Talk:The History of the Fairchild Family

The History of the Fairchild Family has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
July 13, 2007	Good article nominee	Listed
June 27, 2009	Good article reassessment	Kept

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on July 4, 2007.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that the bestselling children's book The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood inspired the character of Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations?

Current status: Good article

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GA Passed

Hello, I've passed this article. It demonstrates remarkably good prose and textual flow. In addition, the article provides reasonable coverage of all the facets of this book. It is well-cited with evidently scholarly material and is NPOV and stable. My recommendations for improving this article are: adding more illustrations if they exist and expanding the plot summary (it's adequate for GA as it provides broad coverage, but not comprehensiveness). That's all. Thanks for the pleasant reading and the shock of learning that this sort of book was once considered suitable children's literature.--Meowist 03:18, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Expanding the plot summary will be difficult for two reasons:

There are three volumes to cover.
The books don't really have a single storyline that is easy to follow. They are mostly collections of stories related in between the adventures of the Sherwood children. Summarizing or even listing all of the those stories would tire the reader out.

Do you have any suggestions? I struggle with this all of the time because most eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century children's literature doesn't have a "plot" per se. I plan on writing a great many more pages on this literature, so I need to find a good solution to the problem. Would changing the heading to "Structure of the text" be a good idea? That way, readers would not expect a real plot summary. In the structure section, I could explain that there is no real plot. (I will try to make this clearer in this article.) Awadewit | talk 04:08, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I will look for more illustrations. I think only one more would fit comfortably on the page. What about you? Awadewit | talk 04:08, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank for the review. By the way, I noticed you said the article "provides reasonable coverage" of the book. Thank you for being so astute. There is very little scholarship on this book, so I have had to make do with very little material. I cannot really adequately fill out the sections until more articles are published (something I hope to do myself someday). I do not believe that it can reach FA status because of this limitation. Awadewit | talk 04:08, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yes, if the books are just a heap of stories about the trouble the children get into and the overall structure appears to be that a of a book of moral tales or fables, then yes changing it to "structure of the text" seems better. I also think that just one more original illustration illustrating the mischeif of these kids would do well. --Meowist 20:08, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have changed the heading and added an illustration. I'm afraid that there aren't many available. Each edition that I looked at only had one (the frontispiece). Let me know if you think a picture of Sherwood would be better. Awadewit | talk 13:28, 21 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

GA Reassessment

This discussion is transcluded from Talk:The History of the Fairchild Family/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.

Starting reassessment as part of the GA Sweeps process. Jezhotwells (talk) 12:20, 27 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Quick fail criteria assessment

The article completely lacks reliable sources – see Wikipedia:Verifiability.
The topic is treated in an obviously non-neutral way – see Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.
There are cleanup banners that are obviously still valid, including cleanup, wikify, NPOV, unreferenced or large numbers of fact, clarifyme, or similar tags.
The article is or has been the subject of ongoing or recent, unresolved edit wars.
The article specifically concerns a rapidly unfolding current event with a definite endpoint.

All OK, start substantive review. Jezhotwells (talk) 12:25, 27 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Checking against GA criteria

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose):
Well written, I made a couple of minor copy edits to remove unnecessary emphasis
b (MoS):
Fine
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references):
Well referenced.
b (citations to reliable sources):
Reliable sources, assume good faith for content.
c (OR):
No OR
It is broad in its scope.
a (major aspects):
It appears broad in scope and ....
b (focused):
....focussed
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
Follows a NPOV
It is stable.
No edit wars etc.:
No edit warring
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales):
Theree pd images, correctly tagged
b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Suitable captions used
Overall:
Pass/Fail:
Pass, maintain GA status. Jezhotwells (talk) 12:38, 27 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]