Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Trout Creek Mountains/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 promoted by Graham Beards via FACBot (talk) 20:26, 15 October 2015 [1].

Trout Creek Mountains

Nominator(s): Jsayre64 (talk) 22:20, 7 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about perhaps the most rural area in Oregon and a section of the vast American Basin and Range Province. These mountains are little known to outsiders and rarely visited. So I find it fascinating to learn and write about this landscape (though I wasn't the one who initially wrote the article). The GA reviewer in January wrote, "Please take this to FA," and a peer reviewer provided helpful suggestions on the talk page in August, helping work toward that goal. Now with more improvements since the middle of August, I believe the article meets the FA criteria. Jsayre64 (talk) 22:20, 7 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Finetooth

  • I reviewed this article in early August and posted my thoughts on the article's talk page: Talk:Trout Creek Mountains#Peer review. I'm leaning toward support, but I have a few more suggestions.

Lede

  • It might be better to recast the first sentence to eliminate link bump: Great Basin mountain range. One way to do this would be to unlink "mountain range", which is already familiar to most readers. I would also unlink "United States"; it's too well-known to need a link.
  • "the mountains are open to recreation but see few visitors" – Maybe "are rarely visited" since mountains can't see.
  • "Wildlife includes bushes, grasses, birds and mammals." – Too general. Specific examples from the main text would make this more interesting. Big sagebrush, desert grasses, mule deer, pronghorn, sage grouse, a few cottonwoods and alders?
  • I'd mention the mercury mines in the lede; they were of significant historical importance.
  • "However, the effects of grazing allotments on riparian zones and the fish led to environmental concerns in the 1980s." – "Concerns" seems too mild. Perhaps "led to land-use conflict in the 1980s"?
  • "to help resolve disagreements between livestock owners and environmentalists" – Since the list of parties is long, "among" would be more accurate than "between", and perhaps "environmentalists" should be expanded to "environmental organizations, government agencies, and other interested parties."
  • "riparian zones have begun to recover from more than a century of cattle grazing." – I'd lop off "from more than a century of cattle grazing" and just end with the word "recover".

Geography

  • "Disaster Peak anchors the southern end of the mountains in a smaller range called The Granites." – Would "sub-range" be more clear than "smaller range"?
  • "on the east along the Harney–Malheur" – Remove the duplicate link to Harney County?
  • "The Kings River begins in The Granites and flows south toward the interior of Nevada, while McDermitt Creek flows generally east toward McDermitt." – Add that Kings River is a tributary of the Quinn River, which ends in the Black Rock Desert. Add a bit more specific detail from the GNIS description of McDermitt Creek: "Heads in Oregon, flows southeast into Nevada, where it disappears into the valley floor, 0.7 mi west of the Quinn River and 2.5 mi southwest of McDermitt."

Land-management compromise

  • I think the bulleted list would be better as straight prose.
  • Done, except I think the list of parties in the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group is easier to read in bulleted format. The MOS:EMBED guideline isn't very specific, but I feel that it's more practical to list 13 items with bullet points instead of in prose. I'd be glad to discuss this and hear others' opinions. By the way, regarding your other comments, it's simply amazing what one pair of eyes can see and another doesn't find. Jsayre64 (talk) 07:15, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OK. If others find the bulleted list problematic, it will be easy to change. I don't feel strongly about this one way or the other. As for eyes, ever it was thus. I have never seen anything at PR or FAC that sailed through with no suggestions for improvement. Meanwhile, I have three more suggestions.
  • I would break up the third long paragraph of the lede after the word jackrabbits.
  • Citation 23 links to an abstract rather than a complete article. The citation should probably include a "subscription required" parameter; that is |subscription=yes.
  • You might consider adding pre-emptive archiveurls to head off link rot. You can search for existing clones of articles in the Internet Archive or use the "Save Page Now" function at that site to create an archived copy if none exists. Finetooth (talk) 17:35, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done. All links that can be archived have now been archived. Thanks for your helpful comments. Jsayre64 (talk) 23:46, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you happen to know when to use "land-use" or "land-management" as opposed to "land use" or "land management"? Jsayre64 (talk) 02:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Off the top of my head, I'd say hyphenate when it's an adjective, as in "land-use conflict" and not otherwise, as in "unusual land use". Finetooth (talk) 02:29, 14 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support on prose, comprehensiveness, style, research, layout, length, etc., and media as soon as Nikkimaria's concerns are addressed. I should note, as above, that I peer-reviewed the article and that I also made a few minor additions and corrections to it along the way. Finetooth (talk) 17:35, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • File:Antilocapra_americana.jpg: couple of problems here. First, I don't see this image on the given site - do you have a more direct link? Second, the site's copyright page currently claims CC BY-SA 3.0 on all images, not PD. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:09, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support on prose, presentation, sourcing, and useful illustrations. It's informative and a highly interesting read. A couple thoughts: first, I do like the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group member organizations displayed as a bulleted list, and second, I'm wondering if the Oregon Desert Trail should be mentioned somewhere in the article. – Juliancolton | Talk 23:45, 26 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I'm glad you reminded me of the Oregon Desert Trail. I think it makes sense to link to that article in a "see also" section, so I've done that and linked to High Desert (Oregon) as well. Jsayre64 (talk) 05:40, 27 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment (having stumbled here from my FAC). Quite well done and educational. Beautiful use of photos. Excellent climate graphic to help inform the reader. Only minor quibble with the short final paragraph in sect Human uses. That paragraph just reads a bit odd to me, I don't know, maybe it's the use of "Today" that feels a bit colloquial. Perhaps "Currently" or "At present" or "As of 2015" or whatever the source says, something like that. — Cirt (talk) 01:05, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I changed the adverb to "currently," and I'm guessing you thought the wording was a little choppy, so I tried to make the sentences flow better. Thanks for looking over the article. Jsayre64 (talk) 05:07, 30 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Reads a bit better now, thanks. — Cirt (talk) 17:53, 30 September 2015 (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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