[WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 27, Issue 10

[Tony Sidaway]

On 10/3/05, Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at 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
DB5<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin_DB5>makes 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.