Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Oklahoma

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 18:13, 25 August 2007.

[edit] Oklahoma

Self Nomination Oklahoma's Centennial is coming up, and the article has undergone extensive renovation. The article is concise, well cited, and comprehensive. Okiefromokla•talk 02:25, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments Close, but not there yet... Some issues to consider:

• The lead does not really need to be explicitly referenced. I wouldn't necessarily consider removing any refs, but since the lead is a summary, every fact in the lead should be referenced later in the article.
• The economy section seems incomplete. No mention is given to agriculture, yet the lead specifically calls it a "major food producer". Indeed the entire section reads a tad hagiographic. Have there been NO issues, no negative sectors of the Oklahoma economy at ALL?
• The cities and towns section does not explain the defintion of these in an Oklahoma context. Definitions of "cities" and of "towns" varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. An explanatory paragraph may help.
• The Brances of Gov't section makes NO mention of the executive, and there are two paragraphs smashed into one. There should be 3 paragraphs here: One for Executive one for Legislative and one for Judicial. Since the one paragraph that is there deals with two unrelated topics (legislative and judicial) it should at LEAST be split.

The article still needs some spit polish. This should be a start. I am sure others will find some issues. It is a pretty darned good start at an FA, but still not quite there yet. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 05:11, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I do note that the agriculture section I added is a little small, but I managed to pick the highlights of some very boring stats and reports. Let me know if you have any suggestions for more content if needed. I added a negative fact to economy (OK is one of the worst states for using of non-renewable energy) but not sure what else to add. I looked at Minnesota (the only state featured article) for some ideas, but its just a rundown of the economic strengths and statistics of that state and not much help. Lastly, I usually argue against removing refs from the lead (my personal feelings), but since every ref in the lead is already in the body, it wouldn't be difficult to remove them if that's what is decided here or if you feel strongly about it. Thanks for the suggestions and thanks in advance for continued input. Okiefromokla•talk 17:58, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

P.S.: I reworked the lead a bit and changed the ref layout to be less cluttered. Okiefromokla•talk 02:40, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Caught one more thing "total of twelve years service in both the House and Senate"... Is that 12 cumulative years, or 12 years per house? --Jayron32|talk|contribs 04:51, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Cumulative. I changed the wording to make it more clear and added a ref since it wasn't in the current one. Okiefromokla•talk 16:52, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose—Improved; provisional neutral. 1a. Gets off to a cracking pace, and I was looking forward to adding my support. But then I struck trouble as early as the lead:
  • "A hotbed for college athletics"—Some readers will have visions of locker rooms and showers. Reword.

Done

• • See MOS on linking: why are many dictionary words linked? We do speak English. For example, in the lead, "mountain ranges", "forests", "Christianity", "territory", none of them piped to a focused article. Please audit the whole article for these and delink so that high-value links are not diluted.

Will do. Though remember Wikipedia is worldwide. Would you support wikilinking the word Taoism or even Islam? Christianity is not a worldwide religion, and certainly has a point to the article, as it descirbes the overwhelming religious makeup of the state. "Territory" is linked to Territories of the United States, since this is what Indian Territory was, and that's the subject of the sentence. I will go through and comb the lesser-needed wikilinks.

• • What is this doing in the lead? Even without the extraneous stuff, it has problems.

"With a prevalence of German and Native American ancestry, more than 25 languages are spoken in the state, the most in the nation.[12]Hmm...that's funny Manahattan has about 190 and Roges Park in Chicago ( only 1.9 sq miles) has about 120 languages."

That was vandalism added early this morning, its deleted now. About your comment that the lead has problems: You should know that I have a hard time writing great leads. If the lead is really so bad, please give productive suggestions for improving it if needed, rather than opposing the article because of it.

• • "It" (I guess that means Oklahoma) once served as a ... territory for Native Americans. Um, I think it's strange to cast an administrative/political unit of the conquering Europeans as a territory that had any meaning whatsoever to the original owners.

