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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Voting Rights Act of 1965/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose 08:49, 25 May 2014 [1].


Voting Rights Act of 1965

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Nominator(s): –Prototime (talk · contribs) 23:40, 20 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a landmark piece of U.S. federal legislation that is a signature achievement of the 1950s-1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is a subject that continues to be of great importance to elections today and is currently a hot topic in Congress and federal courts. The article covers the Act's background, legislative history, provisions, impact, and constitutionality. I have worked on this article extensively since last June (and created two child articles), and it is now comprehensive and thoroughly cites to reliable sources. The article was promoted to GA status after a rigorous review by RJaguar3, and after further polishing, I believe the article now satisfies the FA criteria. I welcome any further feedback; thank you for your time! –Prototime (talk · contribs) 23:40, 20 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. Meticulously well-sourced and good layout. Quite thorough and comprehensive. Great use of structure to organize and present the material on an important subject matter in an educational fashion. Thank you for contributing this quality improvement project to Wikipedia. — Cirt (talk) 03:43, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This article is quite good and well-organised as Cirt says. The prose can become a little verbose at times, so it needs a copy-edit. I have already taken a shot at trimming the Background section.

Looking at the references though I see a potential issue: why are so many court cases and legislations directly used as citations? They are primary sources and us interpreting them directly (rather than via reliable secondary sources) could original research rules.—indopug (talk) 10:25, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your help copyediting, indopug; I agree with most of your edits thus far, though I'll take a more thorough look later today. Primary sources are cited for the sake of completeness and so readers know where to find them; they don't replace secondary sources, but supplement them. According to MOS:LAW, "Where both primary and secondary sources are available, one should cite both." I've tried to follow this to the letter, and outside of a couple direct quotations, every piece of content that cites to a legal primary source also cites to a secondary source. If one were to strip this article of all of its primary sources, the entirety of it (outside of a few direct quotations) should continue to stand. With that in mind, I may restore some of the constitutional citations you removed from the Background section; any interpretation of the constitution that may exist there is supported by the secondary sources cited within it (Bending Toward Justice; Senate.gov). –Prototime (talk · contribs) 13:03, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again for your comments, indopug; and your edits were helpful! I made a few changes I'd like to explain here:
  • I restored a legal primary source in light of the above reasoning;
  • I restored a few wikilinks. Although everyday words, I think "voting" and "elections" are, as stated in WP:OVERLINK, "particularly relevant to the topic of the article", while "legislation" and (especially) "literacy test" aren't everyday terms and could benefit from wikilinks.
  • In a couple instances, I restored the common names of laws, such as "Civil Rights Act of 1964" (which is both the Act's common name and its official short title) versus the "1964 Civil Rights Act" (uncommon). Also, I'm not aware of many instances in reliable sources where the names of constitutional amendments are shortened to simply their number (e.g., "Fourteenth"); usually, the shortened name contains the number and the word "Amendment" (e.g., "Fourteenth Amendment"), except occasionally where multiple amendments are listed directly one after another (e.g., "Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments"). Relatedly, I restored the fuller quote from the Fifteenth Amendment, for that Amendment is very important to the VRA, and it bars more than only disenfranchisement--it also bars "abridgment" of the right to vote, which the fuller quote portrays.
  • I restored the names of the "Civil Rights Division" and "Commission on Civil Rights". Although it uses less words to refer to them as simply "a division" and "a commission", I think it's less helpful to readers to be that general.
I'm happy to further discuss these points or any other feedback you may have. Thanks! –Prototime (talk · contribs) 04:00, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Just to note, I've put the article through another copyedit over the past couple of days, which I hope resolves the verbosity concern. Did you have any further feedback, Indopug? –Prototime (talk · contribs) 20:11, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'll try to take another look over the weekend.—indopug (talk) 08:07, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Captions that aren't complete sentences shouldn't end in periods
  • File:Lyndon_Johnson_and_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._-_Voting_Rights_Act.jpg, File:Bloody_Sunday-officers_await_demonstrators.jpeg: source link is dead. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:34, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Captions and source links are now fixed. Thanks. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 02:50, 27 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Tezero

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Hah! I totally didn't forget! Uheheh.

