Talk:2048 (video game)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Bilorv (talk · contribs) 23:17, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

I'll make an initial review of this by the end of the week. Grabbing it now as it's a game I've spent plenty of time on. I see that the nominator hasn't made many edits to the article but it's not in a quickfail state. I do, however, see sourcing which will need serious improvement if this is to pass—as a couple of examples, student newspapers are not appropriate sources, nor are blogs, and nor is the primary source of DuckDuckGo. Conversely, once all the bad sources are stripped out, to ensure breadth and depth of coverage we'll want to make sure we're including as many reliable sources as exist. — Bilorv (talk) 23:17, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Bilorv, there's articles about this from TechCrunch, the WSJ, LA Times, Yahoo! Finance, CNBC and ABC News. As far as I see, those are all the established sources. Thanks, Thanoscar21_{talk, contribs} 23:50, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

A quick search shows The Guardian, Daily Dot and (more recently) Radio Times. Likely more English-language sources exist and if that doesn't make enough then there's nothing wrong with using non-English sources. — Bilorv (talk) 08:20, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Initial review

Referencing:

• References should ideally be consistently formatted, but for GA we just need enough information for someone to have a good chance of being able to determine what the intended source was 30 years from now. That means no bare URLs—e.g. for online news, we need at least: URL; title; author; website.
• The information Clones written in C++ and Vala are available. There is also a version for the Linux terminal. has only primary sources. It needs either secondary sources, or removal if no secondary sources have discussed this code—otherwise there is no evidence of significance (I could write a version in Brainfuck but that wouldn't be information suitable for Wikipedia).
• Same point for DuckDuckGo (as mentioned above).
• Same point for MathWorks.
• What makes Indie Games reliable? Why is the reference labelled UBM Tech? Is the reviewer a professional who has been published in national news organizations? If it's not reliable then remove it.
• Same question for Geeks With Juniors.
• Same question for JayIsGames.
• Same question with Vulcan Post.
• Why is the Etherington TechCrunch source labelled "AOL"?
• Introduce this source mentioned on the talk page.
• Introduce the sources from The Guardian, Daily Dot and Radio Times as listed above. Search for more sources (if you haven't done this before, try using Google News and filtering based on date ranges roughly as follows: within a week of the game's release; in the couple of months following the release; over the next few years; in the last year or so. You want to search "2048" and then some combination of keywords like "app", "game", "tile" or "Cirulli" in quotes to get the best results.

Content:

• It seems to me that a section "Adaptations", either new or as a subsection of "Development", would be good to contain the last paragraph of "Gameplay" (which is not about gameplay) and the last paragraph of "Development".
• "Comparisons to other games" should be "Critical reception" and contain more critical commentary. What did reviewers think of the game? Too simple, just simple enough, a good graphics style, addictive, too easy to reach 2048, becomes repetitive etc.?
• The "Development" section is missing the origin of the game as a clone of 1024, itself a clone of Threes. See Threes#Legacy. It is wrong to say "19-year-old Cirulli created the game in a single weekend" without attributing what Cirulli was working from as a baseline.
• If 2048 has a free license then we can use whatever game screenshots we want, right? Can we see an example of a "before the move 'left' is made" and "after the move 'left' is made"? I think someone not familiar with gameplay can understand best with an example.
• All content mention in the lead should also be mentioned in the body of the article per WP:LEAD.
• The game can only last a finite amount of moves, and the theoretical limit for the highest tile on a standard 4x4 board is 131,072. Says who? This isn't routine calculation.
• Tile generated is 90% '2' and 10% '4', right? Can we find a source saying this? If not, no worries.
• Surely something of tactics must have been mentioned in a secondary source. The only tactics I'm aware of are quite simple (e.g. keep the largest values in decreasing order from bottom-left to bottom-right, continuing in a snaking pattern; keep sufficient space free on middle rows to avoid being forced to move 'up').

This is perhaps more work than I expected from a first viewing and it may be too early to get this article to GA. In all honesty, I think the current article is C-class (or possibly Start-class) rather than B-class in quality. Let's see if we can get it up to B-class at least over the course of the review.

I'm leaving the article  On hold and the review will be failed in seven days if there is not substantial progress in the referencing quality. If there's substantial progress then we can continue onwards with more low-level details. Even if the review fails, I'm interested in helping improve this article. — Bilorv (talk) 15:53, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

@Thanoscar21: I see there's been a limited amount of progress, which is definitely all positive improvement, but I don't think we're close enough to tackle the remaining issues within the confines of a GA review. I plan to fail the review in about 24 hours, but you can always contact me with questions about any edits relating to the article or any of the points I raised above; I might also find time to help out directly in implementing some of the above improvements. — Bilorv (talk) 13:08, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Fail for GA, regrettably, as the majority of the issues above have not been addressed. I hope the feedback will be useful for further improvement of the article, which I am re-rating as C-class as it fails B-criteria #1 and #2 (per above). Thanks! — Bilorv (talk) 16:27, 31 July 2020 (UTC)