Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Roxy Ann Peak/archive2

Roxy Ann Peak

Roxy Ann Peak (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured article candidates/Roxy Ann Peak/archive1
• Featured article candidates/Roxy Ann Peak/archive2

Nominator(s): LittleMountain5 20:27, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Roxy Ann Peak is a beautiful round-topped mountain that looms over the city of Medford, Oregon. The largely undeveloped peak is protected by the massive Prescott Park, home to several nature trails and many amazing views of the surrounding landscape. I am nominating this for featured article because I think it has vastly improved since its last FAC nearly five years ago, and now meets the featured article criteria. Cheers, LittleMountain5 20:27, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Feedback from Curly Turkey

Feel free to disagree with anything here; some of it is just my personal opinion.

• "located at the eastern edge": I think you can drop "located"
• "1,740-acre (704.2 ha) Prescott Park.": Is "1,740" a precise figure? It sounds rounded, and if that's the case, the hectares should be rounded as well.
• "the 50 to 35 million-year-old Payne Cliffs Formation&nbsp... 35 to 30 million-year-old volcanic basalt ... 5 to 2 million-year-old basalt intrusion": I'm not a geologist, but don't we normally go from the smaller number to the larger? We're not talking years BCE here. Especially since later on you have "the past 8,000 to 10,000 years".
• "prone to downhill creep, earthflows, and landslides.": I'd change the order, as "to downhill creep" initally feelslike a typo for "to creep downhill".
• " far away as near Shady Cove,": "as far away as near" sounds awkward
• "animals which are still abundant there today": you could safely drop the "today"
• "led to the Rogue River Wars of 1855 and 1856. After the war,": shouldn't that be "After the wars"?
• "Roxy Ann and her husband, John, and Stephen and Mary Taylor": if you dropped the first comma it would be more clear that John was Roxy Ann's husband
• "one for each U.S. state": is there something that could be linked to here?
• "a Medford police officer who was ... a surge in vandalism, littering ... city limits": overlinking
• "a trend that would continue for several decades": "a trend that continued"
• "Vandalism has since decreased by 70 percent.": as of?
• "than all of the city's other parks combined": I think we can drop "all of"
• "in part because of a controversial bill passed in 2003": unless you're go into detail about how it's controversial (and probably even then), I'd drop "controversial"
• "The bill easily doubled": I'd drop "easily"
• "cost of retrofitting an existing structure approaches $100,000": "approached"
• "also home to the RoxyAnn Winery,": is "RoxyAnn" with no space how it's actually spelled?
• "On September 21, 2009 at around": I think there's an argument going on over this, but I believe the guideline still calls for a comma after 2009
• "Deer Ridge Fire" section: does this really require a whole subsection? Is this fire somehow a defining feature of Roxy Ann's history? Check out WP:WEIGHT
• "containing trees such as Douglas-fir,": "Douglas fir" should be unhyphenated
• "The peak is home to many species of birds, including blue-gray gnatcatchers, lazuli buntings, oak titmice, acorn woodpeckers, and California quail on the lower slopes, and mountain quail, mountain chickadees, and red-breasted nuthatches on the upper slopes. Wild turkeys and raptors such as Cooper's hawks, golden eagles, bald eagles, and prairie falcons are also common. Ruby-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped warblers, and golden-crowned sparrows arrive in the winter.": Apparently most of these animals should be capitalized.
• again, I wonder if the entire paragraph on Roosevelt elk is due weight

Recommendations that won't affect support

• I fixed some harv errors. These can be really hard to catch unaided. If you're not averse to using scripts I'd reccomend User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.
• The article is fairly dense with inline cites. WP:BUNDLING has some suggestions for prettying things up. Since you're using the sfn template, I'd recommend using {{sfnm}} to deal with it.
• I like {{<nowiki>[[Template:Portal|Portal]]<nowiki>}} links, and think it would be nice to see something like {{</nowiki>Portal|Mountains|Oregon}} in there. Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC) Never mind—even after double-checking I seem to have missed that you had one there already. Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:40, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

