Wikipedia:Featured article review/Seattle, Washington/archive1

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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 kept 02:00, 19 November 2007.

[edit] Seattle, Washington

[edit] Review commentary

Notified Lukobe, Jmabel, Bobblehead, and Wsiegmund as well as Wikipedia:WikiProject Seattle, Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington.

This article was promoted in early 2005 and I believe it has degraded over time. It is insufficiently referenced which includes the placement of verification and citation needed tags in some instances. There are external links in the body of the article and added citations have not been properly formatted. LaraLove 17:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, nothing to disagree with in as far as the external links in the body of the article, lack of formatting on some of the recently added citations go, and the citation needed tags and I'm starting to go through and clean those up. As far as insufficiently referenced, it does have 76 inline citations and 6 books in the Bibliography. How much more referencing would you like to see? Or conversely, what are the specific areas that you feel are under-referenced?--Bobblehead (rants) 18:00, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Truly. Because in such a textually dense, link-dense, and heavily referenced article, we need some more specific criticisms if we are to address them. - Jmabel | Talk 18:51, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Comments, undercited, and citations needed are fairly obvious, I added a few as samples. Large photo gallery. External link farm. See also farm, items which should be worked into the text. Incorrectly and incompletely formatted citations. Haven't examined the text yet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd be happy to help out if someone could put together a task list. --Lukobe 20:27, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Question on the image gallery. WP:MoS#Images seems to encourage the use of galleries for articles with a large number of pictures and there is no prohibition on galleries in WP:FACR. --Bobblehead (rants) 20:54, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Perhaps I worded that incorrectly. There isn't necessarily the need for additional references, just the need for additional inline citation. Whether or not the following information is in the current references, I don't know. But these are some of the areas I'm speaking of:
  • "Its murder rate peaked in 1994 with 69 homicides. In 2004, Seattle's murder rate hit a 40-year low with 24 homicides. Seattle's crime rate has seen an increase in 2006, as have the crime rates in Tacoma and Lakewood, Washington." - Statistical information should be cited.
  • Several sentences under "Economic history".
  • "The rivers, forests, lakes, and fields were once rich enough to support one of the world's few sedentary hunter-gatherer societies."
  • "The Smith Tower was the tallest building on the West Coast from its completion in 1914 until the Space Needle overtook it in 1962."
  • "Seattle Center shares a combination of roles within the city, ranging from a public fair grounds to a civic center, though recent economic losses have called its viability and future into question."
  • "early city leaders Arthur Denny and Carson Boren insisted on orienting their plats relative to the shoreline..."
  • Seattle is often thought of as the home of grunge rock..." - I know that's common knowledge here, but is it common knowledge world-wide?
  • The "Culture" section is without citation after the first paragraph.
  • The "Tourism" section has one citation.
  • The "Sports" and "Outdoor activities" sections lack citation entirely.
  • The "Media" section has one citation.
  • Speaking of Boeing, "it remains the largest private employers in the Seattle metropolitan area."
  • "It is estimated that King County has 8,000 homeless on any given night."
  • "Up to 14 percent of Seattle's homeless are children and young adults."
  • The "Government and politics" section has one citation.
  • The "Official nickname, flower, slogan, and song" section has one citation.
  • The second paragraph under "Education" needs further citation.
  • The fourth paragraph under "Education" also needs further citation for the claims of various rankings.
  • "In 1974, a 60 Minutes story on the success of the then four-year-old Medic One paramedic system called Seattle 'the best place in the world to have a heart attack'."
  • "...the monorail's two trains collided on a curve near Westlake Center where a design flaw made it impossible to pass safely."
  • "Southwest Airlines recently requested permission to move its services from Sea-Tac to Boeing Field but did not receive permission."
  • Other possible issues:
  • Is "In December 2006, the Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm brought very heavy rain and disrupted power to much of the city" really worth mentioning?
  • The See also under "Topography" doesn't seem appropriately placed.
  • "Thunderstorms in the Cascades sometimes produce frequent lightning, which makes for a brilliant light show for those in town." - The "for those in town" seems unencyclopedic to me.
  • The layout of the "Cityscape" section seems very odd to me.
  • "Seattle's cool mild climate helps a huge proportion of its population engage in outdoor recreation." - A "huge portion"?
  • The See also under "Seattle mayors of note" doesn't seem appropriately placed.
  • "There are also a handful of excellent smaller schools" reads more like an advertisement than an encyclopedic article. Perhaps remove the "excellent" or provide sources to back it up.
  • Make sure the "See also" links are not already included in the body. LaraLove 21:03, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the detailed list! Looks like the FA requirements for references have changed since the last time I looked at 'em. Also, I have company in town through the weekend, so unless the rest of the article's editors address your concerns (and the others that I'm noticing) cleaned up, I won't be able to do that much until the early part of next week. --Bobblehead (rants) 22:01, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not volunteering to do the bulk of this, but if there is anything someone tries to cite for and can't, let me know: I'm usually pretty good at tracking stuff down. - Jmabel | Talk 22:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I've been making some comments on the article's talk page. - Jmabel | Talk 06:00, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

