Talk:State revolving fund

This article seems to be written by someone affiliated with the CWSRF. It contains many weasel words and may not reflect a neutral point of view. Before I make further edits to the article I suggest that the authors review it in the light of the above comment. In particular, any praise for the program should be cleary attributed to an independent source with the specific reference added.--Mschiffler (talk) 20:43, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

First let me thank you for writing this very detailed and useful article. Congratulations! Please see a few more specific below.--Mschiffler (talk) 00:47, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Examples of lack of a neutral point of view

• The article starts by saying "The Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) (...) is recognized as the most successful federal water quality funding program in the nation's history." One would expect to have an independent, published source for this statement. Also, it would be interesting what other federal water quality funding programs exist today to which the CWSRF can be compared. Or do you compare them only to the earlier Construction Grants?
• "a groundbreaking... program". Who says so?

I actually think it's a great program. But what I think does not matter so much. If you write on Wikipedia saying something is great, it has to be backed up by an independent, published source to - hopefully - lend more crecibility to the the statement.

Other suggestions to improve the article

• The article's title is about State Revolving Funds, but the lead section is only about one SFR, i.e. the CWSRF. It may be useful to first explain what a SRF is in general and then mention that there are two (?) of them, the CWSRF and the DWSRF, with a brief description of each in the lead section and a more detailed description of each further below. Alternatively, you could create a brief article on the concept of a SRF, keep most of the existing article under the titel CWSRF and then have a separate article on DWSRF that you or someone else could write.
• The use of the terms "return on investment" and "economic benefit" are a bit loose in the article, and to my knowledge differ from the way these terms are commonly used in economics (see Cost-benefit analysis). What you describe is the leveraging of state and capital market funds through federal funds, as is correctly stated somewhere else in the article.
• The second paragraph of the history section is not about the history of SRFs and should perhaps be moved somewhere else.
• There are some repetitions and the article could be trimmed a bit to make it more readable.
• There is still quite a bit of technical jargon. Either try to take the jargon out, or establish links to articles on Wikipedia. You have already started doing so, but more could be done.
• The sources in the footnotes should ideally all be hyperlinks. I have inserted one to show you how it works.
• If the same source is cited several times, there is a way to link them to the same footnote. I will do it with one note so that you see how it works.
• It would be good to have sources other than EPA and the CWA, if there are any, just to provide a broader perspective. Any debates in Congress? Anything from the media? From professional associations?

SRF and related articles

Thanks for having started to revamp the article taking my comments into account. Could I ask you to respond to my comments on this page rather on my user page? That way my comments and your responses are all in the same place. On your request to make sure that your article is under the titel CWSRF rather than SRF, I will work on it now.--Mschiffler (talk) 01:04, 5 December 2008 (UTC)