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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/DeLancey W. Gill/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by FrB.TG via FACBot (talk) 13 November 2023 [1].

DeLancey W. Gill

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Nominator(s): Generalissima (talk) 05:20, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is DeLancey W. Gill, a D.C. watercolor landscape painter and prolific Smithsonian photographer of Native Americans. His work ties in pretty heavily to how Native Americans were seen in contemporary documentation, especially less savory understandings like phrenology. Generalissima (talk) 05:20, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to FAC

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Hi Generalissima and thank you for your nomination to FAC. A few pointers on the process and how to get the best from it:

What to expect

  • As a first time nominator at FAC, the nominated article will need to pass a source-to-text integrity spot check and a review for over-close paraphrasing in addition to all of the usual requirements.
  • You should be aware that every aspect of the article will be rigorously examined, including the standard of prose; breadth, standard and formatting of sources; image licencing; and adherence to the Manual of Style.

Dealing with reviewers

  • Try to deal with comments in a timely and constructive fashion.
  • Remember that reviewers are constructively giving their opinion on the article.
  • Keep calm when dealing with criticism of any aspect of the article.
  • Don't take the criticism personally: reviewers are examining the article – not you!

How to get the best from the process

  • Reviewing the work of others is a good way to get a grasp of the process from the other side.
  • Reviewing other FACs also increases the likelihood that others will review your nomination – although remember there is no quid pro quo at FAC.

Good luck with your nomination.

Gog the Mild (talk) 22:51, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from PMC

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Congrats on your first FAC! Putting myself down here for comments. I usually get back to it within a week, but hassle me if I let it slide.

Here we go:

Lead
  • Why link drafting and landscape painting but not photography?
  • "Characterized as precise and exact in his landscapes" I'm not entirely sure this phrasing works, although I'm not sure how to rephrase it.
  • Not sure about "In this duty". "In this role" perhaps
  • "As well as in BAE...". This whole sentence is a bit knotted up. You could trim the "as well as in" bit and say "Gill's photography appeared in X, Y, and Z" (or similar)
  • "Gill's photographic work" is repeated in the next sentence, it should be revised in one of them
  • I might revise or split that final sentence. It's a long one and you've got some passive voice going on. "Contemporary critics regarded Gill's work as strong and pictorialist" might work for the opener. It's also somewhat ambiguous what strong means in this context, paired with pictorialist - a fancy way of saying "good work" or a technical term?
Early life
  • Please, god, do sfns or some other thing for sources where you've cited different pages in the same source. Ref 1 needs it especially badly given how reliant you are on it. It is...somewhat unfair to expect people to have to skim or ctrl+F an entire 17 page article to verify source-text integrity.
  • Link Washington, D.C. in the body (generally if you mention something in lead and body, you link it the first time in each)
  • Nitpick but his dad was a merchant too, that's probably worth mentioning for background
  • I find the same thing Vati did wrt the paraphrase about the ironwork. It's not clear that he designed those things, the source says he "rendered" them, as in he drew them in a blueprint. They're not quite the same.
  • "especially focused" you can probably ditch "especially" here as redundant to "focused"
  • "considerable amount of local acclaim" vs the source saying "established a reputation" - is it clear that the reputation was strictly local? I'm not reading that, especially considering he had exhibited in New York. (By the way - why not mention that in the article? Seems relevant.)
  • "a Brooklyn reviewer" do we know who?
  • The split between paragraphs 2 and 3 is awkward. I would either merge them into one large para all about painting in general, or take the last sentence in 2 and add it to 3 so you have one para entirely about critical reception.
  • When was Gill hired? How was his career in the USGS? The citation implies it was successful - promotions and raises for a few years - but we go right to him getting Holmes's job with no indication of how that happened (and note that Glenn says it's almost all due to Holmes's patronage)
  • "Gill was tasked to succeed" - "Gill succeeded". You may want to check out WP:REDEX for some ideas about removing superfluous words/phrases from your writing - the less distance between the reader and the content, the better
  • Also, why did Gill get Holmes's job?
  • You can also merge this with the next sentence for smoother flow
  • "John Wesley Powell, in a dual role as director of the USGS..." I don't think this sentence is quite a correct reading of the source, which says "During those days, when John Wesley Powell was director of both the USGS and the BAE, work for one often meant additional duties with the other. Gill thus became supervisor of illustrations of the BAE, but without additional salary." It's not clear that Powell tasked Gill with this specifically. It reads to me more like, if you were the supervisor of one, you wound up being the supervisor of the other, a condition that would have been true for Holmes as well.
  • "lithics" could use explanation in-text. Even substituting "stone tools" would be fine - until I clicked, I assumed it meant some type of photography he had encountered for the first time

