Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)/archive4

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

The article was archived by Graham Colm (talk) 06:24, 5 September 2014 (diff).

Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)[edit]

Nominator(s): --Jakob (talk) 13:06, 7 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about one of the main tributaries of the Susquehanna River in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. It started out as a two-sentence stub and has been steadily improving since 2012. After becoming a GA in early 2013, it failed FAC twice in mid-2013 and early 2014, mostly due to prose concerns. By the third FAC in May, this article was getting close to the standards (mainly due to work by the GOCE), but the prose still required more work. Now, I think that the prose finally meets the prose standards for FA. I am also certain that the other standards are met, as no major issues with these have been raised in recent FACs. Hopefully, it'll pass this time. --Jakob (talk) 13:06, 7 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Image review
There is not a base map, I created that map specifically for this article. Sources for the individual data elements of the map are on the image page. Kmusser (talk) 20:13, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Jakec: Hello, Jakob -- Your article looked interesting, so I decided to read it and see if I could help. It is well written for the most part. I just made a few minor copy-edits to correct spelling and punctuation, and add a few missing words. I rearranged the words in a few sentences to make them more concise and to improve sentence flow. There are just a few issues I'd like to mention here:

1) The last sentence in the section Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)#Oxbow lake is:

"Japanese knotweed has been seen near Interstate 80 on the northern edges of the Turkey Hill Oxbow"

and the last sentence in the section Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)#Biology is:

"There are populations of Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant, along the creek and its tributaries south of Pennsylvania Route 118".

I'm pointing this out just in case this might be a duplication of information. If not, that's fine.

2) In the second paragraph in the section Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)#Geology is the following sentence:

"There are numerous deposits of iron ore and limestone in the lower sections of the Fishing Creek valley and also some deposits of marble along it".

The pronoun "it" at the end of the sentence is ambiguous. It could refer to "valley", but perhaps also to "creek". If it means "Fishing Creek valley", then I suggest the following re-wording, which will eliminate any ambiguity:

"There are numerous deposits of iron ore and limestone, as well as some deposits of marble, in the lower sections of the Fishing Creek valley."
@Jakec: (Did you see this?) You didn't like this wording? If you don't like "as well as", then at least remove "also" and just use "and". "Also" and "and" are too close in meaning to use both.
If there is no real reason to separate marble from iron ore and limestone, why not just make it a list of three?
"There are numerous deposits of iron ore, limestone and marble in the lower sections of the Fishing Creek valley".
It's more concise than the other versions. CorinneSD (talk) 22:52, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

3) The second and third sentences in Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)#Recreation are:

"There are other tracts of public property along the creek, one of which, called the Power Dam, is 2 miles (3.2 km) upstream of Benton. It covers 19 acres (7.7 ha) and stretches for 2900 feet (880 meters) of Fishing Creek, and features the remains of a concrete dam."

Usually, when one uses the verb "features", what usually follows is an interesting or attractive highlight. "The remains of a concrete dam" does not conjure up an image of something attractive. I suppose it could be interesting, though. If you're happy with it, that's fine. It's just an unusual use of the verb. (There is another example with the same construction a few sentences below this.)

4) In the second-to-last paragraph of the article is the following sentence:

"The hiking trail Waterfall Wonderland: Big, Twin, Lewis, and Sullivan Falls is described as "a place of almost mystical beauty" by Jeff Mitchell in his book Hiking the Endless Mountains: Exploring the Wilderness of Northeastern Pennsylvania".
There is something that is not clear in this sentence. I suppose "Water Wonderland" is the name of the hiking trail.

However, what follows, a colon (:) and "Big, Twin, Lewis, and Sullivan Falls" is described as..." does not make sense. Perhaps there are some words missing following "Waterfall Wonderland". Perhaps it should read,

"The hiking trail Waterfall Wonderland, which affords views of Big, Twin, Lewis, and Sullivan Falls, is described as..." CorinneSD (talk) 22:02, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@CorinneSD: Thanks for the comments.
  1. It's not duplication. PA 118 is near the source and the oxbow is near the mouth.
  2. I've changed the wording.
  3. Changed features to contains.
  4. I replaced that sentence with your suggested sentence.
--Jakob (talk) 23:11, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@CorinneSD: I've added in your suggested sentence about iron ore, limestone, and marble. --Jakob (talk) 23:45, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Jakob I saw your edits. I have just learned from another editor with whom I have been working on another article that it is customary for the original poster to strike through comments raising issues which the poster feels have been resolved, so I've done that, above. The article looks good now. CorinneSD (talk) 00:31, 27 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Dank[edit]

  • As always, feel free to revert my copyediting.
  • Consistency needed: BC, BCE. If you go with BCE, link it at first occurrence; most readers aren't familiar with it (though they can guess what it means from context).
  • Our Fishing Creek Confederacy article talks about "a thousand" soldiers in the text, though it says "1000" in the lead. That makes sense; I'm guessing they didn't know the precise number, and "a thousand" is more appropriate when the number isn't exact, so I went with that.
  • Support on prose per standard disclaimer. These are my edits. - Dank (push to talk) 00:53, 11 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose pending referencing improvements. A number of the references are incomplete. GBooks or other web links are not an adequate substitute for complete citations. WP:CITEHOW includes some guidance if needed. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:08, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Nikkimaria: Could you be more specific please? I cannot identify anything that could be objectionable in anything but the Google Books links. If you want publishers added to the GBooks links, I can probably do that tomorrow. If it's page numbers you're after, I don't think it can be done. Sometimes 20 or 30 separate pages are cited. It would be difficult to track them all down and the list would look somewhat ugly. --Jakob (talk) 01:23, 20 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you need both of those things. There are methods to deal with sources cited multiple times with different pages - {{rp}}, {{sfn}}, etc. Web sources also need publishers and/or publications as applicable. More broadly, there is a general lack of consistency in the presentation of sources. For that reason, it's difficult to be too specific, as I can't tell what the intended style is. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:52, 20 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Nikkimaria: There is not "a general lack of consistency". Every citation uses the exact same template and all of them have the same information in the same order: an author (if one is given), a publisher (if one is given), a url (if online), a title, a date (if given), and an accessdate. --Jakob (talk) 12:55, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid that's not the case. For example, FN1 uses a template from the {{cite}} family, but then FN3 uses a {{citation}} template - these are two different classes of citation templates and produce different outputs. Similarly, the publication linked to in FN3 does have a publisher indicated, but the citation itself does not include one. These are examples only, but in my view problems with citations are pervasive here. And of course, there is the lack of page numbers, which leads to a lack of precision in citation, contrary to WP:V. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:41, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't noticed that except in a few cases. Anyway, all the references use {{citation}} now as far as I can tell. I'll get to the page numbers later tonight or tomorrow, but it only makes sense to add them to Google Books and PDFs since conventional websites don't really have numbered pages. --Jakob (talk) 00:09, 22 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Nikkimaria: I've added page numbers where applicable. --Jakob (talk) 01:28, 23 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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