of pure content that I can add. I'd like to encourage people to take a look and let me know what needs tightening, where the prose is less than compelling, what needs more explanation, what needs referencing, etc. Thanks in advance. Jkelly 02:14, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quite a noble goal! Getting a featured article of an entirely new variety is never easy (Hopkins School took a long time to reach the quality standard set by Caulfield Grammar School). My suggestions would be:

At least a stubby article for the disambig to the Irish film so you don't start off with a redlink.
More reviews for the "Professional Reviews" section of the infobox.
More information on the remastered version (which sounds like it has some pretty substantial additions) past "A remastered version was released in 2004, with a second CD of material from the album's singles, and unreleased tracks from the This Is the Sea recording sessions."
A ref for the first sentence of "Album promotion", and an image of an ad for either a performance by The Waterboys mentioning a song from the album or an ad for the album itself.
Perhaps one more music sample?
A cleaner formatting job on Personnel than a list. A nice wikitable like Movie/Television cast tables would probably do it.

That's all I can see right now, but I hope it helps! Good luck. Staxringold 13:12, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Turns out I was wrong. Illmatic is an WP:FA, and gives us a perfectly good model. I missed that happening. Anyway, I created a short article for the film. More reviews is a reasonable request; but its not easy to find reviews from the 1980s -- I'll need some sort of music magazine archive. There's not a lot of verifiable information on the re-release, but, again, its reasonable to expect more detail. I'll see what I can turn up. Finding that "most succesful" ref should be easy. We have a good selection of images of the band performing, but it would be close to impossible to know which songs they were playing. I also doubt that I'll be able to locate any fliers or ads from twenty years ago that are advertising the sale of the album, but I suppose one never knows. I can come up with another sample. Probably the title track is the best choice. The only thing I really disagree about is the prettytable idea -- they're not recommended by WP:ALBUM, and I don't care for them either aesthetically or for ease of newbie editing. If it turns out in the long run that I'm in the minority on this, it should probably be discussed at the album project. Jkelly 19:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the footnote system should be converted to the "Cite.php" system described at WP:FN.
WP:FN: Citations should follow punctuation like so.<ref>LOL</ref> As opposed to this<ref>LOLOL</ref>.
The first sentence is problematic to me because it does not succinctly define the subject. Its distinction as a "Big Music" album is meaningless to those not familiar with The Waterboys, and should probably emerge in a later sentence with an expanded explanation.
The "with 'Trumpets'" part is problematic because it isn't clear that that is a song being talked about (until we learn it was the first song played live later on).
Scott recalls that in December of 1984 "during The Waterboys' first American tour, [he] bought two huge hard-bound books... in which to assemble [his] new songs" It seems this information can be converted to prose without losing anything; I don't think a quotation is neccesary.
The Songs section is very long and at times feels a bit "technical" and "dry". I'm not exactly sure how it can be divided or improved, but it seems to need a bit of work.—jiy (talk) 03:10, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. Do you know a user that is doing the automated ref conversion? I'll try to polish the prose in "Songs". Jkelly 01:13, 15 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

At a glance it looks good, the only thing I would do is make the image sizes larger because they just seem so small to me. - Patman2648 07:53, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]