Yeah, here I go. I'll start perusing now. Tezero (talk) 05:05, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • You might want to mention the actual date in the intro.
  • Paragraph 3 of the intro's kinda long. I'd split it at "The formula was originally".
  • Shouldn't it be "linguistic minorities"?
  • Some of the citations in the intro seem to bolster uncontroversial claims. Consider taking a few out.
  • "Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the Act's "coverage formula", which is prescribed in Section 4(b)." - I'm not sure it's a good idea to include this in the intro, given that you don't elaborate on it. Your call.
    • The next sentence does mention that the coverage formula encompasses jurisdictions that engaged in the most egregious discrimination. Elaborating much more than that would probably be too in-depth for the lead, but its inclusion in the lead is pretty essential, given how much the provision is discussed in the article's body. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 23:47, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Southern states generally sought to disfranchise racial minorities during and after Reconstruction" - Not sure what "generally" does here. Are you generalizing Southern states or the time period? Try to reword this.
  • "thus excluding many African Americans whose grandfathers had been ineligible" - May be obvious, but consider mentioning that they weren't eligible because they were slaves.
  • "that the denied voter-registration applications" - Kind of awkward to use "denied" this way; I'd change it to "unsuccessful".
  • "thousands of hours" - Can you put this into days, months, or years? Is it man-hours? I don't have an intuitive idea of how long thousands of hours really took, as I don't know how long these people's work-days were.
    • The source doesn't specify the work-day length, but I replaced "thousands of hours" with "months", because even assuming they worked 24 hours a day, it'd take at least 3 months for "thousands" of hours to go by. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 23:47, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The Act also included some voting rights protections; it required" - should be a regular colon
  • "However, despite lobbying from civil rights leaders, the Act did not extensively address voting discrimination" - vague
  • "so soon after Congress passed" - should be "Congress had passed"
  • "particularly Selma" - I'd add "the city of", as at first glance it looks like Selma could be a person or event.
    • Done.
  • "violently resisted African-American voter registration efforts" - a little vague
    • Concrete examples of violence (MLK's and protests arrests, Jimmy Lee Jackson's death, Bloody Sunday) are given later in the text, so I'm not sure it's better to delve into specifics at this point when the idea of violence is being introduced. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 23:47, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "explained that in Selma" - I'd put a comma after "that" to curtain away the implication that James Forman explained "that", i.e. the topic of the previous sentence, i.e. the aforementioned police violence - basically, to make sure the reader knows that "that" doesn't have an antecedent. Hmm, does this make sense?
  • "Malcolm X" - preface this the first time with "Civil rights activist"
  • "shot and killed young protester Jimmie Lee Jackson" - might be useful to note he was black

That's all for tonight. Now I'm off to play Thomas Was Alone, where all colors live in harmony! Tezero (talk) 05:31, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine with all of those, so here's another batch:

