Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Orion

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edit Orion

Found it on ICU, re-wrote it. What do you think?You know what the music means... Our time is up. 02:27, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
Humour: 2 Hey, I'll be reviewing the article for you. Don't worry so much about the number, the important thing are the comments.
  • Intro I really didn't get what with Lionel and Linda Irving (and this stretches right through the article). I can't find anything to do with them on Wikipedia or even google so I'm guessing you made them up. If you are going to run with a pair of (presumably incompetent) astronomers you may want to consider picking some famous real life ones such as Neil Armstrong or Galileo and using them in the article instead. Part of the humour of quoting from sources is to take a famous source who everyone knows wouldn't say things like that and attributing things to them that they never said, why else do some people fill their pages with silly quotes from famous people. Note that I'm not suggesting that you add a quote to the beginning of the article. The other thing was that the joke about the differing number of constellations didn't seem to go anyway. You need some sort of punchline to this as to why they disappeared, or why the different claim. Maybe they fell out of the sky, maybe god accidentally flicked a light switch, maybe the astronomers nowadays all have cataracts, there are tons of lines that would work here so experiement with what sounds best.
  • I just didn't really laugh for the appearance section. I get that you are trying to show the incompetence of the astronomers by quoting them say silly things but it just doesn't do it for me. This seems to be the running gag throughout the whole piece, which is unfortunate because I don't think it has the strength to support it's own weight, let alone that of the article. It would probably be a good idea if you go back and redo this section differently...somehow.
  • Mythos - This section was really confusing. First we have a statement that the origin of Orion is well know, then we have the two fake astronomers assuring us they really know their stuff. How is that pertinent to origin of Orion? It then looks like you've gone on to quote them explaining the mythos of Orion, except that instead of quoting it in one long quote you break it up into a couple of smaller quotes with the words they would presumably have said if you were quoting them. Again the incompetence of the astronomers really fails to turn into humour here. Demonstrating a supposedly learned person actually being completely ignorant is a valid tool. But approaching it in such a blunt manner just causes it to lose it's edge. Satire like that is meant to have finesse and make cutting remarks, while this sort sounds a bit more like what upper primary or lower high school kids would consider to be 'kind of amusing'.
  • Other cultures- I'm afraid I don't get the first part of the joke. The second part has a bit of link spam in an attempt to discredt Mr Irving, as if he needed further discrediting. It also falls a bit flat since he isn't actually a real person, making fun of someone's ignorance really only works if they were real people.

The excessive sarcasm used didn't really garner any laughs. Here you have a person calling contellations 'bright star thingys' and after that you quote him as being knowledgeable. It's obvious that is not knoweledgable, so you don't have to reinforce it by using sarcasm, it just seems kind of extraneous where sarcasm's primary purpose is to point out the absurdity of something by stating that it is the exact opposite in order to prove a point. There isn't really any point being proven here, you're just calling him knowledgeable when he isn't.

Concept: 1 At the moment the quoting incompetent astronomers in a kind of interview giving an explanation of what it is and where it came from isn't really working out very well. Orion is a pretty well known star constellation and there are a lot of other approaches to use for it. Personally I think the best idea you could do in order to give it a fresh approach is to create a new page called Orion's Belt, turn the current Orion page into a redirect, and then write the Orion's Belt page up as if it were an article on a set of designer label Orion belts. It's a play on the words of the name of the constellation and also allows you access to all of the related fashion industry humour that you can then use.
Prose and formatting: 5 There weren't any problems with spelling that I could see and the layout was fairly neat except for a bit of white space at the bottom. There were however two big problems with it:
  • The newspaper interviewing style of the piece. This isn't really an UnNews article so having such a large amount of quotes making up the article made it rather unwieldy. As I mentioned before a lot of the quotes seem to be continuous quotes, and you've just placed the quotation marks in the wrong place. For instance 'have recently detected that there is a very faint "sort of smudge..."', reading that most people would expect the words 'there is a very faint' to be included in the quote. Slightly further down you've placed a break in the quotations in between '"...with your finger in the sky", one will see the blue-white star "Riggle...", the words read like one long complete sentence, so why would the middle part not be quoted?
  • It tries to maintain a semi encyclopediac tone but combined with the excessive quotations it breaks up too easily. Now I'm going to stop flogging this part because I'm starting to sound like a nagging housewife.
Images: 5 There are images, but there could probably be some better ones.
  • For the first picture there isn't really much you can see which makes it kind of bland, and the caption doesn't really make sense. The theory of why it is called Orion is because he was a golfer, um what?
  • The second picture has a much better and more viewable scene, and the caption is a nice way to make fun of early beliefs that assumed that constellations were actually real things/people. But it juts out below the bottom of the text which causes the white space to appear.
Miscellaneous: 2 I use this section as kind of 'would I email this to my friends to read' recommendation section. Obviously at the moment the page has some real problems and would probably best be served by starting over from the beginning (again >_<")
Final Score: 15 Like I said in the concept part, I think the best way this article could be improved is by taking it in a radically different direction. You could run with the designer belt label as I suggested. Or it could be turned into a secret 13th member of the zodiac that plans to depose the other twelve so it can be the only member and explain the plans/battle between them. The 'Orion is a constellation' concept just doesn't seem to lend itself to too much. Now with all of that said I'm still going to say that you should be able to do a really good job of improving it once you pick a different approach (partly because I've read your user page and you already have written several featured articles and won noob of the month so I know you can do it). If you want to make any comments or discuss it you can do so on my talk page.
Reviewer: Sequence 03:39, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
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