ChrisTheDude

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  • Image captions which are not complete sentences (eg the Mouth of James Creek one) should not have full stops
  • "William Henry Holmes, a fellow watercolor painter and chief of illustration" => "William Henry Holmes, a fellow watercolor painter and the chief of illustration" (existing wording makes it sounds like he was a "fellow chief of illustration")
  • "came to greatly respect Gill's artistic work, who was tasked" - I think "came to greatly respect the artistic work of Gill, who was tasked" reads more smoothly
  • "Gill accounted for minutia" => "Gill accounted for minutiae"
  • "Government photography of native delegations to Washington, D.C. began in the 1860s and 1870s. The Smithsonian geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden requesting in 1874 for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to send delegations to his office to be photographed." - this doesn't work grammatically as two separate sentences but would if you use a comma to join them together as one
  • "measuring greatly disliked by native subjects[1]," - ref should go after comma
  • "living in Washington at Beveridge House. Beveridge House served" - any way to avoid this repetition?
  • That's what I got - great work!! -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 17:10, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Recommended changes implemented per request; thank you very much for your feedback! :3 Generalissima (talk) 18:41, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sammi Brie

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Pulling up a section to take a look myself. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 03:36, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • When he was five, his father was killed in action in service of the Confederate Army. When he was fourteen, his mother and stepfather moved to Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory. Maybe combine with a semicolon? Right now, two sentences are starting with the same word.
  • the ruins of the Ancestral Puebloan Pueblo Bonito Is there a way to phrase this so as to avoid a WP:SEAOFBLUE issue as at present? There is one other back-to-back link at "Otoe / breechclout" later.
  • sent to Washington, D.C. during Probably can remove the "D.C.", but if it needs to stay, an MOS:GEOCOMMA is missing here.
  • (a glyph substituting for signature) maybe "a signature"?
  • The lead section and article presently conflict on the date of the postage stamp. 1922 or 1923?
  • He later married Katharine Schley Hemmick on January 2, 1905, with whom he had one additional child. Reword, because Gill didn't have a child with January 2, 1905.
  • He taught classes at the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students League of Washington, and collected antique art, including rugs and East Asian porcelain. The first comma is unnecessary as there is only one subject. See WP:CINS.

This is not a source review, but the Clotho's Temple citation should link to https://www.newspapers.com/article/arizona-republic-clothos-temple/134933231/. The citation should read Arizona Days and Ways Magazine, pp. 18–19. The author is not Neal but Kyle Leatham.

Vat

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I came in here with a neutral eye a couple days ago, and have been looking through the article since.

  • Prose concerns -- seeking to racially classify indigenous peoples due to their skull and facial proportions ("due to"?), the structuring of Personal life (e.g. with whom he had one additional child, when "additional" isn't used elsewhere and where the word seems superfluous), one incident where (is "incident" the right term here? that has implications of an uproar/reaction, which the article gives no impression of), having one daughter, suffragist and librarian Minna P. Gill (the false title debate is controversial, but here its absence makes the sentence double back, in the same way you see in some Oxford comma jokes).
  • Source-text -- cite 13 is supporting a lot of strongly-worded statements, yet the article does not mention Gill. No hits for "Kickapoo" either, and "Dakota"'s two responses are about the state of South Dakota. Cite 1 supports some but not all of what cite 13 is being used for, but substantially downplays Gill's role in this compared to his contemporaries. his specialty was rendering 'ornamental iron, tile floors, and linear perspective' in cite 1 is paraphrased to designing ornamental ironwork and tiles. He was noted for his abilities in capturing linear perspective, which extrapolates both the proportion of his work that was this and the success of it in ways unsupported by the source, and doesn't mention anyone to be "noting" this. Anthropometric measurements, otherwise taken from casts and other physical measuring greatly disliked by native subjects extrapolates this from a mention that some subjects rejected it, later followed up by mentioning that it was fairly common nonetheless, and that the photos were used alongside it rather than the replacement implied here.
  • Gaps from sources -- cite 1 engages more with how Gill interacted with the phrenological and ethnological cross-purposes, which the article touches on a lot less despite this being fairly core to the subject. The article gives the impression that he mostly abandoned other artforms after beginning photography, which the source doesn't agree with and indeed talks about works he continued to be commissioned for. There's little talk of Gill's own intent or his influence on how he photographed, which again cite 1 talks more about (e.g. discussing his control over what appeared where, his curatorship, etc) -- the article touches on this with how he edited images, but I was surprised to read the cite and see how much more detail it went to, considering the length of this article.

Oppose at this juncture, unfortunately. The prose concerns are samples; the article could use another look-over prosewise. I'm really concerned by cite 13 -- given some of the information seems to be elsewhere I'm sure it's citable, but there are already significant content concerns with that paragraph, and when I checked it to trace down the correct implication of "incident" I turned up nothing. There are parts of the article that are hard to parse, and comparing them with cite 1 makes me uncertain how representative they are of the subject. Vaticidalprophet 09:04, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from UC

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Having reviewed this at PR, I feel obliged to reiterate my assessment from there that this does generally read and feel like a good GA: in particular, I don't really have the reassuring sense of comprehensiveness that I'd hope to get from an FA. The prose often reads as if it's skimming quite lightly over material where there might or should be much more to say.

