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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 not promoted 18:01, 19 June 2007.

Manhattan

[edit]

Self nomination - Over the past few months, significant effort has been made to expand, improve and source this article, which covers the heart of the Big Apple. In response to requests made during this article's successful WP:GA effort, dozens of new sources and ample new material were added. A peer review has been open for a week and no changes were raised. The combination of the strong quality of the article and its broad appeal make it an ideal candidate to be a featured article. I look forward to any suggestions and addressing any comments to the best of my ability. Alansohn 02:51, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment Looks really great. All web references should have publisher and author information, if available. Some web references in the article do not have that. Please attend.--Dwaipayan (talk) 13:15, 11 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Geography" The island is 20 mi² (51.8 km²) of land measuring 13 miles (21 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) across at its widest point. However, soon, Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles (58.8 km²) in area, 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide, at its widest (around 14th Street.. Please rectify and remove redundancy.
  •  Done Thanks for the catch! The differing -- and unsupported -- numbers initially cited were removed and the sources and numbers retained were reverified. Alansohn 17:25, 11 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
" Neighborhoods" The distinction between streets and avenues can be mentioned. (Or is it there already? Hope I didn't miss!).--Dwaipayan (talk) 16:05, 11 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Done I guess its obvious to us New Yawkas, but the text was clarified to explain the difference between north-south Avenues and east-west Streets. Alansohn 17:25, 11 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - seconding the comment about the history section; I think it can be shortened, possibly by treating more of it as a summary of History of New York City - I assume the two must be identical for large periods. A bit of the prose here could do with improvement (particularly in the history section), will see if I can have a look The Land 21:36, 13 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply Crime section has been added. Sources have been reviewed, with publishers added as described in examples. Link farm has been heavily pruned. Please review and indicate if there are any other issues to be addressed.
  • The "Crime" section jumps from 1933 to 2005... I know mentioning city's bad reputations with crime is a touchy subject, but if you look at any movie or TV show set in NYC from 1970 to the mid-1990s, crime almost certainly appeared at some point and was often portrayed as nearly omnipresent. Can something from the "crime in NYC" sub article be moved here to cover this gap? Also could the difference in "crime in Manhattan" and "Crime in NYC overall" be touched on? Does Manhattan traditionally have a lower or higher rate? If this stuff is even known. --W.marsh 15:25, 16 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply Data has been added to describe the sharp jump in the crime rate starting in 1960 (when modern crime tracking started) and rising until the 1980s. It was this period that gave New York City its reputation as a crime capital. As sharply as it rose, virtually every category has declined sharply since 1990. Current data for Manhattan showing the decline since 1990 is provided, but I have not yet found a comparison of Manhattan crime rates to those of the outer boroughs. Please let me know if any further changes are required. Alansohn 17:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some other things to work on: the Economy section looks sparse for Manhattan. Also, see WP:DASH. Hyphens (-) are for hyphenated words, ndash (–) is for separating ranges of dates and numbers, and mdash (—) is for punctuation. See WP:UNITS about non-breaking hard spaces between numbers and units of measurement. And, see WP:GTL on placement of templates at the tops of sections. I made some sample edits to illustrate some of these items. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply Thanks for the comments and the sample changes. Formatting changes have been made for units of measurement, dashes, PDF files, use of ALL CAPS in lieu of Title Case and standardization of image widths. The economy section has been expanded, as requested. I'm still not sure what the template issues are, nor do I see anything in [{WP:GTL]] that would be relevant here. Any further input on this (and any other issue) would be greatly appreciated. Alansohn 16:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • PS, it's not a good idea to mislabel in edit summary a revert of someone else's work; this caused me to re-do the work unnecessarily, creating the impression of an edit war. Whenever you revert someone else's work, you should indicate that in the edit summary and explain why. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:13, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Since you also reverted my changes to the image placement in Demographics, I suppose you have another plan for preventing the overlapping images and tables, which are unreadable in my browser, as I indicated in my edit summaries ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:23, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • There was no intention whatsoever to undo your changes. I'm not sure why my edits were applied to a previous version as I'm certain that it wasn't marked as an earlier version. I'm baffled!!?!? Alansohn 16:09, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose What's there in the history section is good, but seems very uneven in treatment of various time periods. The 17th century is discussed at length, while later centuries are glossed over. There's a paragraph in the history section that discusses water supply. This sounds like a better fit for the geography section. Then the article jumps back and mentions the 1600s again, jumps ahead to the end of the 19th century, regarding boundary changes. Then skips the first half of the 20th century. Again, the early history material excellent, but needs to be worked with the subarticle (History of New York City, and various subarticles of that), with some details transferred there. A better balance of other time periods, as relating to Manhattan would be good. For example, how African Americans migrated from Tenderloin up to Harlem (good discussion of this in the Harlem article). --Aude (talk) 20:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply Point well taken. The history section was completely reorganized, offering a more thorough history of Manhattan, not just its early formation period. Any comments on these changes will be graetly appreciated. Alansohn 05:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The history section looks much better. Though, I'm concerned about placement of the "see also" links, and other style/prose issues as mentioned by Sandy and Tony. --Aude (talk) 17:23, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose—Much improved writing. There's a ref tag floating under "19th-century growth". Note the hyphen, which most US editors would prefer. And see MOS about capitalising subtitles. 1a. This is not good enough at all. The lead, you'd assume, would be the subject of particular care in the writing, since it might end up on our front page as a display of WP's "very best work". Not this, I hope.
    • "also includes"—my favourite redundancy. Remove "also", of course.
    • "The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata so written earliest in the 1609 logbook (Record of October 2) of Robert Juet, an officer of the Dutch East India Company yacht Halve Maen or Half Moon, captained by Henry Hudson.[3]" Too much is awkwardly packed into this snake of a sentence. A comma is required after "hata", and what follows must be grammatical; "so written earliest" is not. Why not "Manna-hata, first recorded October 2, 1609 in the logbook of Robert Juet ...." Either back-refer to Hudson in the next sentence, or break after Juet with a semicolon and a new clause. Really ... It's a tangled mess.
    • Manuscript map—is this a regular term?
    • "on the west as well as the east side of"—no, this is ungrammatical (s) and verbose: "on the west and east sides of.
    • "manifold"? Just "many", or if possible remove it altogether.
    • "would have been"—you've already got "supposed" as the hedge word, so make it just "were". "Some" could refer to the "people", so should be clarified for smooth reading.
    • A few commas would make the reading easier.
    • "Manhattan is the borough most closely associated with New York City by tourists; even natives of New York City's outer boroughs will describe a trip to Manhattan as "going to the city"." Why bring tourists into it if the association is more widely used by, let's face it, people who are more significant to the topic. "Residents" would be nicer than "natives", to avoid the possibility that the original people are the referent here. Might cause offence, too.
    • "An international center of finance and culture, Manhatten ..." would be less clumsy.
    • "Manhattan has many famous landmarks, tourist attractions, museums and universities. It is also home to the headquarters of the United Nations and the seat of city government." Category problem in that museums are tourist attractions. I'd remove "tourist atractions" and add another item. (There's a wealth to choose from.) I think the "also" could probably go; why create a laboured relationship between it and the previous list?