I don't care to argue the socio-political meaning of Indian Territory but during most of the 19th century it was an organized territory designated to Native Ameircans by the federal government, which recieved dozens of relocated tribes. Please read through the history section. I did, however, reword it to make it clear what the terrotory was.

• • "roughly even political makeup"—it's sort of explained in the rest of the sentence, but this is a vague, unsatisfactory expression. And how can political "makeup" (rather informal word for this context) be defined by the number of registered voters for parties: that is only one narrow definition.

I changed the wording to make it more clear.

And at random: "Forests cover approximately 24% of the state"—Remove "approximately"; the lack of decimal point flags that it's approximate. Temperature chart: Ugly Upper-Case Letters And Rather Large Font Size. Plus indicate F/C somewhere. % then percent. Metric equivalents throughout (I noticed acres). Caption for oil machine is missing a word and a hyphen. "Arts and theater"—category problem in that title. Just "Arts". "Fine art museums"—hyphen, I think. "Carries a circulation"? Has. En dashes and hyphens mixed in list of religions.

The section is Art and theater because it talks about art and theater. This is a common section title in FA places, I have never seen anyone object to it. Also, you are incorrect, it is number, then % sign.

Another issue is that all 158 references are to websites, although there are plenty of books in "Further reading". Bit unbalanced.

It is not a requirement for featured articles to be sourced from books. In fact, many editors believe websites should be the only citations since Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia and its easy to have the source at your fingertips rather than to have to find a book to check if the statement is accurately cited.

Please engage new collaborators to help sift through the prose of the entire article. What I've mentioned here is just a small sample. This is worth saving and can be brought up to standard if you act now. Tony 11:39, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting; I have been waiting a while for someone to comment. As you can see, I went through and commented on each of your points, and some of them I do not agree with (I hopefully fixed the issues you pointed out that I didn't comment on). Also, please give more examples of what needs to be "sift"ed out of the prose. I read through it, and it appears fine to me. Okiefromokla•talk 16:44, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

• Thanks. You need to locate collaborators; fresh eyes are a great advantage at this stage. There are many copy-editors on WP lurking on the edit-history pages of similar articles. Ask them nicely. You've used both "%" and "percent": that was my point—consistency within an article is required. While I was flicking through to confirm that, I found a hyphen used wrongly as a minus sign; have you decided whether your C degree signs will be spaced or unspaced? Read MOS on units of measurement and math. symbols. Tony 00:47, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Well I have to say I am very relieved you didn't mean that the "%" sign goes before the percent number... I was a little worried lol. All the %s have been changed to "percent" except for in the religion section, because to paraphrase WP:MOS: "percent" should be used in the body of the text except in complicated lists. I have taken care of other dash/hyphen, metric, temperature degree spacing, and other MOS problems, at least the ones I caught. I will continue to double check for errors periodically, as you might want to as well before supporting the article. About the prose needing a copy-edit, I have asked some editors for help, but I am also frustrated that this wouldn't be something I can't fix on my own. We can wait, of course, for some other editors to comb through the article but I would extremely appreciate any example you could give me so I could also attempt to work on it myself. Any particular sections in need? Any particular specific issues? Also, are you fine with what I have done in response to your previous list of requests? I'd like to cross out all that have been satisfied. Thanks again. Okiefromokla•talk 02:43, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

• Left and right side images squeezing text to one word a line. Need to fiddle with them to avoid this. Also at the top of the History section.

I don't know what you mean. With my resolution and pic size preference there are no problems like this anywhere in the article. Usually, the number of words per-line is different for different resolutions or pic prefs, so there really isn't a way for the article to look uniform for every possible setting on each induvidual computer. Someone is bound to get a version that doesn't look as flowing as it does on most resolutions. If I can fix it, I will, but since there isn't any problem on my end I can't see what to do.

• Temperature table: text now obscured.

Not sure what you mean by this, but I increased the font size for good measure.