If someone would place explicit {{cn}} notices in the article for whatever is considered to need citation, that would greatly increase the chance of these being addressed. - Jmabel | Talk 23:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Is anyone working on this? It's not looking good; at first glance, the overlinking stands out. Common words known to most English speaking people (like coffee and earthquake) are linked, and we find trolleybuses linked twice within a few sentences. See WP:MOSLINK and WP:CONTEXT, common words need not be linked and only the first occurrence of relevant terms needs to be linked. See also is out of control and needs to be worked into the article. There are still uncited statements. The Gallery is kind of obnoxious for a featured article, but I'm not sure that can be a valid oppose. I'd like to see a stronger citation on most educated city in the US (exceptional claims require exceptional sources); it also needs an as of date and better qualifiers according to what is said in MSN. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on it, but slowly. Thanks for the status check. --Bobblehead (rants) 20:17, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are citations and their formatting (1c, 2c) and MoS issues. Marskell 19:32, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Could you please be more specific on the concerns about citation formatting? I'm unaware of any currently with problems. Or maybe this has already been dealt with. - Jmabel | Talk 20:38, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
  • The references aren't correctly formatted; some have template errors, some are missing information, others have odd layouts. Ref 3, for example, doesn't have a page number. One of the later refs is missing a closing parenthesis. What's up with the (1) (2) etc? I've not seen that before. Lara❤Love 20:20, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
  • The (1) and (2) is a cheater way of only using one reference tag to display multiple sources and make the sources stick out a little more than just using a carriage return would allow. If you'd prefer we can use separate reference tags or get rid of the (1) and (2). I am working on cleaning up the formating of the sources, but we're up to 170ish reference tags now, so it's a bit of a long haul. Another one of the editors will have to work on the books that are missing their pages. I don't own any of these books, so I can't thumb through to get the information, alas. Although, shouldn't be too difficult to replace them as a reference. --Bobblehead (rants) 20:50, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Comments, Jmabel, maybe you can move that large table (below) to the talk page here; it's not particularly helpful with ongoing citation needs and many other issues to list every one of them in table form, and it's taking up a lot of space. With 54KB of readable prose, the article exceeds WP:SIZE guidelines of 30 to 50KB readable prose. There are many candidates for creating daughter articles of detail that isn't needed in the main article; for example, the notable mayors list (if it stays in the article it should be prosified), the Alaskan Way Viaduct, transportation could be a shorter summary, Media, etc. Also, templates are used incorrectly: the main template is used when a summary of a daughter article is included in this main article, and most of those articles are incomplete and aren't summarized back to this article. The article isn't using summary style correctly at all. There are still citation needs. Something needs to be done about the gallery and image placement; it looks more like a picture book than an encyclopedic entry. Listy sections should be converted to prose (see Neighborhoods, for example). Attention to WP:MOS#Captions punctuation on image captions is needed, but first images need to be addressed/reduced; also MOS:CAPS#All caps attention needed on citations. There's inconsistent date formatting in citations; some dates are linked, others aren't. A lot of work remains to be done here before we can even begin to look at the prose; it doesn't look like it's going to make it without a thorough and sustained effort. The article needs to be reviewed for WP:WTA and WP:AWW, example, Time magazine chose Seattle Central Community College for best college of the year in 2001, claiming that the school ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks for moving the table. I kept meaning to, just kept forgetting. --Bobblehead (rants) 20:50, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
