Wikipedia:Peer review/Aliso Creek (Orange County)/archive2

Aliso Creek (Orange County)

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This article has already been through one PR but failed FAC, so I am requesting another PR to clean this up before nominating for the second FAC. Aliso Creek is a really insignificant watershed in some ways, and almost any website or book that mentions the creek has been used as a reference. The article has no problems with prose or organization, really, but I need to identify which references to keep and which to remove, as that is what made it fail FAC.

Thanks, Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 02:46, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: I have far fewer suggestions this time. I did a bit of minor proofing and added some nbsps to things that might look awkward if separated on computer screens by line break. WP:NBSP has details. Later, I'll give the whole article another read-through and post anything else I might have to say below these comments, but I wanted to post this batch without delay.

Geography

~~I'd suggest moving the Land use box up a bit to eliminate the text sandwich between it and the Aliso Canyon image.~~

Water quality

~~The two-line blockquote is too short for a blockquote. WP:MOSQUOTE has details. Just a regular quote within the text would be better, methinks.~~
I don't think the big green text box will survive FAC. I can't seem to find a guideline about this just now, but for one thing the big box creates a text sandwich with the storm-drain image. I don't like the green color (a subjective criticism), and I don't think the box adds anything. Why not use plain text for this?

Wildlife

~~The steelhead image bumps into the "Vegetation" subhead on my computer screen. Moving the image up about three lines would fix this.~~

First inhabitants

~~"In the contrary, some seventy major archaeological sites... " - Should that be "even so" rather than "in the contrary"?~~

Urbanization and development

"Taking advantage of the creek's high winter surges, ranging from 0 to 404 acre feet (0 to 500,000 m3) monthly, an A. J. Stead proposed in 1934... " - Either something is missing after "an" or "an" should be deleted. I'm guessing that some kind of identifier for A. J. Stead is missing.

References

The date formatting in the citations should be consistent. Most of them in the existing citations take the form yyyy-mm-dd. My recommendation would be to change all the nonconforming ones to yyyy-mm-dd. Citation 2, for example, has two full dates, and the first one is March 6, 1936. It should be 1936-03-06. The dates in the main text have to be internally consistent too, but they don't have to be the same as the citations. I didn't notice any problems with the main text date formats.
Citations should be as complete as possible. Typically for refs to Internet sources this would include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date. Some of these are incomplete. For example, the dates of publication for citations 35 and 36 are missing even though they are easy to find. By the way, citation 35 says "latimes.com" for the publisher, but standard practice would be to use Los Angeles Times and not bother with "latimes.com". The publisher for citation 39 is Orange County, and the publication date is 2008. And so on. These details and tweaks make it easier to see how old a supporting document might be and to find things, especially if a link goes dead.
I'll have to give some more thought to your question about which refs are OK and which might not be. Generally, newspapers, books, and magazines and web sites published by newspapers, magazines, and governments are considered reliable sources while many dot-coms might not be. I avoid dot-coms if I can find clearly reliable sources to replace them. Sometimes a personal web site by an established expert is OK, but generally personal web sites, blogs, and opinion pages do not qualify as reliable. If no reliable source supports a claim, I don't include the claim. I hope this sort of general answer is useful. WP:RS has more.

Finetooth (talk) 22:05, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've revised the article based on your comments. However, (I am scared to the bone bringing this up) I am unsure if current ref 5 (the "FPCP" ref) which has some 20 citations throughout the article, should be moved to the "Works Cited" section and each reference replaced with "FPCP, page ...". I really hope I won't have to do this. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 22:27, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think the way you've done it is fine. Sometimes I've listed long PDF documents in a "Works cited" section so that I could cite specific pages numbers or small ranges of pages via separate short notes like "Jones, pp. 11–16". That can be clumsy, though, if it causes a proliferation of separate notes with only slightly different page numbers. Some editors argue that it's better to do them exactly the way you've done the FPCP notes, with a single ref=name for the whole document. Since the PDF document in this case is only 41 pages long, I think you have a strong case for leaving the FPCPs they way they are. I doubt that this will cause a rumpus at FAC. Finetooth (talk) 23:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for saving me again. Do you have any comments on the quality of the references? I removed about 5 that they complained about at the last FAC. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 00:14, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'll look again. I had to go away for awhile, and when I came back I finished flipping the nonconforming date formats to yyyy-mm-dd in the citations. I think I caught them all. Finetooth (talk) 01:58, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I ran the link checker tool that lives here. It's the same tool used at FAC, and it finds a dead url in citation 28. This is the source for a direct quote from the Clean Water Act, so it has to be fixed or replaced. I'm guessing that another government source will have the same information. You might Google "Clean Water Act California" to see what you can find. Any dot.gov should be reliable. The link checker also sees a problem with citation 53. This is the source for four claims in the article, and it looks fixable to me. It's part of the set of Orange County documents that you've cited elsewhere in the article. Even though they are dot-coms, they look like RS government sites. I think you can probably find those maps at the site and fix the problem, which may merely be a syntax error of some sort. More to come. Finetooth (talk) 02:30, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

