Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/City & South London Railway

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 23:59, 14 December 2007.

[edit] City & South London Railway

Self nomination. This article details the history of the first deep level tube railway and major electric railway - an important stage in the development of the London Underground and rail transport generally. It's already achieved Good Article status and I would like to hear others' thoughts on how it might be improved further.DavidCane 22:40, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Oppose I promoted the article to GA status, but it still needs some work. Firstly, the footnotes are poorly formatted. There only needs to be the author's last name, a year, a page number and a period at the end. Footnote number five needs a retrieval date. The other online footnotes are formatted correctly, it is only the print ones that are not.

There are also some inconsistencies in imperial and metric usage in the article. I would simply get rid of all the imperial (which I loathe) and use metric, however, I acknowledge wikipedia has a policy that does not discriminate as long as there is consistency. Unfortunately, in this article distance is in metric with imperial in parentheses, whereas the tunnels have the metric in parentheses. Please be consistent and choose on system as the preferred one (hopefully metric), or get rid one system entirely.

I also still think you have too many footnotes. I really don't see why you need multiple footnotes in one sentence, and I don't think that having footnotes where the stations names have been changed is important. I would also recommend consolidating some footnotes. You don't really need to have the same footnote in two consecutive sentences. If one sentence does not have a footnote, they can assume that the next footnote will refer to everything that has been written in the space between the prior footnote.

FA has a higher standard for writing than GA, and I find a lot of sentences to be short and choppy. Perhaps the best example of this is the sentence that goes 'This time the bill was rejected.' This is boring writing. Most of the article is very well written, with nice sentences, but if you get rid of some of the short the writing will be much improved and it won't feel choppy when read. Zeus1234 23:14, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

OK:

1. Footnote 5 fixed (now renumbered as 20) - retrieval date added.
2. The Rest of the footnotes fixed as per WP:CITE. There is no page number for the Douglas Rose publication because it is a map in booklet form rather than a book.
3. The reason for distances being given in kilometres and the tunnel diameters being given in feet and inches is that these are the "native" formats. London Underground measures distances on its lines in kilometres and the tunnels were originally excavated to imperial dimensions. I have changed it to put metric first.
4. I have gone through the footnotes list again and removed a few where the same source is cited twice in a row. I have also removed a few from the lead where these also appear in the body of the article.
5. The reason for providing references for dates when stations' names changed or stations opened and closed is that dates seem to be one of the facts that regularly get challenged with a {{fact}} tagged. Unfortunately, an article on an historical subject needs these to provide credibility and not to tag them would, I think, go against the recommendations of WP:WHEN. I have removed the details of the name changes with their references and will rely on the linked station articles to give detail on the changes.
6. Stylistically, I personally find the occasional short sentence helps modulate the pace and flow of the text and is particularly good for emphasis. Your previous GA review included a comment that some sentences were too long, so I'm not sure how to resolve this issue. I have altered the specific sentence mentioned.

--DavidCane 02:43, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I think that the issue I had in the Ga review was that some of the sentences were run-ons. Now there is nothing grammatically wrong with any of the sentences, but that having a combination of long sentences and very short ones breaks the flow. But, I may be nitpicking here. Once you add periods to the end of all the footnotes, I'll change my vote. Zeus1234 08:35, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Now revised to add full stops to the ends of all short references - incidentally, I was previously following the style shown at Wikipedia:Citing sources#Short footnotes with alphabetized full citations where full stops are not included at the end. --DavidCane 10:27, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me where you found your reference template. It is incorrect and I am working on getting the periods added to avoid further confusion. Zeus1234 10:50, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Support All of my concerns have been addressed. I am now supporting the ariticle for FA status. Zeus1234 10:50, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Comment Any other suggestions anybody?--DavidCane 23:22, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Support, excellent article, although I'm not sure that the legacy section should not mention that it along with the Central Line bear responsibility for inflicting a tunnel radius that while relatively economic to build has created continuing problems with cooling and forces people standing at the sides of carriages to stoop, unlike other more modern railways, such as the Paris metro.--Grahamec 02:30, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I have added a comment in the legacy section. The tunnel diameter of 11 ft 6 ins used by the CLR was actually set by the 1892 Joint Select Committee as a minimum. Greathead, recognising that his original choice of 10 ft 2 ins for the diameter of the C&SLR was too small, recommended that 12 ft should be the minimum diameter for tube tunnels. The extra 1 ft diameter of the CLR tunnel involved removing 20% more spoil from deep underground compared with the C&SLR. Greathead's recommendation would have increased the spoil to be removed by a further 11% over the C&SLR's quantities (Badsey-Ellis, Antony [2005]. London's Lost Tube Schemes. Capital Transport. ISBN 185414-293-3.  p. 71) If the diameter of the tunnels of the later tube lines had been increased to Greathead's 12 ft, the additional costs to dig the tunnels would have made it even more difficult for the companies to raise the construction funds and we may not have the lines we have today. The original sections of the Paris Metro were constructed using the cut and cover method pioneered by the Metropolitan Railway so the size of the tunnels there was not constrained in the same way.--DavidCane (talk) 15:36, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

• Support - Well sourced, but the Lead/Intro is a bit short, with some awkward one sentence paragraphs. Might want to have someone go through and make sure cites use WP:CIT for uniformity, and do some minor copyediting. Curt Wilhelm VonSavage (talk) 07:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC).

