Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Transportation in South Florida/archive1

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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 Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 11:34, 27 November 2014 (UTC) [1].[reply]

Transportation in South Florida

Nominator(s): B137 (talk) 02:07, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this article as its coverage has been greatly broadened, beyond the suggestions mentioned in its GAN. Some things are left non uniform becuase I am not sure which format to use, such as with references and proper nomenclature. I would like to note that if meeting FAC means tearing the article apart, I would rather dismiss this and leave it mainly as it is. I objectively wrote it using plentiful references, but also omitted some small tidbits as a local who is familiar with what's actually going on on the ground. For example, the county and Wikipedia suggest that the Metromover has variable headways depending on time of day. I can tell you with certainty this is not true. It is already a hassle enough for the operators to clear the system at night. Even at that time, they do not put them away in the maintenance facility, and there is no side track. They are simply parked, usually at the ends of the outer loops. There are several print sources that could be added to further reading section, which I went only as far as to initiate, as I know this makes an article look better. I did not plan to go for broke as I have been doing the past few days on this article, and quite frankly for some time between mid 2012 and mid 2014 I was embarrassed for even having created it. It was circular logic wherein I just kept going farther because I had gone so far, a recent cold that left me indoors also compelled me to delve back into the project. Frankly, it's incredibly easy to write a decent and broad article, it's just time consuming with the syntax. Sans references I could have written the whole thing in an hour or so, and it still would have been just as true. I can easily address any remaining deficiencies or format issues remaining in the article. B137 (talk) 02:11, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments—I reviewed, and failed this, for GAN three years ago. Some items from that review have been corrected, but the recent work does not bring this up to FA standards. Looking at just the references, in no particular order as things jumped out while skimming them:

  • At a bare minimum, a citation needs to list five things: any attributed authors, a date, a title, the publication information, and in-source location information.
    • Not all items will have specific authors, but if they are give, the citation should give them.
    • The date or year the source was published, and in some cases we also need the access date for online sources. In some cases, the access date is optional, but if there is no publication date, it is essential.
    • We need the title of the source, be it the article title, the book title, or the individual web page's title.
    • We need enough publisher information to enable a reader to locate and evaluate the source. For newspapers and major online-only news websites, the publication name is sufficient, but for books or unnamed websites, the company that published the source is needed. Not all websites are named. Most corporate or government agency websites are unnamed.
    • As a part of the in-source location information, if it's a print source, we need page numbers, if applicable. For an online source, this is the URL (and potentially the access date for websites that update frequently).
  • There are three different date formats in use. Most of the footnotes use "Month DD, YYYY" formatting, which for a topic related to the United States would be expected. However, footnote 11 has its dates in "DD Month YYYY" format, and footnote 93 is using YYYY-DD-MM formatting. For a Featured Article, the expectation is for the article to look polished and consistent. The publication dates and access dates can be rendered in either the same format, or different formats as long as you don't mix "Month DD, YYYY" publication dates and "DD Month YYYY" access dates, or vice versa. (Personally, I recommend using all "Month DD, YYYY" for everything.)
  • There is also inconsistency in in how authors are handled. Most of the footnotes list people in "Last, First" format, but footnote 81 as both authors in "First Last" order.
  • The references are wildly inconsistent and inaccurate at handling the difference between the name of a publication, and the name of a publisher.
    • A publication, or published work, is normally rendered in italics. This includes things like the names of newspapers, magazines or websites. In the citation templates, this is indicated with |work=, |newspaper=, |website= (which isn't the URL of the website, rather the name) or |journal=, etc.
    • A publisher is a company that publishes those works. This could also be the television station or network that produces a broadcast or publishes a news story online. These are listed in the citation templates using |publisher=.
    • As a related topic, but wire services, if indicated, are usually listed in |agency=.
  • There is inconsistency in how the same published work is being rendered from footnote to footnote. Unless the newspaper changed its name in the last three years, The Miami Herald in footnote 100 and Miami Herald in footnote 102 should be the same and should always be in italics as the name of a newspaper or newspaper's website. Similarly, you have The Huffington Post and Huffington Post.
    • Honestly, if the publication includes "The" in its name, you should include it as well, although some off-wiki style guides say to omit it. In either case, consistency is the key.
  • Titles of articles should not appear in ALL CAPS, period. You may change them to Title Case or Sentence case, but you must change them according to the MOS. While you're doing that, you should also harmonize all of the article titles to a single scheme, picking either Title Case (would seem to be preferred by MOS:CT) or Sentence case. This level of minor change is permissible. In fact, the APA style guide tells its adherents to change to specific capitalization schemes, regardless of how article titles and publication names are capitalized.
  • A standard practice in citations is to list the city of publication for newspapers that don't include the city in their title, which we can do with |location=. The Miami Herald includes the city, so listing it again is redundant, but the SunSentinel (or is it Sun-Sentinel) does not, so it should be included. This rule also applies to television stations, which should have their cities listed as well.
  • On footnote 20, the TV station should be listed as the publisher, and YouTube, if listed at all as a republisher, should be in the |via=. However as another practical matter, I'm skeptical that the uploader of that video has the appropriate permissions. We are not allowed to link to copyright violations, and if so that link should be removed at a minimum.
  • We really should be adding |format=PDF where appropriate. Not all readers can see the PDF icons in all cases, and those icons may actually disappear at some point. (They've already been removed from other language editions of Wikipedia along with icons for Word, Excel, or MP3 files; they're retained here for PDFs as a local change to the server software that could be removed at any time.)
  • On footnote 24, etc, you list "CBS Miami" as the publisher. It would be better to list the TV station's call letters along with the city where the station is located.
  • Footnote 54 is broken; it's missing a second "}" to close the template.
  • Footnote 90 uses "Belle Isle Blog" as the name of an author, instead of listing it as the department of the newspaper.
  • A best practice regarding linking publication names or publisher names is to only link the name in the first footnote that uses it to avoid WP:OVERLINKing.

