Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)/archive1

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 not promoted by GrahamColm 10:01, 29 May 2013 (UTC) [1].[reply]

Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)[edit]

Nominator(s): ^King Jakob _C2 13:34, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because... It recently passed GA with flying colors and since then I have done some copyediting and added a bit more content, so I think it's now ready for FA.^King Jakob _C2 13:34, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawing nomination as the requested additional content can probably not be provided with all the sources I am aware of for this subject already in use. ^King Jakob _C2 22:19, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

comment Should there not be a link in the Susquehanna River article to this page? Mattximus (talk) 14:18, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Not necessarily, the Susquehanna has hundreds of tributaries, it makes sense that only the largest of them are discussed in its article. There is a link to this page in the river system template at the bottom. Kmusser (talk) 14:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – The reference formatting needs some work. Numerous references are lacking publishers, refs 25 and 30 are currently bare links, ref 29 is nothing but a piped title, and refs 16 and 18 shouldn't be in all caps. And is Google Maps considered a reliable source? Giants2008 (Talk) 14:04, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by ColonelHenry[edit]

The following is the beginning of my comments on the article. There may be more to come and this should be considered an incomplete review (there always can be more to find). At this time, I oppose promotion to FA, pending the results that ensue from these comments and that of other reviewers.--ColonelHenry (talk) 07:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

General comments

I don't consider this article's prose to be well-written, engaging, or professional, in accordance with the FA criteria. I read through this and find large swaths of text that I would write differently--and considerably so. I would have organised the article's sections differently as well.

Media

This article needs more images. Two pictures and a map currently included are nice, but more pictures are necessary given the length of the article and number of sections that are text-only

Question: Would charts/graphs count as acceptable images?^King Jakob _C2 12:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Depends. Is it an image of a chart, maybe...I just don't see a need for image graphs and charts. If you're just talking about putting a table in the text of an article, no. The map is nice, all river articles should have one. But you only have two pictures pushed up at the top of the article and 80% is just big blocks of text that could benefit from being broken up with pictures.--ColonelHenry (talk) 13:06, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Image Check: the three images are free and properly tagged, as of 25APR13.

Citations

A lot of the citations (28 out of 30) do not offer a complete set of bibliographic information. For instance:

footnotes 21-24 are from the book "History of Columbia and Montour Counties, Pennsylvania" (found here: [2]), but the cite doesn't reference the name of the book or its publishing information, the cites offer no page numbers, just chapters.
Gertler, Edward. Keystone Canoeing, Seneca Press, 2004. is an incomplete cite ...where was it published? There are 4 companies called "Seneca Press" that print books. I would refer the nominator to the Chicago/Turabian style guide for rendering these references into properly-formatted citations.

Lede

Does not sufficiently summarize content/aspects of the article. Larger themes of history, biology, etc. are neglected or inadequately covered.
Sentence: "Fishing Creek is well known for its trout population and it also contains many other species of fish" -- "well known" is peacocking. Almost every river has species of fish and many are trout streams, if the river gets a little puffery, the river ought to be unique. The sentence also is strange...What did the trout population do to become famous? Did they cure cancer or are they a counter-culture?

Removed^King Jakob _C2 12:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You're not supposed to use removed/done templates in FAC because it slows down how the WP:FAC page loads. Just use text and maybe embolden it when you reply to a comment.--ColonelHenry (talk) 13:01, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sentence: The watershed of the Fishing Creek is 85 percent forest and 13 percent farmland. In the upper part of the Fishing Creek watershed, the remaining 2 percent is residential, whereas in the lower part of the watershed, the remaining 2 percent is urban - information that is discussed no where in the body of the article. The lede is a summary body, it is not the body nor should it discussed topics or facts that aren't mentioned or expanded in the body.

Tributaries

I am not enthusiastic about the short, few-sentence one-paragraph sections in this section, and it would be my subjective judgment that it would be better organized as a larger "Course" prose section akin to those offered in other river FAs, Big Butte Creek, Bull Run River (Oregon), Johnson Creek (Willamette River), Paulins Kill.
I don't think google maps (footnote 1) meets WP:RS for discussions of the river's course, tributaries, etc. Perhaps USGS topographical maps, watershed/basin reports and maps, environmental reports, local histories would be a better source that meet WP:RS.

