Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/United States housing bubble/archive1

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[edit] United States housing bubble

The old nomination was incomprehensibly long [1], and the article has changed greatly since it was first nominated. I'm restarting this nomination. Raul654 04:52, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, except that a number of my queries, now archived, have not received a response or been addressed. Please refer to the archive. Tony 05:34, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Object. 1a (as discussed previously), 1b and c (comprensiveness and facts/references, WRT over-reliance on one source, given that the issues are likely to be debated by the experts). In addition, the "differential" frame now makes the formatting chaotic in that section. Tony 05:34, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Object. Formatting problems, lots of stuff is squashed into the article and causing overlaps it seems. The Notes section is very bloated, too many long paragraphs. Do we really need every single table and graph, and also...why do we need to see both covers of David Lereah's book? , one should be enough. Its close, but these things need to be fixed first. — Wackymacs 09:37, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Object. Pretty good, but per Wackymacs. —Jared Hunt September 9, 2006, 04:09 (UTC)
  • Object. Headlines too long. --queso man 17:28, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment. I am impressed with the no. of references, and usage of The Economist, but still I don't think I can support this unless it gets at least few proper academic refs.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  15:20, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Could you clarify this comment, please? Robert Shiller's work is considered the definitive academic work on this subject, as far as I am aware, and this article includes references to him and his work and his most famous housing price index plot. -- M0llusk 20:27, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. This article is independently getting very high praise and pointers from professionals in the blogosphere. E.g., here is Jonathan Miller at Matrix, "Housing Bubble Goes All Wikipedia On Us,"

Wikipedia adds an incredibly thorough entry on the whole housing bubble phenomenon called United States housing bubble. Hat tip to Calculated Risk.

It lays out much of the events associated with the end of the recent housing boom. Its long, but its a good read.

Here are some of the topics:

  • Controversy
  • Mania for home ownership
  • Widespread belief that housing is a risk-free, growth investment
  • Popularity of home purchasing in the media
  • Speculative purchases of homes
  • Crash of the dot-com bubble
  • Historically low interest rates
  • Differential relationship between interest rates and affordability
  • Interest-only and adjustable rate mortgages
  • Predictions and status of a market correction

Its makes a pretty strong argument for Wikipedia as a resource.
[italics added]. I think this independent blog entry by a professional real estate analyst pretty much says it all. The article has received excellent feedback during this process, and I'd like to thank those who took the time to make suggestions before. For the remainder of the comments, I will say that before editing this article and working for its inclusion as featured, I was concerned about, frankly, the well-known Wikipedia phenomenon of editors making pronouncements on subjects with which they have very little background or understanding. It's simply ludicrous to say for in an article with over 90 references that it is overly dependent on one source (Shiller), and also that it needs "proper academic references"— it's literally filled with these. And why have sequential covers of David Lereah's book? Isn't this (painfully) obvious just from reading the section in which these appear, the captions, and the book covers themselves?
NAR chief economist David Lereah's book in February 2005.
NAR chief economist David Lereah's book[1] in February 2005.
NAR chief economist David Lereah's book in February 2006.
NAR chief economist David Lereah's book[2] in February 2006.
The one substantive objection above is a formatting one. The article does have many graphs and images that are necessary to illustrate the reality of this controversial subject, and these overlap at some browser sizes. However, they look fine and professional at the default browser sizes I've seen. Making the article scale for all sizes is outside my Wiki-expertise—if other know how this can be done, please feel free to be bold. I've added votes from the previous page below. Frothy 21:10, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment — A fantastic article, to be sure (prose, references, data and presentation thereof, informative on the subject and complete, etc.). As soon as all licensing concerns with the images are worked out, I'll throw in support. Ryu Kaze 00:15, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Support — With the image issues taken care of, I now support for reasons given right above. Ryu Kaze 03:17, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Support although copyediting remains necessary. Rama's arrow 16:07, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
  • "Support" - fantastic job Frothy, and all others. I love to see encyclopedic articles about -current- events. Something only wikipedia could do. SlapAyoda 20:22, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

For those of you out there who have yet to read (or haven’t read lately) the Wikipedia page dedicated to the United States Housing Bubble, I would strongly recommend that you do so.

To say that the page is thorough would be an understatement.

It has been meticulously edited and formatted with many of the most compelling and pertinent data including housing cost and P/E analysis, charts, and discussion on the media and overall cultural factors that influenced the housing mania along with an abundance of exacting footnotes.

It is truly a living document dedicated to what may, in the end, be one of the most compelling stories of our time.

Thanks Frothy (and to the others) who have done such a superb job authoring this great Wiki page over the last nine months.
Frothy 17:35, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: There's simply too much supplementary material. If this page is viewed at 800x600, most of the page now looks fine, but those book covers mess up the layout. Just remove them—they are adequately explained in the text. There's also the issue of using fair use images to illustrate an article that's only somewhat related (that is, this isn't the article covering the book). There's also more work to be done on the prose, though it is better. Phrases like "Little did they realize that the values of investment properties, like those of stocks, will fluctuate from time to time" aren't completely neutral. All that said, this has improved significantly since it was first nominated. --Spangineeres (háblame) 03:23, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Object: This article is very important and highly relevant, but at this time it is mess that is awash with concerns. Without more editing this would make a mockery of the featured article process. For starters there are still copyrighted images that are not okay to be stealing. For another the article rambles endlessly from the very start. Seriously, "actual or hypothesized" is verbal mishmash. Stop it with the bigwords and write down what it is in clear and direct prose, already. Then come questionable references to time frame and relative bubbliness of various areas without even mentioning a metric. This article needs a lot of work and really isn't close to being worthy of featured status. Furthermore, I would specifically add that the recent ripping out of references to external blogs seems wrong to me because arguably at least one and possibly several of these blogs have content that is relevant, on topic, and reasonably well edited. -- M0llusk 20:19, 19 October 2006 (UTC)