Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria/archive2

Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria (2) edit

This is the article's second nomination — the first one failed because of minor issues such as section arrangement (there used to be only two content sections, the first one having most of the current sections as subsections) and the lack of comprehensiveness of some parts of it. These issues have been addressed, as well as thpse from the even earlier peer review. The intro was also shortened and made more concise.

I find the article stable, thorough, well-written, informative, well-referenced and illustrated, and I really think it's FA quality now. It was mainly written by University of Michigan Byzantinist Ian Mladjov. TodorBozhinov 20:12, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment There are only two different books used as refs. Are there more, especially web-based? Rlevse 21:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are four inline (and they're all different) + one more as a general ref (not inline), which makes five. Not sure about web-based refs, I don't think they can provide anything new or that they can be more reliable. These books are the best scholarly authorities on the subject AFAIK, so any web sites would just reproduce this information. I understand web-based sourced could often be more useful than books because they're easily accessed, so I'm thinking of addng this book extract to further support some parts of the text. After all, even more refs are always of use :) TodorBozhinov 21:39, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment it's pretty good to begin with, but it slowly decays to the point that the family section ends with an irrelevant list that should be merged into the main prose. It would also be nice to get rid of the redlinks, especially all those in the infobox. Laïka 14:22, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm aware lists are often advised to be converted to prose, but I sort of like the one in the Family section because it displays the information very clearly. Even if we convert it to prose, it wouldn't be much more than the same listing of names and years, but without the clarity it currently has. It can't be integrated in the main text in any good way I can imagine, because sources about Bulgarian rulers are typically very scarce and generally (as well as in this case) we know little more of their children than their names; in this case, we don't have any dates of birth available, so we can't integrate them chronologically. If you really think it would be still better to convert to prose, then please provide some more arguments. Also, I certainly don't think the list is irrelevant.
  • As for the red links, the only way to remove then would be simply to remove the brackets — articles about many of these personalities can't ever be more than substubs, because there's hardly anything we know about them. TodorBozhinov 16:01, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Lede is too short, and I'm not sure whether it's comprehensive enough. Hurricanehink (talk) 15:05, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • What would be long enough? The first nom had a three-paragraph intro and it was deemed too long, so I shortened it and I think it's fine... Why do you think the article might not be comprehensive enough? Please be clearer when opposing — more specific criticism will help improve the article, but such oppose votes are of little use, I fear. TodorBozhinov 15:23, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object - needs more references and (preferably) more sources. savidan(talk) (e@) 09:18, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]