<outdent> I see the source of some other minor problems in the citations. This is not something you could know without messing around with the citation templates quite a bit, and it confuses lots of editors. The "cite web" and "cite news" templates don't behave in exactly the same way. A peculiar problem that often arises is that "cite news" has a place for the publisher and a place for the work. It would seem logical to put Los Angeles Times in the publisher slot, but this prints it without italics. In fact, though not apparent, the Los Angeles Times is the work, and if you put it in that slot, the italics get added automatically. In some cases you've used "cite web" for newspapers, and in other cases you've used "cite news". Rather than swapping the templates, my work-around is to add the italics to the newspapers in the publisher slot in "cite web" and to move the newspapers to the work slot in "cite news". I've fixed a few of these, adding the publication dates as well in yyyy-mm-dd format. Finetooth (talk) 03:05, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, the travel and recreation site dot-coms like www.biketrails.com are not considered reliable sources for Wikipedia's purposes. The good news is that usually most of the same information can be found at a government web site. You can find a government source for at least some of the bike trail data, including trail names and lengths, here. In a case like this, adjust the claims in the text to what can be supported by the RS. Delete claims not supported by the RS or (tougher) find another source or sources to support the original claims. If I were writing this article, I'd just use the minimal government data. Finetooth (talk) 03:51, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The www.cagenweb.com site is basically a personal web site and is not a reliable source for Wikipedia. You might find similar information in a book about Orange County history. Local historical societies may have published or unpublished materials. Newspapers often have columns with details about local history; sometimes you can do on-line searches for this kind of information. Google books are another possibility. It takes a lot of digging sometimes to find this sort of stuff. How much digging you decide to do depends on how important you think it is to the article. Finetooth (talk) 04:05, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I removed some of the links you specified; I also added the OC Parks link. I haven't been able to find a replacement URL for ref 28, though. There's also a Los Angeles Almanac, however, I've already cited that in the article, maybe I'll add a few more citations. Otherwise, the reference section looks pretty clean of these links. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 15:50, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I added some missing data to the existing citations and moved some things around within the citations as noted above, but I see more that needs to be done. Examples are the lack of italics on the newspaper name in citation 7, lack of an url or access date in citation 44, blocks of italicized material that are a bit mysterious, such as "University of California, Irvine, Department of Environmental Analysis; University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Geological Sciences; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Department of Geology and Geophyiscs; Leighton and Associates; San Diego State University, Department of Geoloogical Sciences" in citation 21. Fixing these is tedious, but each one needs to be as accurate and properly formed as possible. Questions may again arise about the Tom Chester citation (number 20) and the Los Angeles Almanac citation (number 48) because these appear to be personal web sites. If you use them, you'll be asked to show why they should be considered reliable. The Almanac might be one person's notions of the facts; how can we be sure? A good rule of thumb is to anticipate these sorts of questions and to either (1) find a clearly reliable source or sources to substitute for the doubtful ones or (2) prepare convincing answers or (3) delete the claims. With Chester, it might help to note that the article you cite is listed here as part of the State of California Department of Conservation's "California Geotour", but that might not be enough. Who is Tom Chester, and why should we consider him to be a reliable source? Finetooth (talk) 19:10, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the Chester citation does give a works cited list; the info given in it fits well with the other sources used in the article. It does introduce some new facts, but it looks pretty true to me. Actually, I'll replace it with one of the references I found for Santiago Creek, which is from a geology journal, so that's fixed. As for ref 48, the Los Angeles Almanac, I've found in Google Books a better replacement. I'll go finish that right now. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 19:31, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Have any more comments? Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 03:19, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

<outdent> I haven't looked at the article for about a week. I'll take another look today. Finetooth (talk) 16:28, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some really tedious work remains to be done on the citations. I spent an hour or so this morning tracking down and fixing some of the problems, but I have to move on to other projects. An url is not a publisher. Thus you need to track down the publisher for each article with something like "www.water.ca.gov" in the publisher slot and replace it with the name of the publisher. The url shouldn't go anywhere in the citation templates except the url slot; delete any that appear in another slot such as the publisher slot or the work slot. Instead of adding notes explaining the search parameters for the GNIS ciations, it's customary to link directly to the source page. A special "cite gnis" template is one way to do this. I added it to citation 3 so you can see how it works. I spiffed up a few more things in the main text and crossed a few things off the list above. Hope this helps. Finetooth (talk) 18:03, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK. This seems to be a big problem in many of my articles, actually. But what should go in the "Work" slot? Or should I just leave it blank? Anyway I'll go correct these right now. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 20:50, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've never seen the "work" parameter in anything but the "cite news" template, where it's used for the newspaper name, which is the work. (The newspaper publisher might have a different name). I'd suggest deleting it from the "cite web" templates to avoid confusion. Finetooth (talk) 03:42, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, in the cite web template the "publisher" is the website, e.g. University of ..., and the "work" would be the series of articles or the certain group that made it, e.g. the Department of... . If I remove the "work" parameter from the cite web templates, where is the thing I put in the work parameter going to go in the reference? Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 21:27, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The university or other entity is the publisher. The website is the url. Finetooth (talk) 23:26, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

:::::::I mean, in the "publisher" slot, it would be, for example: "University of..." instead of "www.something.edu", which is what mostly prevails in the article. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 00:25, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, I see what you mean, I'll go correct those. Shannon ^talk _contribs ^sign!_:) 00:26, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]