Wikipedia:Featured article review/1755 Lisbon earthquake/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed 17:57, 19 January 2008.

[edit] 1755 Lisbon earthquake

[edit] Review commentary

Notifications were added at WP Portugal, WP Disaster management, Sandover, Rbellin, Aloan --Donar Reiskoffer (talk) 07:28, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

2(c): no in-line references at all.--Donar Reiskoffer (talk) 07:51, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

• Incorrect. It has inline references aplenty, as well as references. It does not have footnotes, and these are not the same things. Geogre (talk) 11:35, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Remove, unless citations added. Comment I would agree it has plenty of references—in the "References" section. I would not, however, agree that it has sufficient in-line references. There are a very few page numbers, which can be found immediately after direct quotes. However, most of the paragraphs throughout most of the article have no reference citations at all. Unless these are added, the FA star should be removed. The article is well-written overall, and someone with access to the listed references could surely cite the facts accordingly and save it from that fate! MeegsC | Talk 14:03, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

So, um, how do we know how many citations are needed? I mean, if a paragraph has only one reference, do we know that it needed three? One per sentence? Is there a formula, or do we do something like, "Statements likely to be challenged?" That last would then seem to ask who has challenged the factuality, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be necessary then to have Donarreiskoffer actually say that something is untrue? Wouldn't it wait for the talk page to have challenges? Otherwise, would the people nominating please list exactly the proper density of note per word so that all articles may be saved from the fire? Also, if page numbers are necessary, is it possible that there are no page numbers? I've used references before that didn't have them. If you know that there are page numbers, does that mean you have the references at hand? If you do not have them, what does that mean? Again, the magic formula would be nice. That way people could enter their articles into databases and produce stars. Utgard Loki (talk) 15:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

The reader should be able to find, looking at the article alone, where any assertion which "is challenged or is likely to be challenged", can be supported. If it is genuinely consensus of all the authorities listed, fine; but this article is (quite sensibly) divided into historical and philosophical sections, and sources which support one will not gp into the other. What we should require is enough citation to find the book in which the assertion is, and then to find the page on which it is stated, once one has the book in hand. Page numbers are preferable for this; but common sense should apply. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:53, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Marvellous page. Nothing wrong with it at all. Giano (talk) 14:38, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

• Questions: For the sort of citation that makes an FA, compare Edward Teller, just successfully reviewed.
  • It looks like the history of the quake itself is a collation of Brooks, Kendrick, and perhaps Chase. Is this true? (If it is, the article should say so, and not leave the reader to guess.)
  • Is every detail in those sections easily found there?
  • If not, what are the exceptions?
  • What did you use Seco y Pinto for?
  • Where is Pombal's survey found (and the comparison with Chinese work)? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:43, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment - this is featured article standard. No need to remove. Put on a list of articles that need the connection between their content and their references made clearer. Carcharoth (talk) 12:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment - Compared to Great Fire of London this article does not seem comprehensive and therefore fails criteria 1b. Questions I would like to have answered when reading this article are for example: What was Lisbon like at the time? If there were political tensions after the quake, then what were the political situation at the time. Also the lead mentions that the quake disrupted Portugals colonial ambitions - this is not mentioned later. On a more scientific note it would be nice to know if Lisbon is located on a major fault line and is there a history of earthquakes in the area?--Peter Andersen (talk) 21:38, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree it could be more comprehensive, but that is something that should be addressed over the next few weeks (hopefully). For now, your fault line query can be answered by Image:1755 Lisbon Earthquake Location.gif (which should be discussed in the article). The red line is the boundary between the Eurasian plate and the African plate. See also Image:Plates tect2 en.svg. The epicentre was to the south of that boundary, and Lisbon is to the north. It would be nice to know how the USGS (and others) calculate epicentres for historical earthquakes like this. Carcharoth (talk) 01:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "Could be as good as X" is not the same thing as "is not FA standard." It is FA standard. It's not a footnoterphone traffic jam, but it has references and citations for statements that are or are likely to be challenged. With that standard, the burden is on those who wish to remove: what do you challenge, and where is the contrary information that challenges it? This is not, "Where can you imagine having a question," like the fellow who wanted "Montana is a state" footnoted, but where is there contrary information that throws this into question? The article is pretty faithful and synthetic. Geogre (talk) 02:14, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Geogre are you commenting on my statement? I said nothing about footnotes but questioned whether the article is comprehensive.--Peter Andersen (talk) 08:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
• Comment My recollection is that the disparate sections of the article (philosophy and seismology, for example) came from various subject experts, not from those named book sources; it's very much a synthetic article. I think it will be hard to retrofit the article with footnotes. Though largely accurate, the most debated fact in the article is the death count; I've seen estimates a fraction of the 60,000-100,000 thousand figure, and the article would benefit from a discussion about the limits of our actual knowledge about how many people died. (There was no census taken, etc.) In any case, however, it's unfair to compare this article to the one about the London fire. There's far less readily-available source material for the 1755 earthquake, in my opinion, and no good recent book-length studies, at least in English. Sandover (talk) 02:55, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
• Comment There are two main issues: WP:WIAFA 1(b) "Comprehensive" and 1(c) "factually accurate", which includes consideration of WP:V.
• 1(b) is actually the more important one in this particular case, IMO, for reasons I'll explain in the next section. I think we are spending time rehashing tired old philosophical arguments about 1(c), when we have a responsibility (to the general readership of Wikipedia) to spend more time digging into the topic itself to see where we can improve the content of the article. For example, "is the article comprehensive"? Well, I dunno (yet), but I have found & downloaded 12 articles so far from JSTOR that hold the promise of interesting nuggets of info to be considered. I'd be happy to email those articles (and potentially more, as I find them) to anyone who so wishes.
• 1(c) [Disclaimer: My view that the "challenged or likely to be challenged" standard is a minimum threshold are clear and are probably fairly well known.] Squaring off and rehashing our entrenched views is counterproductive. Not only is the horse dead, it's starting to stink like something rotten.

