Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Narcissus (plant)/1

Narcissus (plant)

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result pending

There is uncited text in the article, including entire paragraphs. At over 11,000 words, this article is too detailed and WP:TOOBIG. Some of this prose should be spun out, summarised more effectively, or removed. Many sources listed in the Bibliography are not uses as inline citations: Should these be moved to Further reading or removed? Z1720 (talk) 19:59, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. I wandered over from WikiProject Plants to look at this, and it looks like the 3 issues identified were present when the article originally passed GA. I think I'd rank them in the following order of priority:

Uncited paragraphs. Our institutional culture has generally gotten increasing lax about what constitutes a "reasonable challenge" to material and more fascinated by blue clicky numbers, but I editorialize. Fixing these should not be too hard and is useful.
Spinning out the "Further reading" section. The original review noted "I'm not sure the system of subheadings in the bibliography is appropriate, but I wouldn't change it yet." Looking over Wikipedia:Further reading, it might be desirable to spin off a separate bibliographic list based on the existing references section (including subheadings), as I think just moving all the uncited materials there would create a somewhat arbitrary and overly-large "Further reading".
Article size. This is the real sticking point—spinning off articles and condensing to summary style requires a lot of labor and energy (especially given our communal drift towards "Anything that's not exactly, explicitly stated in a source is vile reprehensible OR!") I think there is some room to argue that Narcissus is a broad and important topic and is inevitably going to be a big article when (G/g)ood; looking at the sections, most of them already have spin-off articles. "Cultivation" and "Uses" are probably the two best targets for further summarization here, but I'm not sure how much improvement we can expect. Choess (talk) 16:46, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Choess: Regarding article size: If articles like Earth, Philosophy and Beyonce can get to the ~9,000 or less word count, I think this article can also reach for that goal. Most Wikipedia editors are looking for general knowledge and an introduction to the topic: more specific details can go into the spunout articles. A copy edit might also help with summarising the information more effectively and reducing the size of very large sections with more headings or by trimming words: the "Flowers" (under Description), "Bacteria" (under pests), "History" (under "Cultivation"), "Commercial uses" (under "Uses") and "Western culture" (under "Art") are all very large sections that might be good places to start.

There is also some MOS:OVERSECTION in the article with short, one or two sentence sections. Merging these sections together might help reduce the word count. Some OVERSECTIONs include some "Art" level 3 headings, the level 4 headings in "Commercial uses", and some headings under "Reproductive" (fruit, seeds, etc.) I usually recommend a target of 2-4 paragraphs per heading, though this is not a specific rule and there are always cases where shorter or longer sections are necessary. However, anything too long makes it hard for mobile users to navigate the text, and paragraphs that are too short make the article look like a list. Z1720 (talk) 17:35, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I generally agree with this critique–I've been fixing individual tagged errors on some other broad-scope plant GAs recently, and they also have that sprawly, OVERSECTIONed feel. I would definitely feel that it was a blocker if the article was brought to FA, but I am not sure whether it warrants delisting as GA. I don't personally have a clear feeling for how stringently the community wants to interpret "unnecessary detail" in 3b. Broadly speaking, condensing and summarizing appropriately is definitely something that takes effort and helps separate good writing from mediocre, and it's not unreasonable to ask people to do that to achieve a hallmark of quality. On the other hand (to be a little less peevish than above), I do think our cultural drift towards increasingly high adhesion to "exactly what the secondary source said" (driven by worst-case scenarios like CTOP) makes this unusually hard to accomplish compared to our other markers of quality, and we ought to consider that when we set our thresholds. YMMV.

Another thing that caught my eye was the big illustrated table in Taxonomy. It's not clear why that particular system was selected, and while it won't change prose size, spinning that off would reduce the visual clutter and scrolling. I'm sure there are opportunities like that for spin-off, but I am not sure how much I will be able to accomplish. Hopefully we can get the primary author and their collection of sources involved. Choess (talk) 18:13, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is 10 years since the GA promotion, and at that time this was basically a rewrite by myself, so I might be a little biased. Obviously a number of people have "improved" it since, which is inevitable but sometimes destabilises the original concept, but the way Wikipedia is run continues to evolve necessitating some tweaking. At the time of review, one reviewer stated it was well beyond GA! I think there needs to be a very high bar for delisting GAs on important topics. I really can't see anything fatal in the article that would justify its delisting, but of course it can be continually revised to meet changing stylistic guidelines. I have never been too concerned about size in GA provided that there is a good lead and the contents are well organised so readers can read what they want to. Nor do I think it makes sense to insist every source used is explicitly cited in the text, provided the text is actually supported by reliable sources. Michael Goodyear ✐ ✉ 23:56, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Michael Goodyear: My biggest concern is the uncited text: I would not be able to recommend that this article keeps its GA status until that was resolved. The formatting concerns fall within MOS:LAYOUT, which is required for WP:GA? 1b. The "Further reading" concerns are of less importance, and I'm happy to help if requested. Z1720 (talk) 00:03, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Michael, thanks so much for stopping by. I've added some "citation needed" tags, not in the spirit of challenge but just to help keep track of where the uncited text occurs. There are a few cases where we might be best off just dropping the sentence. Choess (talk) 23:08, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And as far as spin-offs go, we had already added multiple spin-offs. In my experience, "uncited" paragraphs largely occur when somebody splits a cited paragraph leaving sections "uncited" rather than implying text is unsupported. That is a cosmetic issue that is easily addressed. Michael Goodyear ✐ ✉ 00:10, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A bit surprised to find that we didn't cite the number of species from POWO (76 species and 93 named hybrids); I've added it now - MPF (talk) 13:14, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

At GA we went with the World Checklist and spun off species to a separate list. You will note that the current POWO list contains a large number of hybrids, so one could make an argument for two numbers - with and without hybrids. This was originally discussed in the section dealing with historical difficulties in determining the number of species. Michael Goodyear ✐ ✉ 01:09, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that small subsections should be merged. I also agree that the Taxonomy section should be drastically cut given the separate article – the present situation with taxonomy discussed in two places makes maintenance unnecessarily difficult. This is a genus with massive historical, horticultural and cultural significance, which the article reflects. It's always possible to split off some sections into separate articles, but the determining factor should be value to readers, not some arbitrary length limit. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:39, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]