Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Peterborough/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 21:24, 28 April 2007.

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Peterborough

I believe this article meets the featured article criteria. It has been given good article status today. Chrisieboy 15:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: The Local Geography section is far too listy for an FA, and the Politics sections is rather short for so many subsections. You may want to compare it with Sheffield#Government and politics, which shows a good way of laying out this section. Laïka 18:52, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose, the following immediately jump to mind, but there may be more on closer inspection:
  • Economy: there's a table of statistics with no context -- whether they're above or below national average, what neighbouring cities are like, etc, and what those numbers actual mean for life in the city. At the moment it's meaningless without an education in economics.
  • Sport: the football paragraph reads like a promo, and perhaps doesn't need to be that long, considering the club has its own article
  • Affiliations: could add context like what the relationship involves -- economic cooperation? educational exhanges?
  • History section needs to use Wikipedia:Summary style and needs paragraphs
  • There are also unresolved formating issues which may bring up several more objections.
• Joe D (t) 21:02, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
• Several changes have been made, adding the following objections:
  • Demographics is divided into "Population" and "Religion", yet population contains details of ethnicity -- it is essentially a "misc" category. I'd question whether that section needs subdividing at all.
  • Economy has a "Regeneration" header, which again seems to be a "misc" header, containing info about industry classification, which doesn't fit the description of "regeration". I again, I'm not sure that section needs subdividing at all.
  • The areas section contains a line that just reads "civil parishes" with no context: why is it there, what does it refer to, and why does it need to be on a line by itself? This is perhaps the worst instance where the article fails to use prose, sentences and paragraphs, but it's not the only instance.
• Joe D (t) 21:15, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

On the economic stats, the original data is here(starting at the beginning of the section), there are top level headings for UK, England and East of England, which could be incorporated into the table, but I'm struggling to think of a "nice" way to present it, given the various ways the data is split type and year are already incorporated, so the question is whether the additonal data should be rows or columns (or something else altogether). David Underdown 15:28, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

An alternative may be to have an Economy of Peterborough article which can go in depth and include a comparisons table, and on the Peterborough article itself get rid of the table altogether and simply state something like "Peterborough has a bigger/smaller primary and/or secondary and/or tertiary industry sector than the national average and most cities in the UK." Joe D (t) 16:21, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose—1a. Article does not yet meet the required "engaging, professional standard" of writing. Examples from the lead:
  • First paragraph is too stubby; please reorganize the lead so that the paras are neither stubby nor lengthy.
  • Based on the lead, I can tell an audit for comma usage is necessary. For Wikipedia, it's good to be comma happy, because it helps the reader absorb the information. Examples from the first stubby para: "For ceremonial purposes it is in the county of Cambridgeshire. In 2006 the city had an estimated population of 161,000." Commas needed after "purposes" and "2006".
  • "Peterborough Town Hall is located 73.7 miles (118.6 km) north from the centre of London at Charing Cross." "Located" is redundant.
  • "The Romans also left their mark there." — this is a real nitpick, but could you find a way to integrate this thought into the surrounding prose so that the lead doesn't jump sharply with a short sentence?
  • "...Peterborough became something of an industrial centre," ? Please reword this so that words like "something" don't have to be used.
  • "This continues today with the council's masterplan running to 2012 being particularly focused on a £1 billion regeneration of the city centre and immediately surrounding areas." "Masterplan" isn't a word, and might be too POV. "Today" is redundnat, as the tense suggests this. Sentence could use commas, even if restructured.
  • Scanning the remainder of the article, I see a couple stubby paragraphs (two lines or less).
• The organization looks great, the article appears comprehensive, and the references look fine. Nice work; please ask the League of Copyeditors to send two or three people to copy-edit the article. — Deckiller 05:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I've made soem slight changes to the lead, have they improved things? I've left "today" in, I can see your point, but to me the sentence wouldn't read so well without it. The OED defines "master plan" as "a) a large-scale or comprehensive plan of action", so it seems like a reasonable enough description to me. David Underdown 10:43, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Oppose: I was an GA reviewer on an earlier version of this article. I failed it then, and it is nice to see the improvements made; they have been legion and this is a much better article than the one I originally reviewed. It is definately GA quality, but the in addition to the above recommendations, I noticed a few things that need additional work to bring this to FA level:

• In the references, the ability to multireference using the <ref name=XXXX> tag makes the use of references like "Ibid." and "Montalbano, op. cit." unneccessary; it is much more readible, where multiple refs use the same exact webpage or book page to use the name=XXXX type of ref tag. The Manual of Style (specifically WP:FN ) deprecates the use of Ibid and the like, and highly recommends using multi-referencing as described here.
• The "Regeneration" section is rather jargony and without context. I have no training in economics, and I have no idea what these numbers mean and why they are reported here. I assume they mean that Peterborough is getting better, as the numbers seem to go up; but without some explanation it makes no sense.
• "Media" section lacks inline references to support its facts, figures, and claims about individual broadcast entities and facilities.
• "Sports" section mentions the existance of pro/major teams in many sports, but only mentions the names of three: soccer, cricket, and ice hockey? Also, the soccer part is very POV and un-encyclopedic. Consider paring down the soccer part and expanding to at least mention the names of the other sports teams.
• "Arts" section mentions a lot of facts about the Odeon Cinema. This is unreferenced. Also, the last paragraph is also entirely unreferenced.
• "population" section contains this unreferenced sentance: The number of languages in use is growing and diversity is spreading where previously few languages other than English were spoken. Peterborough now offers classes in Italian, Urdu and Punjabi in its primary schools.
• "Transport" section contains several unreferenced paragraphs.
• "Politics" needs expansion and copyediting gravely. The first sentance is a run-on. For the sake of comprehensiveness, this section leaves the reader for want.

As a whole, this is definately a GA. However, it needs some work before an FA is appropriate. All of these fixes are relatively minor in comparison to the length of the article, but taken as a whole they keep the article from the Brilliant and Compelling standard FA;s should be.--Jayron32|talk|contribs 01:52, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

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.