Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/March 8, 2018

Rationale for changes made

To explain my rationale for the changes I made (and which have have been reverted here):

Excluding from the first sentence that Bryant best known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution is a mistake, I feel. If the objective is to summarise the article in such a way that readers click through, there ought to be something to draw them in.

I don’t believe her growing up in rural Nevada, or the kind of degree she obtained, are directly relevant to a summary of this size.

Since we know from the first sentence that she is a journalist, it should be taken that the Spectator and The Oregonian are newspapers; if an adjunct aim is brevity, specifying two newspapers is unnecessary.

It is interesting that we say she merely left her husband, when in fact (per his divorce filing) she abandoned him.

There is a factual error: she married Reed in 1916, not 1915. She had not yet divorced her previous husband in 1915.

The specificity of of the day is unnecessary — is she going to become Germaine Greer’s best friend in 1920s USA? :)

That her stories appeared in Hearst papers should signal to at least some of our readership that they were primarily in American and Canadian newspapers; thus …across the United States and Canada is unnecessary.

If my first point here is to be reinstated, the later phrase Generally in sympathy with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution ought to be removed as repetitious.

I notice “Hitler” in the Winter War blurb was reverted to his full name, and that here the original text before my edits had Lenin and Stalin’s first names. I can’t find a policy on this but I’m surprised we need anything other than these well-known people’s last names (again, my objective here was brevity of character count).

I would argue that my last two sentences should be reinstated in full:

After Reed's death in 1920, Bryant continued to write about Russia, among other countries. She died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles; her grave, which had become neglected, was restored in 1998. The Bryant–Reed story is told in the 1981 film Reds’’.

I don’t think we need a listing of the countries she wrote about; the fact that she continued to write should suffice.

Thank you. — Hugh (talk) 19:52, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding (unless someone disagrees at WT:TFA) is that we've started a one-week process where other editors will evaluate your suggestions. This is too much all at once for me to try to handle it on my own. - Dank (push to talk) 20:13, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, I was simply getting my thoughts down while they were fresh in my mind. I don’t expect any changes any time soon. Thanks. — Hugh (talk) 20:16, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]