  • "to covered jurisdictions" - Shouldn't it be "cover"?
  • "special provision" - pl.
  • "The coverage formula reached a jurisdiction if the following two elements existed" - stilted and unclear
  • "Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution" - should probably put a comma after "2" as it's a long sentence and the reader might get lost
    • Under most legal citation styles, commas aren't appropriate after the section number of a statute/constitutional provision unless there's a subsection/clause that comes after it in the citation. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 05:17, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • probably don't need to link "illiterate"
  • "Initially, the conferees were stalemated." - Is this a typo? I don't know the middle word.
    • "Conferee" generally means "a person who attends a conference", and more specifically in this case, "a member of a conference committee". But you're right, it's an uncommon term term; I've replaced it with "committee members".–Prototime (talk · contribs) 05:17, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • ""Language minorities" means "persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives or of Spanish heritage."" - Is it necessary to state this again?
  • "elects its candidates" - typo
  • "lower federal courts have split on the issue" - repetitive wording; I thought my eyes had gotten lost earlier on
  • "In 2013, courts began to consider various challenges to voter ID laws brought under Section 2." - Might help to elaborate for a sentence or two.
  • "acting under color of law" - ...What?
  • "Two provisions in Section 11 address voter fraud" - I think this should be prefaced with a "However" or something, as it relates to protecting not voters, but elections' integrity at the possible expense of voters' free choice (granted, not a choice that they legally should be making).
    • Well, without getting too much into theory, many would argue that restrictions on voters that protect election integrity are designed to protect voters, because any time a fraudulent vote is cast, it essentially cancels out someone else's legitimate vote. I'd rather avoid any implication that Wikipedia is taking a "side" on that controversy. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 05:17, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Bail in" - Shouldn't the section title be hyphenated?

Again, good so far. More comments:

  • "criteria used was outdated" - number
    • Fixed. 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
  • "remain valid law" - seems like a value judgment; I'd change it to "are still considered constitutional" or something.
    • Well, if I might push back just a little on this, "valid" and "invalid" are pretty common adjectives used in legal sources to describe whether a particular law is enforceable or constitutional (e.g., "a court invalidated the law") without meaning to convey any value judgment that is independent of the court's opinion. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Under this standard, a voting change that results in discrimination, but does not result in more discrimination than before the change was made" - Kind of unclear; the voting change wouldn't result in discrimination; it would just allow some to continue.
    • I see what you're saying, and I did have some trouble writing this sentence. This may be semantics, but the way the courts and secondary sources have described retrogression has been of voting changes "resulting in" or "causing" new discrimination, not in allowing pre-change discrimination to continue. I'm not sure that's the best way to explain it, but I think using "allow" may somewhat change the meaning from the sources. To try to make it more clear, I switched the first "results in" to "cause"; does that help at all? –Prototime (talk · contribs) 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "correct interpretation of "discriminatory effect"" - consider prefacing "discriminatory effect" here with "the phrase" so it's clear they're not interpreting the effects
  • "decreases the ability of a minority group" - Seems to contradict the next sentence the way it is; I'd stick "overall" before "ability".
    • Hmm, I think the problem might be that "decreases the ability of a minority group to elect its preferred candidates" wasn't adequately explained. I've added to the end of that sentence the following "such as by decreasing the number of minority-majority districts". Do let me know if it still needs some work. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Bail out" section title - no space, as with "Bail-in"
    • Ah, yes, good point... and to make things more confusing, sources generally style it differently than "bail-in"... the noun form is usually given as "bailout" (one word, no hyphen), while the adjective form is given with a hyphen ("bail-out provision"), and the verb form as two words without a hyphen ("bailing out a jurisdiction")... but yes, presumably the section title is a noun, so I've fixed it to be the noun form ("bailout").
  • "After its enactment in 1965, the law immediately decreased racial discrimination in voting." - Nebulous and borderline POV; be more specific or mention the author who thinks so.
    • That's meant to be the topic sentence of the paragraph, which gives the specifics of how the Act enabled racial minority voter registration to skyrocket in 1965 and beyond, increased the ability of racial minorities to get elected to office, etc. I can see how the statement may appear subjective, but it reflects the details included in the paragraph and is supported by a virtually uniform consensus among reliable sources (including sources biased in favor of the Act and sources biased against) that the Voting Rights Act has reduced voting discrimination. Thus, I'm not sure it's a POV statement. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "interposed Section 5 preclearance objections to dilutive annexations" - Difficult to follow.
  • "eventually, the Democratic Party's" - can you specify a "By (year),"?
  • "who attained a sixth-grade education in an American school in which the predominant language was Spanish" - Tense should probably be present perfect. These schools still exist, right?
  • "summary affirmances" - ?
  • "indicated in dicta" - Not a well-known term or easy to guess the meaning of; I took AP Gov in high school and I've never heard it. It'd be a nice idea to stick "in passing" or a similar brief summary in parentheses.

