Talk:2017–18 Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 06:52, 30 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, I will be printing this out, doing a light copyedit, and then coming back with review comments in a week or so. Daniel Case (talk) 06:52, 30 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OK. It has been more than two weeks and I think that's time enough to make a decision.

First, my review comments:

Good things about this article:

It is generally well-written, by which I say that my usual light copy edit did not require many changes to grammar, spelling or punctuation. There was only the occasional error that you'd expect, statistically, from any piece of writing this large.
It is adequately sourced. I did not find a single place to insert a {{fact}}. Given the article's scope, that is no small compliment.
It is nothing if not comprehensive.

And therein lies the problem. Frankly we have too much of a good thing here. The article includes (boy does it include) every minor detail it can squeeze from its sources about the season (with one exception, which I'll get to later). It wants very much to show us that homework was done.

However, we have as a result severe information overload. The writer(s) are to be reminded of summary style and particularly the section on detail. We regularly get full mdy dates, full team nicknames, reuse of the word "Michigan", every single way in which every game was statistically or historically noteworthy, long lists of every school that every recruit considered besides Michigan, to the point that if I ever find myself stuck at a hoops trivia night at an Ann Arbor bar, I'll be glad to have read this article.

But that's not what we write articles for. A lot of this stuff, the writers should step back, take a look, take a deep breath and decide how they should trim it down. Because also ...

... the whole season is now in the past. I note that above (on the talk page) the article is still assessed as Future-class, something I didn't know we had until I saw it up there. This suggests what I suspect and what the history suggests: that the article was written as the season went on and has not been seriously edited holistically now that the season is behind us with an eye toward making it readable as a history of the season, not as a running log of current events. That's the main reason we do not need so many exact dates. We also most definitely do not need so many other teams' poll rankings in the text—the season is over. No one cares who was ranked where now. It just doesn't matter.

The net result, when I read it, was an idea of what articles like this might read like if we created AIs to machine-learn and write them. For a human, it was exhausting, and it shouldn't be.

I addressed some of the issues in my copy edit. I broke up the large wall-o-text paragraphs, reduced some dates to "In MONTH" and "two days later", things like that, got rid of as many uses of the passive voice (i.e. "Michigan was led by ...") as I could, as well as a fair amount of sportswriterese ("the big man" is entirely too colloquial for an encyclopedia article, and we need to spell out things like "LSU" and "VCU" on first reference since we cannot assume every reader, even in the US, knows what institutions they refer to). And I fixed a few places where it still used the present tense for But that alone, I realized, will not get us to something that's a few fixes from GA during a couple of weeks of "on hold".

I really think it needs to be rewritten per the above considerations. Some specific points:

Do we really need to give every score of every game in the inline narrative when it's in the table below? Maybe just the remarkable ones.

The intro really shows the signs of having been written as the season unfolded. Its first graf tells us how many seasons Michigan has been playing men's basketball, and how many in its present arena. Only in the third graf do we get to the buried lede, so to speak: the team, despite lower expectations at the beginning of the season due to the loss of some key players, nevertheless managed to go all the way to the championship game on a 14-game winning streak in the late season and postseason. I should read about that in the first graf. All the other stuff is secondary.

The intro, and the article, make a big deal of Michigan's getting to be third-seeded in its NCAA tournament regional bracket. But it neglects to tell us which one that was. For college basketball fans I'd think that would be standard.
It's Michigan, and hey, they won the Big Ten tournament, so I would assume they went to the Midwest Regional. But I shouldn't have to be assuming that.

Now, these things by themselves could be fixable in a reasonable period of time, by a determined editor. However, it's not just the article's monotonous, stat-heavy writing that makes it feel cold and machinelike. Two other things could really be added which aren't in the article at all.

Quotes: How did the coaches and players feel about developments in the preseason, regular season and postseason? What did other teams have to say about playing them, before and after? What did any significant sports pundits have to say? Basketball is played and watched by humans; it would be nice to get a feel for that in the article.

Images: There is a category on Commons of images from the Northwestern game, with quite a few pictures that could be used to illustrate the article. There are images of Crisler Center that could be used. And there may be more free images on Flickr and other sites; I don't know if anyone's looked.
Images, beyond the big maize-with-blue trim "M" in the infobox, would also help break up the monotony of the text and improve readability.

So, since I think the article needs more than is currently here, I am failing it at this time.

If you want help on copyediting a rewrite, or even doing much of the rewriting, let me know ... I would be amenable to helping you out. But, obviously, someone else would have to review another GA nomination if I did.

In the meantime, I am raising the article's assessment to B-class, solely because of the feast of information it provides, and adding WP:MICHIGAN to the projects it's under. Daniel Case (talk) 07:09, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel Case, are you aware that this article is written at about the same level of detail as each of the prior 9 seasons all of which are either GA or FA?--16:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Writing is about more than just detail, and every GA should be reviewed without regard to what articles about similar subjects have been assessed at, whoever you are. Daniel Case (talk) 17:28, 15 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]