Now just fixing these examples I've laboriously exposed won't do the trick. Fresh eyes are required to sift through the whole article. Really, this is by no stretch of the imagination a professional standard of writing. Our readers deserve much better, and so does Manhatten. Tony 11:28, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. There are serious problems with the economy section. I don't know how many workers Manhattan has, but it's considerably more than 1.5 million (which is just the residential population, and discounts the huge daily commuter influx).--Pharos 01:24, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Reply: The employment numbers provided were correct. The text you read did not say that there were 1.5 million workers; it said that there were 1.5 million workers in private industry in addition to the 280,000 in financial services. These numbers were taken straight from the source provided from The New York Times. As I'm sure there are a few people among the 1.5 million residents of the borough who are not working (perhaps a few children, elderly and other unemployed), 1.5 million jobs would be a staggeringly large number in and of itself. The latest total employment number in Manhattan -- over 2.3 million, which also includes the substantial government sector -- has been added to the article to explicitly answer the employment question. Alansohn 02:17, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Some other things also need to be cited (or be cited better), for example that there was a settlement in Lower Manhattan in 1613, that New Netherlanders had "liberties and freedoms unlike those available to New Englanders and Virginians", the idea that Chinatown is "the largest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere" (yes, there's a cite but that's from a tourism agency. Flushing's Chinatown, to pick one nearby example, is clearly larger.)--Pharos 02:11, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Reply: The Chinatown statistic is from New York City's official city-sponsored convention and visitors bureau, not just some "tourism agency". Additional sources will be added to address the other material cited (or not cited). Alansohn 02:17, 20 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support This article just can't seem to stop getting better. I tinkered with it a little for GA status, but it has been taken over by passionate New Yorkers I think lol. Judgesurreal777 07:20, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object The article is a whopping 100+ kbytes long: that's a huge read. And I left quite some recommendation for simple WP guidelines compliance issues on the article's talkpage. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wimvandorst (talk • contribs) 23:16, June 4, 2007
    • Still objecting. I objected to the WP:MOS problems almost a month ago, and started fixing them myself, but my changes were reverted. There are still MOS issues, as outlined on the talk page and above. Also the prose size is 62KB, above WP:LENGTH guidelines. There are numerous sections that could be further summarized, per WP:SS, including History, Neighborhoods, Demographics, and probably others. It's interesting to note that the Manhattan article is much longer than the New York City article. And there are still random copyedit needs (... and the nation's first public park.[22]</ref>[23]). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:42, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why is Manhattan in the lead referred to as a borough in the 2nd sentence, then later on in the sentence, referred to as a county, and then in the 4 sentence, is referred to as a "borough and county"? These inconsistencies need to be addressed. Also, why is there a hypothetical, "[i]f all five boroughs were independent cities" in the lead. The fact remains, they aren't independent cities, so this is just kind of useless information. And if the point absolutely has to be made, does it belong in the lead? The Geography section has way to many details. I would suggest that the entire "The Commissioner's Plan of 1811" paragraph be removed and added to the subarticle. The point of the section is to give a summary of Manhattan, all these streets/avenues can't be that important. The transportation section is also rife with specifics - the cost of subway fare and the cost of the PATH fare. Details about the MetroCards and the PATH cards most certainly do not belong here. Looks like the article has enough content, just too much content. Much effort must be made to streamline the article and cut out any unnecessary details. Oppose. Pepsidrinka 21:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose the chart shown in the section of demographics is pretty outdated, i.e. year 2000. Titles are basically poorly written on these pictures, e.g. Manhattan compared, historical populations, etc. The comparision from the chart (Manhattan compared) is not that comprehensive indeed; it is only in the scope of NY state. The part of culture mentioned too much unnecessary details like Landmarks and architecture, sports, etc. I personally think that crime shouldn't be mentioned in the section of government. Basicaclly, this is not a good topic to be promoted to the FA status at this moment.Coloane 23:41, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Reply: The historical populations title is provided by the USCensusPop template, the preferred Wikipedia medium for presenting US population data. The most recent United States Census took place in 2000; only some of the data is available in more current form, and very little would change in any material fashion. Furthermore, these same formatted tables (with "City" changed to "County") are used in the New York City article, a Featured Article that passed without any criticism (or mention) of these "poorly written" tables. It's hard to view architecture in Manhattan as "too much unnecessary detail". I will be more than happy to attempt to address any specific constructive suggestions, if you have any. Alansohn 00:04, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      landmarks and arch. & sports mentioned too much detail indeed in the section of culture (actually I don't know if they are appropriate for putting under this category), go to take a look carefully. I don't care actually when the Census took place, but you had better provide the up-to-date information to us. If the most recent census took place in 1980, are you going to use it? well, I don't think so. Again, the table is not that comprehensive indeed to compare in wider scope. If you said that criticism (or mention) of these "poorly written" tables is poor, why don't you go there and improve them, but sit down and find the excuses instead? Again, oppose! it is not a good article, period! Coloane 00:57, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.
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