That handles the biggest things that stand out in a quick skim of the numbered footnotes. However, you have a curious second footnotes section with a single shortened footnote that references a single full citation. Do your readers a favor and:

  1. Convert that single footnote using the other footnote system to use <ref>...</ref>.
  2. Run the full citation within that set of <ref>...</ref> tags. There is no use in shortening the only footnote to that source.

On that note, I will come back another day to evaluate the prose. If things are as jumbled there as I'm seeing in the citations in terms of formatting consistency, I hold very little hope for this article passing FAC in the normal time period. At this time, I'm leaning toward formally opposing promotion for this article. Imzadi 1979 → 09:43, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your feedback; I am not taken aback by your opposition at all. I realize that this is not an inherently eloquent topic. It is also so broad as to be possibly be not stable enough, especially with dating. When briefly reviewing the list of GAs and FAs recently, I noticed that Transport in/Transportation in/Rail Transport in – type of articles were basically non existent in either category. As I stated above, I was waiting for feedback here to see which format of reference was most accepted. You went into more depth here on things than you did in the extra comments of the GAN. The reason I did not do a GAN is because basically any editor could pick that up and give me non-collaborative advice on how to format it; here I thought I was more likely to get refined advice. B137 (talk) 15:58, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I am working on these syntactical issues now, with many completed. I added that The Miami Herald requires a subscription; it allows you a number of free articles per month. After that there is a pop up; however, you can still read the article behind it. Furthermore, if you hit stop at the right moment you can prevent the pop-up and freely read, search, and copy text from the article such as the title. I am unifying the refs as per an United States centric article, despite requirements for conversions for non-American readers. I changed the television sources to the call letters and the city, should I also add the affiliate (CBS, NBC, etc.) as the agency, perhaps? B137 (talk) 18:20, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
One additional inquiry; is it appropriate to supplement the book references in the standard reflist by including said books in the Bibliography section in a more traditional way, without the url of Google Books or whatever site hosts the preview or abstract of them? The Further reading section would remain dedicated to additional reading sources that are not directly referenced in the article, but still may be of interest to the in depth reader. B137 (talk) 19:58, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Many of these issues are fixed, with some remaining pending further advice. For example, South Florida Business Journal is a published source and as its name suggests it should be considered a journal, therefore using the parameter |journal=_ would be appropriate; however, as with The Miami Herald, some of their work is only available online. Not 100% can be seen in the print editions. Vice versa, not everything published is available online but none of that work is seen here. On another note the herald recently reformatted their site and some links were lost. There may be an archive but I'm not sure. B137 (talk) 22:16, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
"United States centric [sic] article"? "conversions for non-American readers"? This is a non-scientific topic clearly related to the United States. It should be written in American English and use American-style dates. It should also list customary measurement values first with metric given as a conversion. Otherwise, the content would be no different than you if were writing about a topic in Europe using British English, European-style dates and giving the metric values first.
I may not quite understand your Google Books question. If I'm reading you correctly, you don't need to duplicate the book like that. If you're only citing a book once, just put the whole citation using {{cite book}} into the footnote with the full information (authors, year, title, publication location, publisher, page number, and ISBN or OCLC if possible) and if you also read it online, include a good URL and probably |via=Google Books.
The "issue" with the South Florida Business Journal isn't an issue. In {{cite news}}, |work= |newspaper= and |journal= are aliases for each other; it doesn't matter which parameter name you use because they are functionally the same. In fact, if you set up more than one of them, I believe the value for |work= will override the others. Use |work=South Florida Business Journal or |journal=South Florida Business Journal and it won't matter, the name of the published work will still appear in italics in the proper location. (It also doesn't matter if you're reading it in print or online, it's the name of a print publication and its sister online website.)
If links have gone dead because The Miami Herald has reformatted their website, and you were relying on online-only articles, then you'll need to find links to those sources that still work or replacement sources. When dealing with news articles from The Mining Journal, I check to make sure that their online versions match a print edition (they don't publish stuff online-only), and then I use both the URL and the page number out of the print edition. I'll even go so far as to pre-emptively archive all online sources through http://www.webcitation.org/archive.php like I did with County Road 595 (Marquette County, Michigan). If any of those sources go offline in the future, someone (or a bot) can remove |deadurl=no to point readers to the archived copy.
Finally, my opposition has nothing to do with the topic, or any perceived lack of eloquence with it. Rather, FAs are expected to be "Wikipedia's finest work", and this is far from it in the references section. I have not only reviewed the formatting and found it quite wanting. If the prose is similarly wanting, then I will oppose promotion and suggest a thorough copy edit by a third party to get this article up to the level expected of a FA. We expect FAs to have a professional appearance, from the quality of the prose to the polish of the formatting. That is what matters, not the specific topic of the article Imzadi 1979 → 00:18, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Nearly all if not all of the print sources including books that would be of interest to this article can be found at the Richter Library at the University of Miami; I believe they have herald archives, though I have not looked at any them yet. Easier yet but with a cost the herald website has an online archive; Transit expose I had thought lost where articles from 1982 to present can be found. This would not include the early planning of Metrorail or the highway system, let alone anything on the early 19th century systems, most of which can be found in other sources anyway, such as the MUATS studies (at UM), this would cover all of the linked Miami Herald entries found in the article thus far.
To get to the long and short, have you read the article? B137 (talk) 02:00, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose—I haven't fully re-read the article since the GAN in 2011. The sourcing and its formatting though gives me pause. If the sourcing isn't good, it doesn't matter how good the writing is. If you have re-source the article, that could mean extensive revision of the content to match up the new sources. As it is, there are entire uncited paragraphs present in the article. The recent changes to citation formatting have corrected some errors and introduced several more. (Locations for TV stations were inserted into |publisher= instead of |location=, and publishers are appearing in italics where they weren't before or have been incorrectly shifted into |via=, as just a few examples.) I suggest that the nominator withdraw the nomination, take this to WP:PR and engage with other editors willing to assist in the detailed copy editing and polishing necessary to consider a FA nomination in the future. Imzadi 1979 → 03:06, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Whoa, a few links went bad, and I suggested two ways to get the information back; who said anything about resourcing the entire article? While I agree that The Herald does not offer the best journalism in the world, they are quite reliable in this subject. Is "Hunts' Guide to Michigan's Upper Peninsula" a more reliable source? Not trying to make this personal, but I feel I'm already late to that game. Regardless of the print archive, the online archive is little more than a paywall, and project guidelines do not mandate that all sources be freely available. Also, largely fixed are the minor syntactical issue of TV market areas, publishers, etc. I realize that it might be all but impossible to get this subject up to FA standards because so much of it is naturally just raw information that allows little creative license and inspiring prose, but with all due respect I feel that after your latest entry this has just devolved into rhetoric.
B137 (talk) 06:02, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Please re-read what I said. I've never questioned The Miami Herald, nor would I since they are presumably a/the paper of record for the metro area. Nor were any of my comments related to paywall vs. print archive or any of that. I just said that there are issues regarding the sourcing, and that has to be sorted out before we can move on to the prose because changes in sources usually mean changes in prose. Also, the presence of Talk:Transportation in South Florida#To do is also concerning to me. If there are topic areas that you know are missing, this article should not be at FAC. It's one thing if a reviewer points on a deficiency in comprehensiveness, but if you know there are these deficiencies, you're wasting reviewer time on an incomplete article. In short, you have structural issues to resolve before we can deal with polishing the prose. I still suggest withdrawing to work on these issues. Imzadi 1979 → 23:29, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]


