Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Europa (moon)

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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 22:39, 7 January 2008.

[edit] Europa (moon)

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I'm nominating this article for featured article because it was reccomended for nomination upon achieving GA Serendipodous 00:25, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Comments - looks good but some tweaks'd be helpful getting this one over the line:
which helped buttress the emerging heliocentric cosmology. - sentence seems to stop abruptly.
"the surface is probably decoupled from the interior by a subsurface layer of liquid or ductile ice," - can this be rephrased without quotes?
However, at present it is far from certain that NASA will actually fund this mission, as funding for it is not included in NASA's 2007 budget plan - does this need to be updated to 2008 now?

Otherwise a very good article and great read. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:10, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Support— I made a few minor tweaks to the text, but in all other respects the article satisfies FA criteria. It is comprehensive, well sourced and well written and deserves to be featured. The only problem that I can find in the article is lack of inline citations in the infobox. I think it should not be very difficult to add them. Ruslik (talk) 11:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Weak oppose: complete, but there isn't the bibliography. However, i'll change my vote :)--Brískelly[citazione necessaria] 17:08, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

If it's complete, why are you opposing? This doesn't look like an actionable comment. Pagrashtak 17:41, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I've addressed most concerns raised; there were a few refs in the infobox I haven't been able to find. Also, it seems a number of ref tags have suddenly become invalid for no apparent reason. Does anyone know why this happened? Serendipodous 22:15, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I seem to have fixed the "problem", but knowing how many refs use that particular format, these should be cropping up virtually everywhere now. Serendipodous 22:26, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Support with prejudice. I was the one who passed this article for GA. I think it represents some very fine work. As an astronomer, I think it may be the best resource on this subject on-line. ScienceApologist (talk) 16:08, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Support Very nice article, as said above needs inline citations, but still fine without. I would only advise possibly moving a image or two from the right side to the left. So many on the right just doesnt seem good to me. But perhaps that's just me.-Mastrchf91- 05:41, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
Could you flag the missing citations with [citation needed]? Serendipodous 18:29, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Support This is an excellent article on a fascinating moon. My only suggestion is to cite the last sentence in "Spacecraft proposals and cancellations." Shrewpelt (talk) 01:41, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Support Comment—It's a fine article overall, but I'm not quite ready to support it yet because of the following concerns:
    • The "Orbit" section does not provide an energy source for the internal heating of Europa. It only explains the mechanism of the heat generation. It needs to explain the energy source in terms of changes in the orbits of the Galilean satellites or a slowing of the rotation of Jupiter, whichever is the correct source. (Didn't I raise this before for Io?)
    • What does "put an upper limit on this hypothetical slippage of no faster than once every 12,000 years for the surface relative to its interior" mean? Is the exterior completing a full rotation relative to the interior during that time frame? Or does a "slippage" only occur once every 12,000 years? If the later, then what is the magnitude of the slippage?
    • ...the atmosphere would "fill only about a dozen Houston Astrodomes"... Does this mean in a solid form? Or a gas at STP?
    • I think the article should clarify why Europa does not share the same internal heat source as the Earth: radioactive decay.
    Sorry.—RJH (talk) 16:54, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Y Done I think I answered all these comments (see article). Ruslik (talk) 19:07, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Yes that looks good. Thank you. I'm pleased to change my preference to support.—RJH (talk) 20:13, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Support for a fascinating article.--GrahamColmTalk 09:40, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Oppose—Lots of good in this article, but the writing needs improvement. Here are examples from just the lead. Please collaborate with someone fresh to the article; try locating them from the edit histories/edit summaries of FAs on similar topics.
  • "shortly thereafter" --> "soon after", or better still, enlighten us as to the year.
  • "Very" is usually very redundant.
  • "composed" twice in two sentences, the second followed wrongly by "from".
  • "Its surface is composed of ice and is one of the smoothest in the Solar System, indicating that it is very young"—the surface is (again, "very") young, or the moon is? Ah, it's clear only in the next sentence (not good).
  • , which, which.
  • "also drives"—remove the first word.
  • "to date"—which date? What will this mean in five years' time? "As of 2007"?
  • "ensures that".
  • " would have specifically targeted"—Spot the redundant word.
  • "Conjecture on extraterrestrial life has ensured a high profile for the moon and led to continued lobbying for future missions."—"has led"; "continued" is not right—"continual"? Tony (talk) 13:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

PS MOS breaches aplenty, such as "A giant tube worm colony at a Pacific ocean hydrothermal vent." (A caption that is merely a nominal group, not a sentence, and thus doesn't want a period (check others); and the muliplication symbol should be spaced. And I see ellipsis dots wrongly unspaced. Semicolon before "et al."? Hate those semicolons, anyway. "(2006-Jul-13)"—is that an acceptable date format? "19,041-19,048"—MOS breach, en dash required, and SO hard to read: "19,041–48" (better?). Tony (talk) 13:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment: if the spaced × is the accepted style, then it should also be applied to the {{e}} template, which is a widely-used template for inserting exponential notation.—RJH (talk) 15:45, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
I addressed all these issues (except one) and MOS breaches. However I think 3×1018 looks better than 3 × 1018. In addition, in this case × is not realy a multiplication symbol. It does not symbolize any real mathemathical operation here. Ruslik (talk) 19:52, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
If not a multiplication, what on earth is it? Spaces must be used, and I've already complained on the talk page of that template, which cannot be used until it's fixed. They don't seem to care. Please do not use it here until it's fixed. Tony (talk) 03:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Well it would certainly be easy enough to develop a separate template to meet the MoS consensus style, rather than using {{e}}.—RJH (talk) 17:52, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (ISBN 0521471540) uses spaced × in scientific notation, as does Mathematica. On the other hand, the Springer Style Guide does not. There doesn't seem to be any type of international standard, so I'm not sure why Wikipedia should be enforcing a particular style layout in this case. Perhaps the MoS consensus needs to be reexamined for scientific notation?—RJH (talk) 22:11, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Other style guides are irrelevant: we have our own, and it says—quite rightly, in my view—to space them. I do hope you're arranging for the rest of the article to be copy-edited by someone fresh to it. Tony (talk) 03:03, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
I inserted those spaces. I asked two editors for copy-edit. And I hope this article will be ultimately in FA list. Ruslik (talk) 17:48, 5 January 2008 (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.