Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of off-season Atlantic hurricanes/archive1

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

The list was not promoted by Dabomb87 02:45, 3 April 2010 [1].

List of off-season Atlantic hurricanes

Nominator(s): Viennaiswaiting (talk) 22:35, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured list because I spent a lot of time on it, and it's the main article in a topic I'm writing. It's about the freak tropical cyclones that don't form during the normal season. Short, sweet, and too the point. Viennaiswaiting (talk) 22:35, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

oh, one little comment, i have no opinion one way or another on the title, whether it should be "off-season Atlantic hurricanes" or "off-season Atlantic tropical cyclones". --Viennaiswaiting (talk) 22:36, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken care of some of these issues, but there's still a lot to do, and seeing as this has been up for 3 weeks now, I would like to withdraw it, rather than continue. --Viennaiswaiting (talk) 01:27, 3 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

~~Comments~~ from ManfromButtonwillow (talk) 09:35, 15 March 2010 (UTC):[reply]

~~Deaths and damages are reversed under the 2007 hurricane, Olga.~~

Ref 20, [2], appears to be dead.

The two images appear to lack alt text. See what's been written for Hurricane Rick for an idea on what it should look like [3] See WP:ALT for more precise guidelines.

The first paragraph of Records and statistics: "[...]most recently Tropical Depression One in 2009." You might consider rephrasing this, so that this information will remain correct in the event that another out of season hurricane occurs and the article isn't updated.

Images are verifiably in the public domain (although the source page for the Hurricane Alice image was dead, here is the proper link [4], in case anyone cares), no ambiguous links. Good luck!

OK, I fixed the image for Alice, switched the damage/deaths for Olga, replaced the olga links w/ one single link thats more official, and added alt texts. i didn't change the wording about the "most recently", since the entire article will have to be updated when there's another off-season storm. Thanks a lot for your review! Viennaiswaiting (talk) 15:35, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, yeah, I suppose that's true. Ok. I'm striking my previous comments, and supporting on all but one count (the article is stable; the prose seems to be high quality; the lead is short, but it is a short article; no structural issues that I can see; and style appears to be in line with requirements) The only exception would be criterion (3). Not that it isn't comprehensive, I just don't feel qualified to judge it one way or the other (sorry). Nice, brief article. Best wishes! ManfromButtonwillow (talk) 12:08, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

sweet, thanks! Viennaiswaiting (talk) 15:01, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support - as this list covers all known off season AHS cyclones. This being merged into an global list wouldnt work IMO as there are no preseason Cyclones in the Western Pacific/Northern Indian Ocean.Jason Rees (talk) 21:59, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: This list is inconsistent in its treatment of off-season tropical depressions. In the parts of the list covering recent times, it has no problem linking to tropical depressions. However, for parts of the list covering earlier times, it doesn't bother linking to them (not even section links). To a much lesser extent, this also applies to tropical storms. Perhaps it ought to be consistent in how it treats OSTC's across different timeframes. Miss Madeline | Talk to Madeline 23:20, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I went back through and made sure there was proper links for every tropical storm, subtropical storm, or tropical depression that had a section in a season article. Some didn't have a section in the season article, so I left those unlinked. Originally, I only linked those with articles, but this works too. --Viennaiswaiting (talk) 01:07, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I can support now then. Many older seasons usually don't have much to say about tropical depressions, and probably don't need their own section as it probably isn't worth it to have a section that maxes out at one sentence. However, a full of discussion of what to do about this doesn't belong at this FLC page. Miss Madeline | Talk to Madeline 02:11, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - a really quick browse...

Lead is inadequate. Needs to "summarise" the whole article. There are numerous examples of our current featured lists which would help.
Date ranges should use unspaced en-dashes, not spaced hyphens per WP:DASH.
List could easily be made sortable.
The color key fails WP:ACCESS as there doesn't seem to be a way of discerning what a color means without the color. In other words, if I can't discern color, I can't use the key.
Region affected - there are often more than one, so shouldn't this be Region(s)?
Spaced hyphens in the references. Not per MOS please.

The Rambling Man (talk) 21:41, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- thx for reviewing: lead is longer, i see you did the date range and spaced hyphens (i think), the list is now sortable, and now its "region(s) affected". the colors are based off the saffir-simpson scale, which is at the top-right of the climo section: should i say in prose what the colours represent? Viennaiswaiting (talk) 18:04, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  - Sortability goes nuts when you sort by date... (in Safari at least) The Rambling Man (talk) 18:51, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    - should i remove the sortability then?? Viennaiswaiting (talk) 03:10, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      - Or fix it. It usually goes wrong when you have colspans or rowspans. The Rambling Man (talk) 06:20, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        Removing colspans/rowspans should fix the table sorting issue. If you still require two rows at the top (and need to prevent the second row being part of the sort), check out the sortbottom trick at Help:Sorting#Excluding rows from sorting. But you need to fix up the sorting on the dates anyway. Currently your months are being sorted alphabetically, so "April", "December", "February, "January", etc. You'll need to use the {{sort}} template to fix this up. --Tntnnbltn (talk) 12:42, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        ok, should be good. Viennaiswaiting (talk) 16:26, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

More...

When sorting by name the #-named storms don't sort in the correct order.
When a date spans you use an en-dash, when the seasons span you use a slash. Be consistent.
Pressure column doesn't sort correctly.
N/A means not applicable or not available? I would add a quick note to be sure.
Damage column doesn't sort correctly.
Deaths column doesn't sort correctly.
As per the color discussion above, you need to ensure that the storms identified with colors are also identified with something that is non-color related, e.g. a * or a ^ or similar.

