Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The KLF

The KLF

article about early-90s british electronica band. certainly one of the best musical group articles on wikipedia. its comprehensive, thoroughly cited, somewhat long (but most of the extra size comes from the long citations and inline invisible comments) and maintains a neutral tone (no gushing). i did some trims and copyedits and put it on peer review (all comments addressed) but bulk of article was well-written enough i didnt need to touch it. any other comments to bring it to FA status welcome.

• Support per nom Zzzzz 11:57, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Very well done. RyanGerbil10 12:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Comment kingboyk and myself have also put a lot of thought into making this article worthy of being 'featured', with a lot of care given to meeting the guidelines. I believe that it cuts it now. --Vinoir 13:08, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Softened "support" to a comment - it should pass or fail on the strength of other people's opinions and not that of me as an author of the article. --Vinoir 14:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. It seems very well done, but could you please do something with the "Personnel" section. I don't like sections consisting of one link. You can either move the link to somewhere else or write a summary as described in WP:SS. --Maitch 13:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Nor me. When I went to bed yesterday it was within the article, but (perhaps rightly) it's been forked out to cut down on the article length. Would you recommend adding a summary paragraph, or renaming it "See also"? --kingboyk 13:38, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

i went ahead and added the link to the klf template at the bottom, and removed the no-longer required section. hope its ok now. Zzzzz 13:40, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm satisfied with the solution. --Maitch 11:03, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment in lieu of support as one of the primary authors I do of course support the proposal. However, I won't formalise that support as I'm not impartial. Furthermore, although we've already completed a Peer Review I do very much welcome any constructive criticism. --kingboyk 13:38, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. The footnotes are extremely complicated in structure and, like in so many other recent candidates, seem to be in a state of unnecessary overusage. The multiple-linked "abc"-notes are especially confusing and hardly make the article easier to reference except for those who already know the subject (and preferably) the sources themselves quite intimately. And why are only four of the sources used listed under "References"? Why are the rest considered irrelevant to the list? / Peter ^Isotalo 14:25, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Because they are general references: discographies (you wouldn't want us to put a footnote in place for every mention of a recording) and a "general" reference for the Library of Mu online site from where we get most of our sources. If you and others feel that the article doesn't need them, and that the footnotes are sufficient I'm more than happy to remove that section (and had been leaning that way anyway). With regards to the complexity of the footnotes, I'm not sure of your objection? We referenced our article thoroughly - I'm certain not too thoroughly - and I'm not sure how we can "fix it" without losing valuable information. I'm open to further comments of course, perhaps I'm missing something. --kingboyk 14:39, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
    • I've removed the general "References" section, which I think was overkill and more meaningful in The KLF discography, and renamed the "Notes" section "Notes & references". --kingboyk 14:56, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Support Seems to be of a high quality. Cvene64 15:17, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object. Image issues:

Image:The KLF.jpg has no indication at the source of who owns the copyright to the image. We don't know that this is a promotional image. It needs a Fair use rationale if we are going to use it.

Image:The JAMS - 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) .jpg needs a proper fair use rationale, as does Image:The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu- All You Need Is Love.jpg, Image:The JAMS- Who Killed The JAMS? (rear).jpg, Image:Bill Drummond at the 1992 Brits Awards.jpg, Image:The Timelords- Doctorin' The Tardis (UK CDV).jpg, Image:The KLF - What Time Is Love video (Cornfields Version).jpg and Image:PBlaster.JPG

Image:The KLF-The White Room (album cover).jpg needs a fair use rationale

Image:2K - Wheelchair.gif is in danger of deletion, as is Image:KLF - J&A ice cream ad.jpg. Jkelly 16:15, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, we can fix all those apart from - at the present time - Image:2K - Wheelchair.gif and (gulp) Image:The KLF.jpg. The former I will need to do some research on to verify my claim that it's a promotional image, or remove it. The latter was uploaded before I became a Wikipedian. Fortunately I see the uploading editor has been active within the last couple of days so I'll drop him a note. It's extremely difficult to get better than fair use images of this band, because their public appearances were very rare, but I'll see what I can do :) Thanks for bringing the issue up. --kingboyk 16:40, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

We're working on the 2 problematic images I have mentioned. If we don't get an answer and 2K is deleted I think the article can stand that. The lead image is admittedly a problem. Anyway, my reason for writing is that I think (hope) we have satisfactory fair use rationales for the others you listed now. If they're still not up scratch some assistance would be most welcome. Although I'm an admin I'm not a lawyer nor am I American :) --kingboyk 19:56, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Update: The ownership and fair use status of Image:The KLF.jpg has been investigated, and we have decided it's probably not fair to use it. The image has been nominated for deletion and replaced with Image:The KLF - Why Sheep?.jpg. We're still actively working on the 2K picture. --kingboyk 10:03, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

