User talk:Carl Waxman - Misplaced Pages

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16:20, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Critical acclaim

Hi there. I noticed you've been editing film articles. They often need a bit of help. However, I noticed that you're using what we call "puffery" or "peacock wording". This includes phrases like "widespread critical acclaim", "universal acclaim", etc. It's non-neutral wording and does not add to the reader's understanding beyond what the review aggregators tell them. If a film has a 90% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes, just say that. You shouldn't use over-the-top wording to emphasize the rating, and you definitely shouldn't interpret the results as "critical acclaim". When you see something described as having "positive reviews", that's good enough, and it generally doesn't need to be "upgraded" to something more hyperbolic. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 06:46, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Please stop adding peacock wording. I have explained to you above why this is problematic. If you continue to do so, you can be blocked from editing. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 07:33, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Carl, as NinjaRobotPirate notes above, we don't need editorials in our articles. "Universal acclaim" is hyperbolic fluff and doesn't belong in our articles, nor does similar wording like "nearly universal acclaim", "critically panned", etc. The WikiProject Film community also shuns language like "mixed to positive" and "mixed-to-negative", the latter being something you added here. This phrasing constitutes synthesis, since you appear to be combining both the Rotten Tomatoes score with the Metacritic score, and then making a statement about the information that neither source says explicitly. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of summarizing the critical response at all so long as we have aggregator data, which are already summaries of critical response. Why summarize a summary? Thanks. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:24, 31 December 2015 (UTC)