Wikipedia talk:Featured article criteria

Maintenance

Hi. Is there a place in the instructions to add, "FAC nominators are expected to continuously maintain articles they nominated"? I just read that yesterday at WP:FASA, about 15 years after the fact. Pardon me if I missed it. -SusanLesch (talk) 21:10, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

There is no such instruction because there is no such requirement for an article to become featured. However, an editor won't get a second star at FASA for "saving" an FA that they previously got promoted and then ignored, which what that statement at WP:FASA is trying to communicate. If you don't like the way it is worded, a discussion at WT:FASA would be more appropriate. --RL0919 (talk) 00:12, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Capitalization of source titles

Does "consistent citations: where required by criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations using footnotes—see citing sources for suggestions on formatting references. Citation templates are not required." require that all citations use the same capitalization style when the sources don't use the same capitalization convention? Question came up at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mount Hudson/archive1 Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:54, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

MOS:TITLECAPS says that titles of works should be given in titlecase, but with the exception that WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of pre-defined, off-Wikipedia citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article. My reading of this is that either all article titles should be in sentence case, or none should: we don't mix-and-match depending on how they are presented at the source. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 08:28, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I understand that this allows us to follow subject-specific citation and bibliography styles. For example, in mathematics, the vast majority of journals use sentence case for article titles mentioned in the bibliography (and title case for journal titles). Some publishers (like the AMS) also tend to use sentence case for book titles in the bibliography, while others use title case for book titles. This is independent of the question how the source itself formats its title (unless it is in a foreign language; many foreign languages do not have a concept of title case, and usually formatting as in the source is best). The FAC criteria ask us to be internally consistent; personally, I think these MoS/consistency aspects get too much attention at FAC at the cost of actual fact/source checking (we should care far more whether an article contains one incorrect statement than a hundred incorrect dashes). —Kusma (talk) 09:10, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

personally, I think these MoS/consistency aspects get too much attention at FAC at the cost of actual fact/source checking I don't disagree with this! The problem is that it is easy to nitpick fine details of the Manual of Style (there are a lot of fiddly little rules to remember, and it doesn't require any subject-specific expertise) whereas unless you happen to have significant knowledge of the field already, it is very difficult to make substantive points about content – generally anyone bringing an article to FAC is more expert on that topic than any of the FAC reviewers!

But regardless of that, I think we agree on what the rules as currently written actually say? In which case, in the linked discussion SchroCat is in the right, and in the extreme case it would technically be valid (if silly) to oppose promotion while this is not "fixed". Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:54, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Generally, I agree with Kusma here: if an article establishes a consistent style (for example, that book titles are capitalised, and article/chapter titles are not), that's fine. It's preferable if they're following a particular named citation style, but I don't think we should police too firmly whether something is indeed the Loughborough University Arts Faculty house style (or whatever). As SchroCat says in the linked discussion, it is however not fine to simply follow what another source does -- MOS:CONFORM is the overarching principle here, I think: in stylistic matters, we adjust the formatting to match our MoS, not whichever house style an individual publication happened to use. As such, I think Caecilius is right that an article would be in error to have, for example, some articles capitalised and others uncapitalised on the grounds that that is how the publication did it (I'd note as well that lots of older articles are often printed with titles in all-caps, and that's definitely not a good move!). As Kusma says, though, foreign-language sources are a different thing, and here the MoS already tells us to follow that language's norms. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 11:25, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Citations for individually authored chapters in edited books

Are citing individual chapter authors in edited books a requirement? Or is it optional? I have thought citing the entire edited book is acceptable [1], but that might not be the case [2]2.4.2? I also asked this in Citing sources talk page Bogazicili (talk) 17:23, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

If your source is a single chapter in a book, and every chapter in that book has a unique author (e.g. an anthology, or collection of essays) then the name of the book's editor/compiler is relatively insignificant, and the reader will want to see the chapter's author's name more prominently. Something like:

* Smith, John "Name of Smith's single chapter", in Morales, Anne Title of the book pp. 55-9 ISBN xxxxxxx, 2018 Harper etc

But that is just my thought as a reader, I'm not speaking for the FA community. Noleander (talk) 19:55, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

@Bogazicili: - I've always thought that it was best to cite the individual chapter authors, (although I didn't do that for my first couple FAs). An example of where I think it's helpful is Battle of Poison Spring - DeBlack 2003a, Moneyhon 2003, and Urwin 2003 are all chapters from the same book. Johnson 1998 is a chapter of Kennedy 1998 (part of that book was written by Kennedy). Sutherland 1994 is also a chapter from another edited book, as is Urwin 2000. It really makes it clearer what authors are actually being used/cited. Hog Farm _Talk 20:23, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Best practices in FA for multiple cites at end of a sentence

If an article has a sentence, and there are several sources for that sentence, say three, that are all significant, what is the best practices in FA for listing all sources? Displaying three (or more) separate cite superscripts as [1][2][3] in the body is clearly ugly, so bundling is preferred, correct? Is is acceptable in the FA world to use bullets as shown in the following examples:

This is sentence one.

References

or:

This is the sentence two.

References

or:

This is the sentence three.

References

[ignore the first/last/title formatting here ... question is only about the bullet layout]. Or is some other approach more favored in the FA universe? Noleander (talk) 20:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

All forms are acceptable. Bundling is not best practice. I personally prefer separate cite superscripts, as bundling leads to bloat and repetition where the same reference is used multiple times in different bundles. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:01, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Agree with Hawkeye that bundling is not necessarily preferred. It's worth considering whether you do in fact need to use three or more consecutive citations often enough that it makes a difference whether or not you bundle – often lots of consecutive citations are either unnecessary (unless it's very contentious, you don't generally need three citations to support the same claim) or could be better placed so as to make it clear which one supports which claim. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:35, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

@Caeciliusinhorto - Great suggestions. Regarding multiple sources for a sentence: the article I'm working on covers a contentious topic, and there are a couple of sections that seem to attract lots of the wrong kind of attention. Providing multiple sources is, it seems to me, a useful way to provide information for editors 5 or 10 or 20 years in the future. If editor(s) in 2025 do research and find 3 different angles on a single sentence, why not capture all 3 angles, so future editors don't need to repeat the research process? Again, this is in the context of contentious sections that have been repeatedly contested over the past 20 years. Noleander (talk) 00:31, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

There certainly are situations where multiple citations are a good idea. Looking at your contributions, I see a lot of recent edits to Margaret Sanger – I can certainly see why you might want to might often want to provide multiple sources there. If you do want to bundle citations in an article like this, I don't think anything in the FA criteria would prohibit you from doing so. Of the three examples you give, I would tend towards the second format Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 14:53, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7 - Thanks for clarifying that bundling is not best practice ... good to know. Noleander (talk) 00:27, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

What is best practice when a book (listed in the bibliography) is named in the body text?

Consider a biographical article, and the subject wrote book "A Great Book". That book does not have its own article in WP. The book _is_ used as a source for citations, so it has an entry in the Bibliography, and there are citations pointing to it. Query: When the body of article first names "A Great Book" in a sentence, should the text be a blue link down to the entry for "A Great Book" in the Bibliography section? Or should the book's name simply be white text with no link? Or does FA not care either way? [PS: I tried to find recent FA articles that had this situation, but could not find any] Noleander (talk) 04:56, 15 January 2025 (UTC)