• Perhaps "Instrumentation" could use some prose. 12.107.19.23 02:22, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
  • I think you might be right. The question is whether we abandon the list all together and replace it entirely with prose. We'll see what we can do, thanks for your feedback. --kingboyk 08:57, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
    • "Instrumentation" is now rewritten as prose. This is beneficial because it allows the instruments to be contextualised according to how useful they were, and when. Thanks for the comment. --Vinoir 20:05, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. Not there yet. It's a pity that the opening paragraph is kind of ... crowded. Can you reduce the amount of detail and aim for more impact—a helicopter view?
  • More commas (and occasionally fewer) required throughout, for ease of reading. For example: "Perhaps their most famous performance, however, was at the 1992 Brit awards where they fired a machine gun into the audience, and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party." Easier as: "Perhaps their most famous performance, however, was at the 1992 Brit Awards, where they fired a machine gun into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party." Get rid of "however", since it doesn't contradict the previous text. I don't really like "Perhaps"—why not: "One of their most ..."?
  • "internationally-selling"—No hyphens after '-ly' words, please.
  • "weird" might be POV. Use more neutral wording.
  • "advert"—spell out in this register.
  • Why is "1987: in italics?
  • It's quite densely linked, so consider delinking low-value and repeated links, such as the names of countries, and dictionary words such as "submarine" and "chaos"—we do speak English, you know; "UK Singles Chart" is linked at least three times. You do want your high-value links to be more prominent, don't you, and you don't want your page to be spattered with blue, do you? Tony 02:52, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the detailed feedback.
      • OK, I'll take a look at the punctuation. "Perhaps" was to reduce the POV; we do have citations later on saying the performance in question was one of the top 5 rock and roll moments by any band, however. We'll have a think about how to reword that sentence and see if we can trim the intro a little.
      • OK.
      • Ditto.
      • Because it's an album; if it's an occurence of the year and not the album it's a mistake. Will investigate.
      • Links: I'll give it another run in AWB and remove some of the more obvious/over-repeated links.
    • --kingboyk 08:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Tony, those are very helpful comments. I've trimmed the introduction and, in so doing, hopefully added a bit more punch. "Perhaps" is gone, because this was without question the most famous of their few performances. I checked the italics of 1987, which are appropriate throughout (italics in reference to the album, upright for reference to the year). Next I shall re-proofread the entire article for flow, commas and punctuation. --Vinoir 09:16, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Links cleaned, hopefully to your satisfaction[1]. Let me know if there are any remaining you disagree with (or feel free to change them yourself, of course). --kingboyk 10:48, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• Further comment. It's much better, but please note the following issues.
  • The untidiness of the lead is not improved by scattering it with bold; consider removing the bolds after the opening statement.
  • This use of hyphens is unsatisfactory:

" Although Drummond and Cauty remained true to their word of May 1992 - the KLF Communications catalogue remains deleted - they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, The One World Orchestra and - most recently, in 1997 - as 2K." Why not use m dashes without spaces (so much tidier); and more than one pair of dashes in a sentence will confuse the readers: " Although Drummond and Cauty remained true to their word, as of May 1992 (the KLF Communications catalogue remains deleted) they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, The One World Orchestra and—most recently, in 1997—as 2K." There are quite a lot of space-hyphen-space instances throughout the article.

• • "top ten"—hyphenate (unless quoted, of course).
  • "Scott Piering's"—Use a piped link so it's all blue.
  • You often use upper-case T in The—e.g., The JAMS, The One World Orchestra. This is undesirable, unless part of a title or unless T.. really is use in a standard name.
  • Ellisions within quotations: space before the three dots, unless ending a sentence as well, in which case no space and four dots plus space. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tony1 (talk • contribs) 19 May 2006.
    • Thanks again Tony. Let's see:
      • The appearances of bold in the lead are for alternative monikers of the band which (example) redirect to The KLF. I'll have to check the MoS to see if we should lose that formatting or not.
      • Hyphenation, piped links, ellisions (a new word for me!) - We'll fix those
      • "The KLF", "The JAMs" - "The" is part of the name so in my opinion should be title case. I might be wrong, and you're the expert (but note that there's been quite ferocious debate about capitalisation of "The" at the Beatles WikiProject, and there seems to be some internationalisation issues, with British editors being most vociferously in favour of title case).
    • --kingboyk 09:30, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Then at WikiProject Beatles the British editors should get their way, since The Beatles were a British band. Bill Drummond himself capitalises "The" in such cases throughout his book 45. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the capitalisation is correct. --Vinoir

Well, yes, that was the end result at the WikiProject, but with some exceptions depending on context. I think it would be best if Tony changed any uses he disagreed with in terms of context, with the proviso that we assert that the proper form when referring to the band's title is The KLF/The JAMs/etc. --kingboyk 12:46, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, latest diff: [2]. All issues covered hopefully, except for the bolding in intro. I'll check the MoS later and remove it if incorrect. --kingboyk 14:53, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

• Support. Excellent article! Martin Hinks 08:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)