Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Early life of Hugo Chávez/archive1

Early life of Hugo Chávez

Withdrawn FAC (two months ago — late November). Peer review 1 (no comments). I've worked through and copyedited this article, which I wrote up late last year. I also overhauled the weird Harvard referencing, converting it to use the new m:Cite/Cite.php mediawiki citation style. Saravask 10:44, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Well written. well referenced, comprehensive. --Oldak Quill 20:23, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Not enough info on this guy yet? Eh, just because I think his politics are awful doesn't mean the masses shouldn't be able to read about him. Nice article, seems to flow nicely. I'd suggest adding some of the best external links from the main Chavez article to this one, just to round it out nicely. Also, why not use the same lead box as is used in Military career of Hugo Chávez? These aren't a big deal; just some suggestions on how to improve this further. I don't see any major problems. --Spangineer (háblame) 06:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Conditional support, as long as a paragraph or two summary is inserted under "Childhood". It looks to be a very complete and pretty well-written article. Tuf-Kat 15:57, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support, I think adding anything directly under the superheading "Childhood" would detract from the flow of the article. Andrew Levine 17:03, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I support adding general info under "Childhood" (eg. physical description of him as a baby or child) or removing the two sub-headings ("Early childhood with parents" and "Later childhood"). Also, when was he married? and when did he meet Herma Marksman? Perhaps you could clarify his dealings with Marksman and his wife. I couldn't figure it out with the (Guillermoprieto 2005) reference. And are there a lot of rotting donkey heads on the streets of Venezuela? That was pretty weird. --maclean25 07:12, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the critique, copyedits, and fact-checking. I made some changes in response ([1]). As for the asinine heads ... wouldn't know too much about that ... Saravask 23:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry but I have some fundamental problems with this article. It seems to exist not because Hugo Chavez's early life is inherently notable but because the author wants to write far more about Chavez than can possibly fit in one article. The opening sentence sets the scene - 'The early life of Hugo Chávez spans the first twenty-one years...' shows clearly that the article is not about the early life itself as a notable subject but is just a subsection of a now very lengthy set of articles, describing an arbitrarily chosen number of years of Chavez's life.
Hugo Chavez is notable and deserves a thorough article, but I do not see the point in creating so many articles which do not stand alone but simply mean that in addition to his (far too large anyway) 100kb main article he has another 90kb article spread over several pages. I don't see why his early life is notable in and of itself, and the article doesn't make a case for why his early life deserves such highlighting rather than being described in his article, where it has context and is much more useful to the reader. Worldtraveller 01:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine. You should renew your object vote here, since you already know my opinions regarding these concerns. This time, the FAC director can weigh the arguments' validities and sort it all out. But I do have questions: what is the difference between this article and History of saffron or Trade and usage of saffron? Do you consider the question of notability to be unique to this one article? Saravask 05:06, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well I haven't properly read those articles, but they do seem to have considerable overlap, even using exactly the same sentence in the opening paragraph. I could believe that the history of saffron may be worth writing about separately from the seasoning itself but I am not entirely convinced. I definitely do not believe that the early life of anyone is worth writing about separately from the rest of their life - that just doesn't make sense to me. All our articles should stand alone and be able to be read in isolation, and as an encyclopaedia is supposed to summarise and synthesise, many detailed articles on narrow aspects of a single topic begin to defeat our purpose. In my own field of professional expertise, I would have no trouble writing lengthy articles about many aspects of NGC 6543 - I could do Temperature of NGC 6543, Chemical abundances in NGC 6543, Kinematics of NGC 6543, History of NGC 6543 observations, and perhaps more. I am sure I could make them all quite readable and could certainly make them comply with all the FA criteria. But, I won't because I think the paragraph or two given to each in NGC 6543, which is a featured article, is more than sufficient for even the biggest encyclopaedia in history. If I had the time and the energy to write so much about NGC 6543 and other planetary nebulae, maybe I'd consider wikibooks as an outlet, but here I think an encyclopaedia, even one with theoretically virtually unlimited space, needs to retain sight of what it is and what its readership is interested in.

That's my view, anyway, and I'd be interested to hear what you and others think. Worldtraveller 23:12, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Support Great well done article. You would be hard pressed to find a better (free!) biography of his young life. Focus is all too often on politics and sensationalism later on. A great fresh look at the man so many admire. This should be recognised--Colle 02:28, 7 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunate oppose. Unfortunate, as in the nuts-and-bolts sense there is absolutely nothing wrong with this article and obviously a lot of work has gone into it. But I think I largely agree with Worldtraveller. This reads to me like the first few pages of a bio, not as an encyclopedia entry. For instance:

- Chávez's mother wanted him to become a Catholic priest, and so he was made to serve as an altar boy for one year. One of his duties was to clean and polish figurines depicting the saints and Jesus; Chávez developed a dislike of Jesus' depiction as a simple figurine. Specifically, Chávez was offended by what he saw as his church's portrayal of Jesus as "an idiot" and not, as Chávez considered Jesus to be, "a rebel". These experiences resulted in Chávez's lifelong distrust of religious hierarchies. This should be a quarter the length at best and the bit about the figurines doesn't belong IMO.

- One of his childhood dreams was to become a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, following in the footsteps of his childhood hero, Venezuelan pitcher Isaías "Látigo" Chávez (no relation). When Látigo died at age 23 on March 16, 1969 in Zulia in the second worst airplane crash in Venezuela's history, Chávez was saddened to the extent that he refused to go to school for two days. I don't think any of this is relevant.

These and other parts of the article are not summary style. Now, if you pruned or compressed stuff of this nature I wonder if you'd be left with an article weighty enough for FA so it is a bit of bind. Marskell 17:41, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]