A few more concrete comments:

  • The formatting in the references is very inconsistent: almost any system is fine, but it's best to pick one and stick with it.
  • "Critique" means "assessment and feedback"; we mean "criticism".
  • As noted at PR, I don't really see comprehensiveness here in terms of Gill's place within the broader practice of phrenology, racism and so on: it's mentioned in the lead but not really discussed.
  • Agreed with Vati that some points of the prose could do with a look to make sure that they are clear, grammatical and that they really stand up to scrutiny (one that I noticed: the walk downtown was disliked by the delegations, who preferred to stay in the vicinity of the Smithsonian: did someone ask all of those delegations? Greater precision is needed here.) UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:01, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Vaticidalprophet, @UndercoverClassicist - I combed through the article and added a good deal more context (esp. about the motivations of Gill's work and his place in this) and copyedited as per both reviews. UC, I would like clarification on reference formatting - I have been using just the default source editing citation style for these. Generalissima (talk) 18:28, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm afraid I'm not seeing all that much more context (I note the addition of ~3500 bytes since 7 Nov): in particular, in the critique/criticism section, there's no mention of the idea that photographing people as anthropological specimens is now considered pseudoscientific and racist, and we allow the moniker seeking to capture subjects as "nothing but an Indian" to pass without comment, context or criticism. Why did people like Gill go into this kind of photography, who else was doing it, and what was the place of people like him in the intellectual world? Then, what happened, and when, to change American science's attitude towards race, anthropology and photography?
    On citations, the key issue is capitalisation. Normally, we use title case for headings -- so nouns, pronouns, verbs, first words, last words and words immediately following a colon are capitalised. Take a look, for instance, at the difference currently between ref 8 (Poskett, title case) and ref 5 (Elderidge, sentence case with extra space before colon) or ref 7 (sentence case). Any system is fine, but it does need to be a coherent system. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:46, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Okay, I standardized the capitalization for the citations. In regards to additional background information — I had considered adding a background subsection on contemporary photography and anthropological practices, but it would break up the standard flow of a biographical article like this and introduce sources that do not mention Gill or indeed the BAE at all. Maybe footnotes could give context in a fitting manner? I am to be honest unsure on how to add context here without exceeding the scope of the article. Generalissima (talk) 21:07, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It's always useful to look at FAs in a similar topic area: taking James B. Longacre and V. Gordon Childe as examples, you can straight away see a difference in the level of coverage and detail. Even where we have someone like John Doubleday (restorer), who in lots of ways is similar to Gill (a museum employee involved in work with objects and people rather than constructing academic theories) and about whom relatively little is known, what we do know is covered in extensive, comprehensive detail. I'm not yet seeing this article as comparable. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:00, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]


Thoughts from Guerillero

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  • The title of Glenn 1983 is wrong.
  • Can we get ISBNs for the books?
  • Did Weidman come from Newspapers.com?
  • "Such errors were shared by contemporary photographers of Native Americans such as Curtis and Frank Rinehart, seeking to capture subjects as "nothing but an Indian" in order to document what was considered by contemporary anthropologists to be a disappearing race and culture" feels like a COATRACK to me because the source does not mention Gill
  • Were there any other obits? The sourcing feels thin and the reliance on one source feels off to me

--Guerillero Parlez Moi 21:07, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    • Sadly, no other obituaries for Gill exist. I have corrected the title of Glenn 1983, added ISBNs, and gave a link for the Wieidman source. Per the penultimate point, this is a needle I am having to thread between giving as much context to his role and the state of American anthropology as feasible while avoiding a coatrack article! I hope to find a way to make reviewers on both sides of that divide happy. - Generalissima (talk) 06:48, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Harrias – Oppose

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Unfortunately, this article just suffers from too many little flaws for me at the moment. I haven't looked into the sourcing concerns raised by Vaticidalprophet above, but purely looking at the prose, I agree with their analysis and think it needs a significant copy-edit to approach FA standards. A few general issues:

  • Lots of noun plus -ing constructions.
  • Parts of the article seems to be excessive detail for a biography of Gill. For example, what does the paragraph starting "Prior to 1904, native delegations were photographed at.." tell us about Gill?
  • Some of the prose is excessively clunky and difficult to understand, for example "Anthropometric measurements, otherwise taken from casts and other physical measuring greatly disliked by native subjects.."

Recommend withdrawing for a thorough copy-edit before bringing back to FAC. Harrias (he/him) • talk 14:37, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Closing comment. Due to concerns raised by three reviewers regarding prose, sourcing, and comprehensiveness, I am archiving this nomination. It's recommended to seek mentorship at WP:FAM. Additionally, consider initiating another peer review, given the premature closure of the last one, and collaborate with reviewers to address concerns before reattempting FAC.FrB.TG (talk) 15:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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