Thank you for responding professionally despite my signs of taking offense. Since you are apparently not discrediting the herald, and you are okay with archives, what references again need to be changed? What issues are there remaining with the sources bar syntax, which I have fixed as far as you have guided me. The to-do list was a place for me to organized some new ideas, the only parts that have not been struck out I have discredited. I think I once briefly heard of fraud taking place by parking an unwanted car on the railroad tracks, and that this happened to Tri-Rail, but I could not find that information; it may have been as far out as a ranting comment, and the idea itself is absurd. B137 (talk) 21:15, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I have browsed several print sources on the topic, many old studies of highway and transportation plans and can say that there is not too much more that is worth adding to the article, unless the history section was going to be expanded as its own awkwardly titled Miami Transportation history (would be more local) or similar. It could be debated for weeks what minor details could be added or taken away, such as the controversial red light cameras at large intersections which seem to have been deactivated. If this stagnates for more than a few more days longer, I will withdraw it as an unequivocal oppose from the community if it has not already failed at that point. B137 (talk) 19:57, 22 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Closing comment -- Well, I think the review has indeed stagnated after those few more days so I'll be archiving it shortly. Beyond Imzadi's comments, I notice that there are still several uncited statements/paragraphs. I agree that Peer Review is the next logical step after addressing these issues. This is a very ambitious article, and I wish you the best luck with it. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 11:25, 27 November 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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