Wikipedia:Peer review/Abbas Kiarostami/archive1

Abbas Kiarostami

I have been maintaining this article since one year ago when it was basically nothing more than a list of films and basic personal information about Abbas. Since January 2007 I have been intensively working on it and made it a comprehensive article. Then I aksed several editors from Film Wikiproject and several other administrators and native English speakers to help me with the copyedits, tone, format and language. User:Ernst Stavro Blofeld, User:Mtevfrog and User: Francis Tyers were most helpful. Copy editting is not finished yet. The size of the article is big which can be easily reduced by simply splitting out one of the longer sections (e.g. filmography). By all these considerations I believe the article is in status that a peer review would be very helpful. I am interetsted to know the status of the article based on wikipedia quality scales (Wikipedia 1.0 standard). I also would like to have your comments on the article for future improvements. Thanks in advance. Sangak 21:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Changes made according to peer reviews

• Transliteration: The names of the films are all in English and if there is any Persian name it is according to IMDb. So the problem you are refering to must be in names of people. There are some names that are used every where like director's name and we have to live with them (I used the names according to the common form in festivals and IMDb; e.g. Sohrab Shahid-Saless). I've just added the director's name transliteration according to wiki policies.
• Main photo was replaced by a free one.
• I tried to reduce the number of short paragraphs.
• The order of the notes and secondary literature are now according to WP:LAYOUT.
• I worked out the external links according to WP:EL.
• I also tried to fix some misusage of coma and some grammer mistakes. Meanwhile I asked one native speaker to read it. I have been informed that "The language reads quite nicely". There was a badly written sentence about "Ticket": I fixed it too.
• The early life section has been fully rewritten.
• The filmography section was cut out to a separate article to make the article shorter. Also personal life section and Early life sections were merged. As you know the rule for "article size is not a binding rule". I personally prefer a readable informative article than a compact article with less readability.

I will continue copyediting while looking forward to more comments and suggestions.Sangak 20:11, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Review by Cbrown1023

• A good deal of references, which is great. However, the Early life section is quite awkard to read and should be fixed and the cleanup tag removed. Cbrown1023 talk 22:23, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Good job. Only one small techincality, the section is titled "Biography", yet the article as a whole is the biography. I know I am being a stickler, but if we want to get this to be an FA, we need to fix every little detail, including stylistic ones. Cbrown1023 talk 01:17, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Review by Hrödberäht

• Yes i agree, alot of references! Thats really good though. I think the "See also" section could be expanded a tiny bit, and tweaked, and there is too many pictures(in my opinion). Other than that i think it very well could or should be featured. -- Hrödberäht (gespräch) 17:01, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

MLilburne

An interesting and informative article which was mostly a pleasure to read. In terms of its thoroughness and potential I'd like to say that it's an A-class article. However, it suffers from a number of problems which would at the moment preclude it from GA status, so I'm going to have to assess it as B-class. Here are my comments (not an exhaustive list):

• You really don't need three footnotes after the first sentence. If the reader isn't going to take it on faith, the reader had better give up before going any further.

• The main picture doesn't have a correct fair use rationale. It can only be used under fair use if it's directly illustrating the event in question. In general I love seeing all the pictures in the article, but if they're copyrighted you have to be sure that they're being used to directly illustrate something that's being discussed in the text, and that their fair use rationales are correct.

• That semi-colon in the third para of the lead ought to be a comma. But it's a run-on sentence in any case, and needs to be broken up.

• There are a number of places in the text where colons are misused. This sentence, for example... "The department's debut production was Kiarostami's first film, the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley (1970): a neo-realistic short film about an unfortunate schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog." The colon should be a comma.

• The quality of the article's prose is very inconsistent. There are so many run-on sentences, grammar problems and missing words in this passage that it's almost unreadable:

“ Following The Experience (1973), Kiarostami released The Traveller or Mossafer (1974), Kiarostami's first feature that tells the story of a troublesome, amoral 10 year old boy Hassan Darabi, living in a small town in Iran, who wishes to go to Tehran to see the Iran national football team play an important match. To achieve that, he steals money from friends and neighbors through a series of scams. After a number of adventures, he finally reaches Tehran stadium at the time of the match, but there, in wrong-doing he meets an element of moral punishment for his crimes and comeuppance. The film addresses how driven the boy in reaching his objective, and in doing so never thinking how what he is doing will affect other people, even those that are closer to him, examining human behaviour and the balance of right and wrong. ”

• Too many one-sentence paragraphs. They should either be expanded or merged with other paragraphs.

• This sentence needs footnoting: "The film regarded by critics as a metaphor for the sense of civil duty of the Iranian people, as well as a film experiencing notions of loyalty and everyday heroics." It's also missing an "is".

• I'm not entirely sure that you've put "Secondary literature," "See also," "Notes and references," etc, in the standard order. Take a look at WP:LAYOUT and try, if you can, to follow the model there.

• Strikes me that there are a few too many external links. See WP:EL.

As you'll gather, I haven't given it a fine-toothed reading all the way through, and I haven't done a proper copyedit. (Which the article needs more than anything else.) But I hope that's enough to start with. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will try to come back later and offer some more detailed comments. MLilburne 11:30, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Good work finding a fair use image for the article. But... what's with all the embellishments? Better by far in this context to use the plain picture.

I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to copyedit the article for language and grammar, but I hope you find someone to help you with that. Good luck. MLilburne 09:22, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Review by NigelG

I've had a very brief look at this article, which seems well-researched—though no doubt in need of some copy-editing, as noted above. As I know Persian, I was struck by the variability of the transliteration, which I suspect doesn't conform to the Wikipedia standard for Persian. Of course this isn't an article on linguistics, but we still have to aim at consistency in the way languages with other scripts are represented (see WP:MOS-AR). You can't just omit hamzeh and `eyn in all the Persian titles (or even the director's name!).

Now a confession: what first caught my eye was the name of one of my favourite types of Iranian bread (Sangak) ... Keep up the good work. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 19:07, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Having had another look at the article, I was reminded of Pascal's statement that "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter". I really think the article is too long, & could do with some tightening up. Don't misunderstand me: it's an excellent essay—but it would be a better, & more useful, article if it were shorter. Of course this is to some extent a matter of taste; but in general people refer to WP for some basic facts & background, with an introduction to the main issues involved in a given topic. They don't, in general, want a more discursive, "literary" discussion.

I don't have any specific recommendations—just an overall feeling that the article's too long. Several of the films seem to be discussed & described in far too much detail. The main points you want to convey will, I think, come across more convincingly if you trim these details, if only because your reader is more likely to continue reading & less likely to get bored & give up. In a word: remember Pascal! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:43, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Review by Aivazovsky

I've never had a chance to see any Persian cinema, but after reading this article, I'm interested in checking some out. Abbas Kiarostami seems like an interesting filmmaker (as I read this I could even see an early artistic influence from his childhood with his interest in painting, etc.) This article enticed me into reading more about him and his films. Overall, I thought that it was well-written and well-researched. I don't see any problems with it. -- Aivazovsky 03:30, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

• Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR _t 20:41, 19 February 2007 (UTC)