Talk:Harry Kendall Thaw/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Wizardman (talk · contribs) 04:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll review this article shortly. Wizardman 04:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

In short, the concerns from Talk:Evelyn Nesbit/GA2 are in this article in spades. It's plenty detailed and has mostly good sourcing, though it is thin in a couple spots. The tone of the article, however, is completely unencyclopedic. Here are just a few lines that don't really make an encyclopedia article:

• "His historical legacy rests on one notorious act. In 1906, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Thaw murdered renowned architect" notorious/renowned are not needed.
• "His cautions were generalizations, lacking the sordid specifics that would have alerted Nesbit to Thaw’s all too real, aberrant proclivities. " this sentence sounds nice in a vacuum but doesn't add any substance to the article.
• "due to the intervention of the city's social lion, lauded architect Stanford White, who would not countenance Thaw’s entre into the hallowed halls of masculine supremacy." same as above.

There is so much style in the article that it actually hurts the substance that's present. It would need an outside reader to go through the article tom to bottom to turn this into a GA piece, as is the case with Nesbit as well. As a result, i have to fail this article at GAN despite how long it's waited for a review. Wizardman 04:26, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

• Ten years later the writing remains wretched. EEng 01:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

I just came upon this article at random with no prior knowldge of the subject and also felt frustrated by the tone of the writing. Although you could call it well-sourced, I think in some ways it hurts the article to be based largely on newspaper writing of the day and what seems to me like a rather "pop history" book in Uruburu's American Eve—that combination seems almost guaranteed to yield a needlessly sensational and lurid tone with this kind of subject matter. I think this article would really benefit from some scholarly history sources (I know Uruburu is an English professor but she seems to be writing more for the general public in that book, and in a pretty racy way that I don't think has done this article many favors).

Just glancing at JSTOR it looks like there is some scholarly history on this but it doesn't seem to make much of an appearance here. This article on the literary history of the "sob sisters" idea seems interesting to me, for example, and its topic does appear here briefly, but if the previous editor consulted that article there's no sign. This one from a sociological legal history angle seems like it has intriguing things to say about the tension between the "unwritten law" of 19th-century-style "honor" vs. the era's legal concept of provocation as they featured together in Thaw's trial, but that article also doesn't seem to be in use here. This is just from a brief glance so maybe there's more.

I don't see much scholarly writing on Thaw's life aside from his trial, though, which maybe bodes a bit ill for the rest of the article. Also, all the book-length stuff I've come across, glancing around, appears to be in a rather popcorn-munching novelistic vein not far off from American Eve in tone—seems like people have a hard time taking an extended interest in this subject from any other perspective.

This topic strikes me as kind of depressing and I'm feeling pretty down as-is, so I'm not sure I really want to spent a lot of time with this article, but I might decide to have a go at it anyway. If I don't, and another editor decides to, I encourage widening the source pool with some less "tabloidy" material, which I think will help temper the article's style. 🍉◜◞🄜e𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚊r🅟🜜🥑《 𔑪‎talk〗⇤ 04:08, 3 July 2023 (UTC)