And... there you have it! The article's quite polished overall. Tezero (talk) 22:36, 6 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for your feedback! As a lawyer, it can be easy to slip into using unfamiliar jargon or phraseology, so I greatly appreciate your comments on how to improve the article's readability. :) –Prototime (talk · contribs) 06:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support. This is a comprehensive and well-crafted read on a topic more important to general knowledge than any of those I've worked on, likely one of the best resources for the topic on the Internet. It was quite good even before I showed up, though I'd like to think I've helped a bit. Good luck in future endeavors. Tezero (talk) 12:40, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments—I stumbled here from my nomination, and I have a few comments related to the citations.
    • Sources that link to PDFs should consistently note the format. Several do, but several do not.
    • FN120 does not have The New York Times in italics.
    • Ditto FN130 and The Wall Street Journal in FN131.
    • In FN134, CBS News shouldn't be in italics since it is the name of a division of CBS Broadcasting. As such, it's a publisher, not a publication.
    • Now, the footnotes lack publication locations on books, but in the "Further reading" section, they're present. Personally, I would add them where missing, and not wikilink them. (If including the state name, I would also advise that the state names be abbreviated.)
    • The last entry in Further reading has "Columbis University Press", which should be "Columbia University Press".
  • This is all fairly minor stuff, and otherwise the sourcing looks good. NB: I did not perform a spotcheck for accuracy, plagiarism or paraphrasing. Imzadi 1979 → 03:09, 22 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your source review, Imzadi1979! I've addressed all of your feedback. I did have one question about FN134 (which is now FN135, after a new FN9 was just added): do you know what should be listed as the "publication"? I had thought that the title "CBS News" applied to both the publisher and the publication, and I'm not sure what else to put as the publication, if anything. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 19:41, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Not all news articles will have a connected publication. For example, where I am at the moment, we have two local TV stations. WLUC-TV named their website Upper Michigan's Source, while WBUP-TV has not explicitly named its website. If were citing the former, the footnote will have " Upper Michigan's Source. (Negaunee, MI: WLUC-TV)." while the latter would just have "Ishpeming, MI: WBUP-TV." In looking at the source used here, I can't see that they've attributed it to one of their specific news programs, any of which would be a publication, so in this case it would go without an explicit publication in the footnote.
One quick suggestion to add some further polish to the citations. Right now there is a mix of Title Case vs. Sentence case in the titles of the sources. One (FN133) uses ALL CAPS, which must be reduced to either of the other cases per the MOS, but the rest should be harmonized to a single style. Such a thing is a minor typographic change, so we need not worry about reproducing how each publisher formats headlines. (APA style explicitly says to use Sentence case in article titles, for example, even though many APA-based publications will use Title Case on their own headlines.) Our MOS is fairly neutral on which style to use, although MOS:CT (composition titles) does seem to prefer Title Case. Imzadi 1979 → 22:31, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again, Imzadi! I've standardized the source titles to title case. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 02:23, 24 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I stumbled here from my FAC and thought I'd comment, since I know a little bit about the topic and wanted to participate in the FAC. Really, it's a great written article, and I have very minor nitpicks that don't affect me supporting it.

  • Not to be nitpicky, but could you get a source that specifies that this is a landmark piece of legislation? I don't see one now.
  • Any update about the "Voting Rights Amendments Act" of 2014?
  • "or use of at-large/multimember elections" - are you opposed to using "or" instead of the slash?

♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 02:44, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your support, Hurricanehink! I've fixed the issues mentioned in your first and last comments. Concerning the Voting Rights Amendments Act of 2014, I'm afraid there's no additional update beyond what's already mentioned in the article about it being introduced; that may change if a Congressional committee decides to hold a hearing on it. –Prototime (talk · contribs) 19:41, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Keep up the good work on such important topics. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 19:46, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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