Talk:Martin O'Malley/GA2

GA Reassessment

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

I am filing this GAR because I do not believe this article comes close to meeting the criteria for a GA article.

In terms of GA criteria 3a and 3b, there are many places where the article does not have adequate coverage and/or goes into too much detail about something.

• In "Early life and education", half the section is about O'Malley's father, not O'Malley. More is needed on O'Malley – what kind of student was he, what was his major subject in college, what were his other interests, etc. Was he president of his class, did people see this in his future?
• "He is a descendant of a War of 1812 veteran, and is an active member of the General Society of the War of 1812." Unsourced, and unclear whether the second part refers to O'Malley or his father.
• Did O'Malley ever practice law? Not clear.
• In "Early political career", he was a Baltimore City Councilor for eight years, but there's no indication of what he did in that office other than sit on a couple of committees. What legislation did he sponsor, how did he vote on key matters, what were his relations with his constituents, etc. This is a major omission.
• In "Mayor of Baltimore" "Tenure", all it discusses is his approach to crime. He was mayor for eight years, he must have done a number of other significant things in office besides that. City services, relations with city labor unions, relations with businesses, economic track record (to the extent it can be ascribed to a mayor's actions), race relations, etc. This is a major omission.
• There should not be a "Mayor of Baltimore" "Controversies" catch-all section. All controversial material should be included in the normal narrative sections they occur in, in this case "Tenure" (or the tenure could be split into first and second terms). This is a longstanding practice in WP – a special effort was undertaken to rid all 2008 presidential candidates' articles of such treatment — see here — and the same was subsequently done for some other political figures' articles, including those running in the 2012 presidential election and those running in the 2016 election.
• What's more, the "Land developer controversy" one is related to his 2006 gubernatorial election and belongs in with that part of the narrative, not where it is.
• The description in "'MD4Bush' incident" is either too much (is this really important? is it a BLP violation?) or too little (why was this fellow Democrat out to get him?).
• The "9/11 — budget comparison" matter seems kind of trivial – the kind of verbal blunder followed by faux outrage that all politicians have to deal with. Maybe most of it belongs in a Note rather than the main text.
• "Media attention" is not usually a separate subject header, but descriptions about a politician's media coverage are integrated into the career narrative.
• Somewhere, there should be O'Malley's reaction to the death of Freddie Gray, the police behavior, the riots in Baltimore, etc. It happened years after he left office, but the causes go back a long way.
• In "Governor of Maryland", the "Democratic Party" section is too short and choppy. The material can really be moved to the section that deals with his national ambitions.
• In "Governor of Maryland", the "Crime" section is short and choppy, and the CitiStat/StateStat material is a repeat of what is already stated two sections above.
• In both the "Mayor of Baltimore" and "Governor of Maryland" sections, it would be better if the material about his re-election were in the middle of the sections rather than at the top. Re-elections are referendums on first-term performance, after all.
• In "Presidential politics 2016", there is nothing about who he would be running against (HRC) or about how his bid has been damaged by two recent events (his lieutenant governor losing the 2014 gubernatorial election to a Republican in a very blue state; the Baltimore riots).
• There's no indication anywhere of O'Malley's general political ideological viewpoints. There doesn't necessarily have to be a full-blown "Political positions" section, but there have to be some indication of his general policy preferences.
• Better articles integrate "personal" material in with the biographical narrative. Here, the MD4Bush incident is described before we ever know O'Malley is married. Worse, the fact that his father-in-law is a longtime, successful Maryland politician is introduced way at the end of the article. Maybe that connection had a role in O'Malley's upward climb? Integrated, chronological narrative is the best.
• Information about O'Malley as a musician is duplicated in two different sections, "Personal life" and "In other media".
• "Electoral history" is missing information about his early Maryland State Senate and Baltimore City Council elections as well as the 2003 Baltimore mayoral race.

In terms of GA criteria 1 and 2, there are many MoS violations, which include but are not limited to:

• The lead is too short.
• "Baltimore" shouldn't be linked in a subject header.
• "Political ambitions" is a meaningless subject header (all politicians are ambitious); "National ambitions" would be better.
• "Percent" should be spelled out and usages like "... O'Malley won the Democratic primary with 53%." are substandard.
• Some links are overly repeated, some are missing (e.g. Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School; Westminster, Maryland).

Cite formatting is substandard throughout:

• Authors are sometimes last, first and sometimes first last.
• Newspapers are sometimes italicized, sometimes not.
• The Washington Post sometimes has the 'The', sometimes does not, sometimes is called Washingtonpost.com.
• Most dates are mdy but some are dmy and some are ISO.
• Some are missing publisher altogether, e.g. " "Martin O'Malley Courts Democrats Before May 30 Announcement", "O'Malley to chair party's governors group".
• Some are broken in url linking, e.g. "O'Malley announces 2016 launch details".

Regarding GA criteria 6:

• I am betting that the top image is a copyvio. Just because it appeared on some arts.gov page doesn't mean it was taken by a federal employee. It was probably taken by a Maryland state employee and thus is not available to WP. At the time the article was listed as GA, this was the top image, which itself was illegitimately cropped and flipped.
• The stained glass image is also probably a copyvio. You can't take someone else's artwork and put up a photo of it, especially when it's taken in Europe.
• The inauguration image is substandard in quality even by WP standards – it looks like it was taken through tissue paper.

For all these reasons (and more if I spent more time on it), this article is not close to being of GA quality. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:03, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

At the time I filed this, I notified the original nominator and reviewer and four different projects, and of course anyone watchlisting the article saw this GAR appear on the Talk page. Twelve days have passed and there have been zero responses here. (Re images, I did get the State of Maryland image deleted but it turns out the stained glass one falls within Ireland's allowable freedom of panorama.) Therefore I will be delisting this article from GA. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:01, 11 June 2015 (UTC)