The Rambling Man (talk) 07:29, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose for now:

Lead:

Image caption describes Hurricane Alice as "the first Atlantic hurricane to span two calendar years". Shouldn't this be first recorded hurricane to span two years, as opposed the first hurricane?
What years does this article cover? At the bottom of the article it says "In the official Atlantic hurricane database, the first storm to occur outside of the current season was in 1865", and searching around I found this goes back to 1851, but there is no mention of this in the article. It would be worthwhile explicitly mentioning what date ranges this list covers.
First sentence sounds a little forced because it includes the name of the article for bolding purposes. MOS:BOLDTITLE says you don't need to include the article title (or bold it) if the title is sufficiently descriptive. You could probably make the first sentence sound more natural if you don't include the text "list of off-season Atlantic hurricanes".
The second and third sentences of the lead explicitly talk about 'on-season' rather than 'off-season'. It's a bit jarring when I'm expecting to read about off-season hurricanes.
Lead says that "The [Atlantic hurricane] season is currently defined from June 1 to November 30". Defined by who? Also, with the sentence above I'm not sure about the wording. I'd prefer "The United States Weather Bureau currently defines the Atlantic hurricane season as occuring between June 1 and November 30 each calendar year."
"Of the storms that struck land, areas of the Caribbean Sea were affected most." -- In general, prose could use tightening up. Also, shouldn't this be areas surrounding the Caribbean Sea? Areas of the Caribbean Sea itself is just sea, and doesn't match the part about striking land.
(There's probably more which I can say about tightening up the prose and deciding which things to include in the intro vs the background vs the statistics, but I'll see how the article changes with my feedback first)

Background:

In the background it says "The Atlantic hurricane season was not always as long as it is now." This sentence seems redundant as is; I'm going to find out that in the next two sentences anyway.
One of the references mentions re: start/end dates that "the end date has been slowly shifted outward, from October 31st to November 15th until its current date of November 30th." In the background section it seemed like there was a single date range in 1938, which was changed to a new date range in 1964. There was no mention of any changes inbetween or otherwise.
It mentions definitions of the hurricane season by the United States Weather Bureau. Do any of the other nations mentioned under "Region(s) affected" operate their own meterology services? If so, do any of these other nations have definitions for the hurricane season? Are they the same as the US definitions or different? When were these definitions implemented? (I don't know if there are any answers to these questions, but I'm genuinely curious. I realise most of the source material is from the US, but a worldwide perspective would be great if possible)
The 'hurricane season' was first defined in 1938, yet the list includes cyclones which occurred prior to that. What definition of off-season is being using for these cyclones? I don't think it's explicitly mentioned that cyclones prior to to 1938 are being classified as on- or off-season based on the current definitions.
Similarly, what definition is being used for cyclones that occured between 1938 and 1965? When it occurred, Tropical Storm Thirteen (1953) would have been defined as an off-season storm by 1953 standards, but isn't included in this list.

List:

To my knowledge, units should be left uncapitalised in the table headings. i.e. "Winds (km/h)", not "Winds (Km/h)"
The table uses a pattern of "Wind [linebreak] (units)", but then used "Pressure [linebreak] units (equivalent units)". Why is "knots" in brackets but "Mbar" isn't?
As The Rumbling Man mentioned above, Names for numbered storms, Pressure, Damage and Deaths columns don't sort correctly. Read up on Help:Sorting#Numeric sorting with hidden key
Currently when sorting by alphabetical order, "Unnamed" sits between "Peter" and "Zeta". Given that the term 'Unnamed' is arbitrarily given anyway, I'd prefer if you used the sort template so that these are separated from named cyclones. i.e. {{sort|!|Unnamed}}. ("!" is one of the few characters which will sort before "#1")
When you fix the above sorting, I'd define "Several" deaths as a number greater than 0 in the sort template so they sort seperately to 0 deaths
Every mention of deaths other than Arlene (1959) and Ana (2003) cites a reference for the death toll. Why are these two unreferenced?
Same deal as above for the "Minimal" damages of Arlene (1981) and Lili (1984)
For cyclones with 0 death toll there is no reference for that number. I assume that such information is more readily available when there is an actual death toll to report, but are you sure there were no deaths for each of those other storms? For all I know, whoever wrote the article might've not searched hard enough for a death toll number and just assumed there were no deaths because they didn't read anything to indicate the contrary.

Statistics:

Your table under monthly statistics defines the listed months as "Month of formation", but the image on the right does not make a similar definition.
Do you need a separate section for "Monthly statistics"? In the previous section called "Records and statistics" you already started describing the frequency of storms by month ("Storms were most likely to occur in May, followed by December.")
"Only one cyclone was reported in March, in 1908, [...]" -- Every cyclone in this paragraph includes its name with the exception of this one
"[...] and only one tropical storm has ever occurred in February or April, the 1952 Groundhog Day Storm and Tropical Storm Ana of 2003, respectively" -- If there was only one in February and one in March, how come the table says "February - 2" and "April - 7"? Either something is wrong here or needs clarifying.
"Overall, there have been 58 tropical cyclones in each [emphasis added] month between December and May" - 52 tropical cyclones per month? :)

--Tntnnbltn (talk) 14:23, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments. I see I have a lot to do, a lot of small errors, so I'm going to withdraw it and work on it some more. --Viennaiswaiting (talk) 01:27, 3 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.