———Curly Turkey (gobble) 00:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the review! I fixed all but a few of the problems:

• RoxyAnn Winery is indeed spelled without a space, strangely enough.
• I agree that the Deer Ridge Fire probably doesn't merit its own section... The problem is that the information doesn't seem to fit anywhere else. Any suggestions?
  • It's not the section header I was concerned about, it was how much space was given to it in ratio to the rest of the article. Was it really such a big deal that it required two paragraphs? Have there been no other fires throughout its recorded history? Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:34, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• It'd be fairly easy to shrink it down to a sentence or two, but then the section would be tiny. Are such sections acceptable in featured articles? LittleMountain5 05:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• I'm always unsure whether I should capitalize animal common names or not... (And plant names, for that matter.) WP:BIRDS seems to favor capitalization, but many other non-bird articles don't (mainly mammals). What I'm getting at is: should I capitalize just the bird names, or all of them?
  • Clicking through to the articles will show you what's (likely) preferred—me, I use this script, which highlights different kinds of links. The redirects appear in green, and if you hover over them it tells you what they redirect to. In the case of all these animals, they were redirecting to capitalized versions. Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:34, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• Yeah, I know they were all redirects—in fact, I created a few of them. They're capitalized now. I just wish animal articles were more consistent. LittleMountain5 05:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
  • I'm far from an expert on the subject, I was just pointing out that they were capitalized in their own articles, so I thought it likely they should be capitalized in this one, too. The other articles themselves could, of course, be mistaken, or there could be multiple standards, etc etc. Without knowing myself, I'd just capitalize the ones that are capitalized in their own articles, or hunt down a subject expert where I wasn't sure. Curly Turkey (gobble) 06:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• Do you recommend I remove the elk paragraph? I thought it was interesting.
  • There's "interesting", and there's "encyclopaedic". I thought it was just a bit much, and given how recent it was (same as the fire) it made me wonder if it wa really all that significant, or if it jest happened to be recent enough to have a lot of online material to reference it. Unless it can be explained why this event requires so much space, it gives a sense of imbalance. Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:34, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• I shrank it a bit and merged it with the previous paragraph. LittleMountain5 05:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

• I changed the article from sfn to sfnm, but I'm not sure if I like it. While the text is cleaner, the reference section seems a lot more confusing, at least to me. Thoughts?
  • It's not a requirement at all, but I prefer it, thinking that one doesn't normally scan over the list of citations—normally one clicks through from an inline cite, and only wants to see the citation(s) for that particular instance. With the prose, however, most of the time you just want the inline cites to disappear so you can just read. Whichever style you go with will not impact whether the article is worthy of FA or not, it was just a suggestion based on my personal preferences. Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:34, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Also, thanks for fixing the harv errors. That script is awesome. Cheers, LittleMountain5 03:49, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

is ====Image check====

• All the images are on Commons and properly tagged. It looks like half of them are by Little Mountain 5 themself.
• File:Roxy Ann Peak Madrone.JPG: WP:IMAGELOCATION recommends against starting a section with an image on the left.

———Curly Turkey (gobble) 04:45, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the check. (Yes, all but one of the images are mine.) As for the image layout, I don't see much of an alternative... There's not much room to cram all the images on the right, and none of the sections are long enough to not have a left-aligned image under a section heading. Hmm... LittleMountain5 05:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Minor issue

This line: "Roxy Ann Peak has a high level of biodiversity due to its location midway between the Cascade, Klamath, and Eastern Cascade ecoregions, and also because of its wide range of elevations." is poorly worded. I also found that the "Cascade and Eastern Cascade" to be unspecific and redundant in usage. Unless there is a clear reason for needing both, I'd stick drop the "Cascade" part. I believe that that you could drop the "level" and the "location midway" awkwardness by restructuring the sentence as "The high biodiversity of Roxy Ann Peak is due to its location between the Klamath and Eastern Cascade ecoregions and the Peak's wide range of elevation." Just a suggestion. 209.255.230.32 (talk) 14:31, 19 November 2013 (UTC)