Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Wade's Causeway/archive1

Wade's Causeway

Wade's Causeway (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

• Featured article candidates/Wade's Causeway/archive1

Nominator(s): PocklingtonDan (talk) 21:57, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I nominate this article for FA consideration as its primary editor to date. I am happy to work with reviewers to make any improvements that are felt necessary. This is the first nomination for FA of this article. It has had a GA nomination (successful) and a peer review. PocklingtonDan

The article is about a stone structure of ambiguous origin, located in Yorkshire, United Kingdom. FA review of areas such as copy-editing are welcome, but specific value can be added by reviews additionally by those with domain knowledge in areas such as archaeology, history, and etymology. (talk) 21:57, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments from Curly Turkey

I haven't really read the article; maybe I will, maybe I won't. I just wanted to know what was going on with the mountains of "Explanatory notes", like "See Grimm[169] and Davidson.[135]", that just point to "Citations" without "explaining" anything? Is this a convoluted bundling method? Have you seen sfnm?

 Doing... Thank you for taking the time to give the article a brief scan. I hope you will take the time to read and review it fully. I am looking at this particular item now, thanks for the helpful javascript tool - PocklingtonDan (talk) 19:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, there are a ton of harv errors in the references. You can see them easily if you use User:Ucucha/HarvErrors. Curly Turkey (gobble) 22:09, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

 Doing... I have sorted the reference errors. However, the same javascript tool shows several refs that are not cited. This may be works that were added as refs but then the cites removed, or may be where refs are typoed or duplicated etc. I will investigate each one and revise accordingly and am doing this now - PocklingtonDan (talk) 19:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments from Chris857

I'm noticing there seems to still be a ref issue, note ϸ, I see "See Knight (2011),[260]Powell (2012)CITEREFPowell2012 and NYNPA Minerals Technical Paper (2013).[261]" -- note the CITEREFPowell2012.Chris857 (talk) 16:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

 Done Thanks for the heads up. This is now resolved - PocklingtonDan (talk) 18:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

There are also two refs with "|url= missing title (help)" errors. Chris857 (talk) 16:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

 Done Thanks for the heads up. This is now resolved - PocklingtonDan (talk) 19:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oppose from [unregistered user]

Oppose reference system is weird. For example, do a ctrl+F for "[79]". There are two hits. One goes to the citation "Hayes 1964, p. 11.", but the other goes to the explanatory note "Ϗ.^ See Lang[146] and Geake.[210]". This seems to be the case for all the citations. 122.172.27.199 (talk) 16:50, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oppose rather than pointing out some problems that you can see and giving me an opporunity to fix? Why? The FAC guidelines suggest that reviewers and editors work together to improve articles, this unsightly brief comment stating oppose is hardly conducive to that end. I see that you are an unregistered user with 3 edits from 2009 and a dozen more in the last 24 hours. You may want to withdraw your oppose, which as an unregistered user is highly unusual, and familiarise yourself more closely with the FA review process. PocklingtonDan (talk) 18:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oppose from Squeamish Ossifrage

Oppose, urge withdrawal. FAC doesn't prescribe a specific referencing standard, but this isn't really acceptable. Numbered citations point to "explanatory notes" which aren't numbered, but are instead indexed with a (very) extended Greek alphabet? Then those notes in turn point to sfn-formatted citations with corresponding references? That's very confusing, and it's nonstandard to the point of uniqueness. Additionally, you've got unformatted external links (like in the lead). There are books missing ISBN numbers (I believe the Barker book is 978-0-7134-3189-6, for example), and books without issued ISBN numbers should ideally have OCLC numbers instead. The division of books into printed and electronic sections based, presumably, on how you accessed them, is very confusing to the reader and not at all a standard practice. Google Books is not a publisher per se; you're also very inconsistent how you refer to Google Books and whether it's italicized. Most of the printed journal entries lack page numbers, and I'm highly dubious of the way you've formatted the title of the Austen reference (if it doesn't have a title, don't make one up). Malformed templating abounds (Chadwick, Andrews, Strahan, Witcher, likely others). Several of the website references are insufficiently formatted ("North York Moors" is little more than a bare link), and several are not reliable sources (including MyHeritage, Wiktionary pages, and a Wikipedia image file!). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:29, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oppose rather than pointing out some issues that you can see and giving me an opporunity to fix? Why? The FAC guidelines suggest that reviewers and editors work together to improve articles, this unsightly brief comment stating oppose is hardly conducive to that end. Additionally, offering a wall of text rather than cogent and well ordered points makes your comments difficult to respond to: nevertheless, I will attempt to do so. Most of your points were covered and explained at GA review, but I will revisit them here. I would urge you to change your oppose to a comment and allow us to work on addressing these minor issues that have raised. I have broken up your comments into bullet points in order to address them rationally and individually PocklingtonDan (talk) 18:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm usually pretty amenable to letting folks respond intra my comments (even though the header says not to), but please don't bulk-refactor my response like that. Also, from the header (and this one is taken rather seriously), "the use of graphics or templates on FAC nomination pages is discouraged". As it stands, however, simply bringing the citation and referencing system into something compliant with criterion 2c will require changing hundreds of citations; that's error-prone work in a task that cannot afford errors. Regardless of what else is right or wrong with this article, I remain convinced that it's in the best interests of the article's development to close this nomination early and use the two week relisting lockout to rebuild the citation structure into something more standard, fix the broken reference templates, add the missing information, clean out the clearly unreliable sources, and then bring it back to FAC for a clean second look. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I have no wish to withdraw the article nomination. You are of course entitled to your opinion on this matter, but it is a shame that you are not willing to work with me as a reviewer to fix any issues that you have with the citations within this review and work as a team as others above are willing to do. Your revert of your comments into an impenetrable wall of text is similarly unhelpful and makes responding to your points in a clear way very difficult. I had hoped not to encounter awkward reviewers such as yourself, but c'est la vie - PocklingtonDan (talk) 20:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Yikes ... Dan, insulting the reviewers ("awkward reviewers such as yourself") is not the best way to attract others to review your nomination. Squeamish Ossifrage is not new to reviewing FACs, and I doubt he'd recommend withdrawal lightly. Curly Turkey (gobble) 21:17, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

It is a little inventive to read my description of this reviewer as awkward as an insult given that this is a transparently accurate representation of his behaviour. He is deliberately making it awkward for me to respond to and action the points he raised. I'm not sure quite how else you would describe his behaviour in reverting my edit that broke his wall of text into actionable points that I could respond to and action in editing the article. You can check the edit of his. How would you characterise this? I am interested in attracting helpful editors who are interested in raising constructive comments that are actionable and that I can respond to. Reviewers such as the one referenced here I, and wikipedia, can do without. - PocklingtonDan (talk) 21:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)