On 10/3/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
(If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
I find this rhetorical question difficult to credit. Anybody who has ever encountered a content dispute knows the value of references. The process that produces referenced articles has absolutely nothing to do with the featured article process.
And again, good writing isn't the product of the featured article process. Ian Fleming's Thunderball, we're told today, was created "with the intention of being turned into a film." A book with self-awareness? In any case, a very weak sentence construction.
The article waits until the second paragraph to tell us that the novel was filmed twice, first as Thunderball and then as Never Say Never. And then the grammar bogey strikes again, telling us that Thunderball "was originally scheduled to have been" the first Bond movie, and this was due to a lawsuit "brought about" by one of Fleming's collaborators on the original screenplay.
This is not terrible stuff, but you'd think that a decent peer review process would pick up and remedy poor writing style. But the cast and character list that follows the plot summary neglects to state which film it applies to. Adolfo Celi's presence in the cast list as Largo suggests that it was the 1965 version--Connery played Bond in both.
And "the famous Aston Martin DB5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin_DB5makes its second appearance, previously in *Goldfinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger*." That isn't even good English grammar.
The article was apparently picked as a featured article mainly because it has an interesting subject and some flashy pictures with pretty girls, guns and explosions. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's be honest about it. It certainly wasn't picked because it represented the best Wikipedia has to offer, because the writing is pretty mediocre and in places is downright embarrassing.