  • I've removed the gallery, shuffled the images around a bit, and worked on the captions some. Can we check that off the list, or is there more work to be done in that regard? --Bobblehead (rants) 01:56, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
  • No, I started through so I could strike, and found several captions not corrected. I would fix them all myself, but this article is so large that editing it is painfully slow, and it took me several minutes to add/subtract a couple of full stops. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:23, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
  • D'oh. Okay. Thanks for making the edits you did. I'll go through and hopefully get them correct this time.--Bobblehead (rants) 17:25, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Okay. Now (I think) the images are done. I replaced some images that were not related to the section they were in, expanded the caption on others to include more context, etc. If you'd like any other changes, let me know and I'll do them. --Bobblehead (rants) 22:39, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
  • I did some more MOS corrections (WP:UNITS, WP:MOSDATE, WP:OVERLINKing, WP:DASH, etc.) but I didn't get them all and more is needed. This is one of the slowest loading articles I've ever worked on, so editing it is hard. Reducing the size might be a good thing, even if it is within FA range again. The article is still overlinked and over long (see my sample edits). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:16, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks for all the edits you made. I'll see if I can pick up where you left off on some of it. Main problem we're having with the page size is the number of citations (170+), most of which were added as a result of this FAR/FARC. The article has 48k of readable text, but is 118k in size, so I'd imagine WP is choking under the weight of the cite templates. I'm not sure decreasing the amount of readable text will help any when the big problem is the citations. --Bobblehead (rants) 22:00, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Done WP:DASH and WP:MOSDATE are done. Still working on the overlinking but I've removed all the double links. I have a question on the WP:UNITS though do things like "4,000 years" and "100,000 attendees" need a non-break space? --Bobblehead (rants) 22:07, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Done I think I got rid of the low-value links. The only place I'm concerned about is the last two paragraphs of the Economic History section. There are a lot of links to businesses and Boeing airplanes, but they all seem related to the article. --Bobblehead (rants) 23:16, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Look at ref 70, with all the street fairs; that is total spam, and verges on WP:NOT. You could delete the entire sentence it's citing, and the article wouldn't suffer. It's that sort of text that is chunking up this article size so badly; that kind of info can be shuffled off to daughter articles, or completely deleted per WP:NOT. Also, please resolve the cite needed tag at ... The Seattle Center Monorail, constructed for the 1962 Exposition, runs between Seattle Center and downtown and is used by tourists and by commuters from the north, who often find it cheaper to park at Seattle Center and take the 1-mile (2 km) route to work rather than taking their car downtown.[citation needed] ... again, this kind of information isn't crucial and could be pruned. I'm very close to a Keep on this article, but ya'll really can prune some of the text. Get out the red pen! If it's already in a daughter article, weigh its value in this article. (Responded on my talk page about WP:UNITS; you're almost there ! Keep at it.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:10, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Fixed the two new examples you mentioned and got all the non-breaking spaces, so the WP:UNITS issue should be resolved. As for the article size.. The article is currently at 44k of readable text and more trimming seems unnecessary to me, especially considering the poor condition that the daughter articles are in. I'm willing to work on the quality of the daughter article so that the corresponding section can be trimmed, but until then removing a sentence from the main article to add it to a low quality daughter article seems an unfortunate decision. --Bobblehead (rants) 02:24, 18 November 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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.