I have expanded the lead section and changed the breaks around to avoid the one sentence paragraph and have formatted the references to web sites to use {{cite web}} formatting. Other linked references use {{cite book}} or {{LondonGazette}}.

• Oppose—1a, 1c. I'm sorry to be a pest, but the opening paragraph made me look as though I'd sucked on a lemon.

The City & South London Railway (C&SLR) is considered to be the first deep-level underground "tube" railway in the world,[1] and also the first major railway in the world to use electric traction. Originally intended to be operated with cable-hauled trains, the collapse of the cable contractor whilst the railway was under construction forced a change to electric traction before the line opened - a still experimental technology at the time.

• • Who's doing the considering? Remove, since you provide a reference. BUT, who is Wolmar: ref 1 is simply "Wolmar 2004, p. 4.". Please do an audit on the referencing—we need the standard details (title, publisher, etc.) for each entry, so that our readers can follow the trail.
  • Remove "also", for heaven's sake. Replace "to be operated with" --> "for".
  • "While" is modern; "whilst" is rather old-fashioned. Plain English, please.
  • Read MOS on em and en dashes; the hyphen is wrong as an interruptor.
  • "an experimental technology at the time" is better.

Then: "through", not "in". "high-backed seating"—hyphen please. MOS.

I won't go on. Here's a good opportunity to recruit a good copy-editor to WP from one of the countless railway-enthusiast clubs—surely there are such people. Try messaging online. If that's more a medium-term goal, try researching edit-summaries on the edit-history pages of other good railway articles. See who's good. Ask them nicely. Tony (talk) 02:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

• Y Done It is something called short citations, which is an acceptable form of referencing. I've linked all of them. - Mailer Diablo 13:58, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Tony for your comments and Mailer Diablo for wiki-linking the references. Ironically, each reference was originally presented in the full style Tony prefers but this was changed during the GA review to the short style now seen which does have the utility of avoiding duplication of information.

• Hopefully, opposition on 1c is now resolved.
• I have been more emphatic with the opening sentence as suggested. I have used "for" in the second sentence as suggested for brevity but will be leaving the longer form in the haulage and infrastructure section as I feel this cannot be shortened without losing explanation.
• I have checked through the hyphens, em and en dashes and fixed, I think, these. I will read through again for any pesky missing hyphens.
• I wasn't happy with "a still experimental technology at the time." myself and have replaced it with your suggestion.
• The jury seems to be out on whilst v while. Although whilst is seen as archaic in some quarters (America for example) it's still fairly broadly used in Britain. To make the article seem less archaic to those who aren't used to seeing whilst, I have changed the four instances in the article.
• I feel that "ran ... in a pair of tunnels..." is preferable to "ran ... through a pair of tunnels..." as the latter suggests (to me at least) that the tunnel was open at each end, which was not the case.

I'll do a thorough copy-edit tomorrow. --DavidCane 01:47, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. May be worth adding a few high-value wikilinks to the article. Perhpas link electric traction to Railway electrification in Great Britain or Railway electric traction? By the way, isn't Parliament a proper noun in this context? (That's the way I've always seen it written.) CloudNine (talk) 11:37, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Good idea to link to Railway electrification in Great Britain - done (may add some additional info to that article as well). You're correct with regard to Parliament and I've corrected that as well. --DavidCane (talk) 01:31, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

• Withdrawn oppose, but please fix the ellipsis dots, which need to be space per MOS. And:
  • "at opening, a single flat fare of two pence, collected at a turnstile, was charged for all passengers". First two words are unclear: do you mean "in the first year of operation", or what? "A single flat fare of two pence was collected from all passengers as they passed through a turnstile."? So if it were my nomination, I'd get someone to pass over it with a tooth-comb again, whether on this page or after it leaves. Tony (talk) 14:19, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Y Done Thanks Tony and also Epbr123 and SandyGeorgia for their assistance - I had never realised the number of times I use "number of times" :). This copy editing process is proving an educational experience and will help improve the other articles I've worked on. I'm going to print this out and read through on paper next - I find that often helps identify shortcomings. --DavidCane (talk) 00:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

No need to thank for me for fixing italcs and boldface; minor tweaks as I read. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:48, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.