• 56 and 17 inches; um ... in normal speak, what's that?

I added the metric conversion, if that't what you meant.

*"Man-made"—well, many readers would prefer a gender-neutral term, but it's not mandatory. "Articificial"?

I'm not sure "artificial" is the right word. They're not "artificial" lakes, they're real lakes that were created by dams, so to say they are "artificial" is a little misleading, I think. I'll try to think of a better way to put it in the article maybe.*"United States history"—"American" better?

done.

• "the state had the fastest growing gross domestic product in the nation from 2005 to 2006, with a 10.8 percent rate of growth over the previous year, totaling $134 billion in 2006." "Fastest-growing" avoids possible ambiguity. Remove "over the previous year. We're told this in the lead, too, but nowhere do you provide the GDP per capita, which many readers would like as a measure of wealth.

Removed "over previous year" and inserted GDP per-capita.

*"Economy" section has lots of trivial links, such as "energy" and "government" (??)—they're not even piped to "Energy in Oklahoma". These should all go, so that important ones stand out. This issue hasn't been addressed throughout. I can see about a hundred. All spattered blue, which is harder to read and spoils the nice look of your article.

I went through and eliminated more wikilinks, let me know if its enough. Okiefromokla•talk 16:13, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Support I don't had time to read this word for word, but it looks good. The lead compiles with WP:LEAD, and I am satisfied with the citations.--milk the cows (Talk) 16:07, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Support I never did respond after all of the changes were made. This article is much improved, and I am glad to lend my support to it! --Jayron32|talk|contribs 01:03, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Support After briefly looking over this article, I feel that it is worthy of FA status. I'm very impressed with the number of citations. The article is extremely thorough. I wonder if the article may, in fact, go into a bit too much depth in a few sections; perhaps some of that material would be better suited for subarticles? Still, I am fully behind granting this article FA status. Great work! --MatthewUND^(talk) 05:39, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

• Support
  • Should probably add that there are no major league teams to the start of the sports section
  • Aren't OU/OSU sports the biggest sports draw in the state? Maybe they should be made more prominent in the section.
  • Clarify that PRI is broadcast in the state, not based there (based in in my state :)
  • Need to mention Native American government in some way.
• Other than that it's excellent! It's a lot of work getting a start article to FA isn't it? I worked on Minnesota for months. -Ravedave 04:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. I should thank you because I used Minnesota as a rough guideline for content when I and other editors almost completely rewrote this article. I do have a few reservations about a couple of your suggestions though:

• I don't really see reason to clutter the sports section with repetitive information, since it is already clearly stated that: "The NBA's New Orleans Hornets became the first major sports franchise based in Oklahoma when ... " Besides, most states don't have major sports teams, so I don't know if its such an important fact to clearly spell out that Oklahoma doesn't. It should be clear when only minor league professional teams are mentioned in the section.

• I added "minor league" in front of professional, that clears it up for me. Here in MN if you say "professional sports" people think major league, hence my confusion.

• While OU and OSU are certainly large sports attractions, since its a short section and there is limited space, I chose to order the three paragraphs in the most logical order I could: regular professional sports, irregular professional sports (the hornets, golf tournaments, etc), and college sports. I would have to probably re-write and re-structure the section to put college sports more at the top, and I certainly will do so but I wanted to explain the reasoning behind why it's this way before I did. What do you think?

• I personally would rank them by attendance/popularity, but this way is fine. It was my impression OKans were rabid OU fans.

Haha, well half of us would applaud you for that and half of us would probably stone you for that. I went to OSU for a semester myself... Okiefromokla•talk 03:18, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

• The other two bullets I completed.

Thanks! Okiefromokla•talk 00:17, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

• Excellent, I left additional comments above but the article is definitely FA quality. Congrats! -Ravedave 01:38, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
• Support. I absolutely think that this should be a FA. I translate it to Norwegian, and think it's very good. Jannizz

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.