Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Académie française/archive1

Académie française

Self-nomination. -- Emsworth 00:45, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Object. Comprehensiveness: How has the Academy been perceived? Also, "Current members" is redundant to the List of page and won't age well. 119 03:11, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • I beg to contradict this objection. The page does note that the body has been perceived as excessively conservative. Furthermore, the listing of current members of a body (if the list is not too long) is customary. The list will be regularly updated. -- Emsworth 15:16, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • The only coverage of perceptions of the Académie are a brief mention of allegations of conservatism and that some government officials have ignored its advice. But why was the Académie formalised by Richelieu? Why was it abolished during the French Revolution? How much weight does it have with normal usage within the public? Are there popular opinions on the Académie? The members list should also note at what time it was last updated. 119 19:26, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. Looks good as far as I can tell, but I'm not sure the rather large picture of Richelieu at the top of the article really belongs. Surely we can find a more appropriate one. Phils 17:49, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
• Object, I endorse 119's objection about how the Academy has been perceived. A much fuller discussion is needed than the sentence you cite in response. I have a problem altogether with the article's proportions. It seems to me there's not nearly enough about the function, criticism, and perception of the Academy, and proportionately too much about trivia like the special green habits. The sentence on function, "The Académie is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, although its recommendations carry no legal power" needs some background and explanation, it's mystifying. How—in what sense—is the academy "France's official authority"? Who recognizes that authority, and what does it mean to recognize it? What is the force of the word "official" and of the word "authority"? The second part of the sentence states that the force is not what common sense suggests, so what is it? This is a big question-mark to leave.

It seems to me necessary to discuss some background to the Academy's place in French history, with some attention paid to its cultural relation to the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedists, the French Revolution (not just the bare technical facts of discontinuites around 1800, though those are of course wanted too). Some sense of its ideology over time, and the history of mutating perceptions and criticisms of it, needs to be supplied. (Not of course in the editorial voice, but by acknowledging and attributing the ongoing French discussions of these subjects.) The sentence "The body, however, has sometimes been criticised for behaving in an excessively conservative fashion" is inadequate as the sole hint at such matters. It is too innocent of history, and the section "History", in its turn, is too innocent of ideology. I'm afraid I see this article as too superficial a treatment of its important subject, as yet, to be an FA. The three references show why: two of them are from around the year 1900 (one of them the Catholic Encyclopedia), the third is the homepage of the Academy itself. You urgently need to use some modern authority (other than the Academy's admiring self-description) or, preferably, authorities.

Btw, although the corresponding article in fr wiki is quite short, it's more specific about some things that would be useful here, especially about the original mission of the academy. This was to fix the French language, to stop it developing. Language change was in the 17th century seen as degeneration, and the unchanged language was seen as a valuable cultural "patrimony" for future generations. This is interesting stuff, which until recently colored the self-perception of the Academy and the criticisms against it—perhaps even still does to some extent, though the official mission statement has changed. (Again, some modern discussion of such matters needs to be consulted and referenced.) --Bishonen|Talk 20:07, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)