• This article's topic is both "dead history" (as opposed to current events; of course it has made some mark on the present) as well as being completely noncontroversial (aside from the fuzziness of our knowledge about the number of casualties). There's probably little content here which can be attributed to any particular scholar. These facts do not completely excuse the article from the burden of supplying inline cites, but they slide it down the spectrum toward "fewer" rather than "more."
• In the past, in other reviews, I've seen Sandy and others provide bullet points showing where they believe inline refs should be placed. I've also noticed such bullet point lists are sometimes summarily ignored. :-) However, some people complain that {{cn}} tags disrupt the flow of the article. So this is what I'm gonna do: Below this I'll list places where this article in its current incarnation needs cites (IMO). Anyone can (and probably will) challenge my justification for any item on the list; I'll try to explain further. If no action of any kind is taken in a couple days, I'll uglify the article with {{cn}} tags. here we go:

• "as many as 90,000 were killed" Specific number; functionally the same as a direct quote.
• "Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed" Ditto.
• "It is said that many animals" Who said it?
• "Now? Bury the dead and take care of the living," Direct quote.
• one day they will be small Ditto [plus strangely different formatting than prior quote].
• "among the first seismically-protected constructions in the world" Strong claim.
• "whose severity he believed was due to too many" OK. There's no reference by Rousseau in the references, so mentioning his name doesn't point me directly to a particular source for that quote. Yes, Rousseau is mentioned in the title of a publication by Dynes, but connecting that fact to the quote requires two steps of logic abstarcting (perhaps slightly) away from the idea of an easily locatable quote. That's one step too many. Plus Wikipedia is not a mind reader.
• "powerful Duke of Aveiro and the Távora family" There is a cause-and-effect logical sequence in this whole paragraph that just wafts a vague aroma of being WP:OR, even though I am fully aware that it is not. This chain of logic is an analysis that has been put forward by some scholar. That scholar needs to be credited. It is his/her thought; not Wikipedi'as, and should not be expressed in Wikipedia's voice. However, I would be OK with a single cite at the end of the paragraph.
• "discussed and debated by contemporary scientists" This last one is a marginal case. It is not one that clearly falls under WP:V so much as it reflects common sense: many readers will want a footnote (as logically distinguished from a cite, but may include or consist entirely of a cite) which points them to the locus of this debate.
• "studies by modern Chinese seismologists " Ditto.
• "reconstruct the event from a scientific perspective" Ditto.

• Not quite done! I have nitpicks:

• "Negative Dialectics 361" Whose Negative Dialectics? Please put them in the ref section.
• (263). Ermm, umm, OK I guess that's probably some kind of MLA thing to place a naked page number out there in the text, isn't it?

• Ling.Nut (talk) 08:45, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Some great points there. If I find time over Christmas, I could be persuaded to work on this article, as disaster articles and history articles are topics I both enjoy reading about and writing about. I think three weeks takes us up to the end of the year, so Ling Nut, if no-one else takes you up on the JSTOR article offers, put me down as a possible. One point for now - it is not an entirely uncontroversial article - see the talk page for the discussion on the "hanging priests" issue. Carcharoth (talk) 22:00, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

• Will the original nominator please do the notifications per the instructions at the top of WP:FAR, and post a list back here? Has anyone been notified ??? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:24, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I have put notifications on a few relevant talk pages but forgot to put a mention of those notifications on this page. I added tese now. --Donar Reiskoffer (talk) 07:28, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

• Remove from featured status The prose is unprofessional, littered with poetry and bias. Its not comprehensive and its not clear what is referenced and what is not. And that "birth of seismology" section is very poor for its otherwise grandiose title. Shiva_eVolved 16:25, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concern is referencing (1c). Marskell (talk) 04:02, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

• Remove Still some quotes and claims requiring inline citations. DrKiernan (talk) 14:38, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
• Remove per DrKiernan and my previous statement.--Peter Andersen (talk) 12:28, 12 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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.