According to the GA review, Google maps data is OK for uncontroversial statements. That's in an archive of WP:RS/N (not sure which as there are 147 archives of that noticeboard). ^King Jakob _C2 12:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

First off, you're basing entire sections with google maps and for me that is a WP:RS problem. This isn't an innocuous question about alternate spellings of a road name, you are drawing the course of a river from what you see on google maps, that runs afoul of WP:SYN (i.e. original research). When the consensus says unquestionably that it's o.k. for things non-controversial, they're not endorsing a violation of OR or the basing of large swaths of content on google maps. That would not be non-controversial. Secondly, the RS/N board is a discussion board, and from what I've seen searching through it, each time the question of google maps comes up it's mentioned in the archive, it's a discussion, and none of them seem conclusive (one person argues for, another against, and little more is achieved in terms of consensus) and the discussions do not result in either an hard-and-fast consensus or an unequivocal change in the rules. So, unless I see an explicit dictum of "google maps is a reliable source" at WP:RS or another MOS policy/guideline page (i.e. a discussion that results in an unequivocal policy statement), whatever is said on a talk page is meaningless. Third, Google maps (any map) is a tertiary source and should not be used in detailed discussions. That's what secondary sources are for. This is a very salient reason for denying the FA, so I'd advise you to do it right and use a watershed report, or a local history that describes the course of the river and other documents before synthesizing a summary off what you see on google maps. If you have to use a map (a tertiary source), back it up with a secondary source...because if it is verifiable, someone would have put it in a secondary source. And as far as a reliable source, if you have to use a map as a tertiary source for anything, point to a USGS map because google maps has a myriad of accuracy problems. When in doubt, never settle for the easy way out. Google maps is the easy way out and as far as I see it, not reliable. --ColonelHenry (talk) 13:01, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Soil

As someone with a background in agronomy, I know soils...but this section offers nothing to the unknowledgeable reader. It is a list of the region's various soil profiles and by a cursory glance at the content, it looks likely that this entire section too closely paraphrased from a USDA/NRCS soil survey.
The 1914 crop yields aren't atypical or extraordinary--in fact they match average yields today (although the corn is a bit low). Why are they relevant when there's no other discussion of local agriculture? If this river and watershed feeds an agricultural region, a larger discussion of agriculture is warranted.

Watershed

Why isn't this section incorporated into the "Course" section? I would think it would be more appropriate and cogent together.
This section mentions tributaries that aren't even included in the tributaries section.

History

Lacks a lot of parts of the local history (including French and Indian War and Revolution, missing a lot of Native American information that could/should be there, european settlement patterns (which ethnic groups? where did they come from? the Port of Philadelphia?). Also, 1770s is not "recent history", neither is 1915.

Renamed subsections.^King Jakob _C2 12:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just renaming subsections doesn't improve the lack of content on large swaths of history.--ColonelHenry (talk) 13:18, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Biology

How is any of these species unique to the area? Aren't they largely the same species you see in almost every other river in the Northeastern US?

Habitat quality

Needs context. The entire discussion about habitability scores, organism density, and diversity is useless without explanation what it means and why it's important.

Recreation

Not comprehensive/Inadequate coverage. The entire first paragraph is a list of public areas, the second is a one-sentence article with a series of activities but no discussion. If this is a well-known trout stream, here would be the place to extol its virtues.

See also

Is there a prevailing reason to link to Catawissa Creek, Nescopeck Creek? They do not seem to be related to the article topic except as other tributaries of the Susquehanna, and that function is better served on the list article cited or in the category of the Susquehanna tributaries.

Fixed^King Jakob _C2 12:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly more to come. --ColonelHenry (talk) 07:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Fredlyfish4[edit]

As as starting point, I think the points I previously made on the article's talk page should be addressed:

Briefly mention what the Shannon diversity index is.
I think it is worthwhile mentioning that of the three trout species, only brook trout are native and rainbows are probably stocked for recreation (I'm not sure about brown, but I think they're also stocked).
The last two-sentence paragraph before biology seems a bit out of place. Perhaps you could expand more on land cover in the watershed and other terrestrial species.
The "highest density of organisms" paragraph could use some clarification. What organisms were studied and included in this? An organisms could be a fish or a bacterium and anything in between.
With regard to glaciation, mention when the area was last glaciated. I expect this area was near the terminus of the Laurentide ice sheet during the last glacial period, and thus would have been one of the first ice-free areas once glacial retreat began.
I also agree with the above that the overall quality of writing should be improved.

Fredlyfish4 (talk) 02:44, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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