Talk:A City on Mars

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 00:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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• ... that the book A City on Mars covers sex in space, raising children in low gravity, space law, and space cannibalism? Source: The book itself, but https://futurism.com/the-byte/astronaut-cannibalism-mars , https://www.space.com/a-city-on-mars-author-interview for a few online sources
  • ALT1: ... that the book A City on Mars covers topics ranging from sex in space to space cannibalism? Source: The book itself, but https://futurism.com/the-byte/astronaut-cannibalism-mars , https://www.space.com/a-city-on-mars-author-interview for a few online sources
  • ALT2: ... that the book A City on Mars discusses unsolved problems in space settlement, such as raising children safely off-Earth? Source: The book itself, but https://www.space.com/a-city-on-mars-author-interview for an online source
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Invisible ships
  • Comment: Alt2 is more a boring backup hook if someone complains at ERRORS.

Created by SnowFire (talk). Self-nominated at 07:16, 29 November 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/A City on Mars; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing:
• Neutral: - Kind of, but needs work to avoid conversational or rhetorical tone.
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:
• Other problems:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Wow! QPQ done, interesting and cited hook, lots of good sources in the article. Very nice job on this. I'd be ready to approve this now except that there's a few tone issues that I'll outline below. BuySomeApples (talk) 05:59, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

There are a lot of rhetorical questions in the article, but these should be avoided unless they're direct quotes.

Some sections read as POV if they aren't attributed to a source. We don't want to say that something is "often glossed over" in wikivoice, although it might be okay to attribute that opinion to a relevant source. Rewriting the article to be more encyclopedic and less conversational would probably fix most of this.

The "Contents" section probably needs to be trimmed a bit. Right now it's over 1500 words. Wikipedia:WikiProject Books/Non-fiction article suggests 400-700 words with an upper limit of 900 words. This part isn't necessary but I think cutting out some of the less encyclopedic bits might get you closer to this anyway. BuySomeApples (talk) 05:59, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

@BuySomeApples: I've tried to chop it down some and make the tone a bit more formal. I'm used to some other areas of the wiki, where old books get extensively combed over for every last bleeding detail (e.g. Herodotus, Polybius, Josephus), so it was a bit of a surprise to see the modern non-fiction guidelines having such strict length suggestions. It's a little tricky to chop down to the almost "anthology" nature of the book on 10 different topics - I feel that we shouldn't just say "the authors discuss (topic)", but also say what exactly they're saying about (topic), yet that requires a bit of setup to explain what the authors are actually suggesting or raising as what they believe to be an important unanswered question. I'm already leaving a few of the topics just out entirely, too. Anyway, it's down to ~1200 words from ~1500, so still a tad over the limit, but eh, see above for why.

On questions: Quite a lot of those weren't intended to be rhetorical, but rather genuine unsolved problems where the answer isn't clear, and the authors are saying that we should really get a better answer before proceeding (e.g. ethical dilemmas). I have rephrased them, though, to make that more clear. SnowFire (talk) 21:24, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! I'm going to take a closer look @SnowFire: but the tone already looks much better. Wikipedia usually doesn't pose questions directly, even if there are unsolved questions which I think is just a style preference more than anything. I might see if I can rephrase "Contents" a bit, usually its possible to crunch down details without losing much information.

Also, I know I said it already but good job with such a hooky hook. BuySomeApples (talk) 03:05, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

OK @SnowFire: I gave it an edit for WP:PERSUASIVE and WP:INFORMAL tone, and I think it looks pretty good. It brought the wordcount down to ~1000 too, so that's nice. I'm gonna let someone else take another look at this just to make sure its up to par since I'm now a significant contributor. BuySomeApples (talk) 00:18, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

The prose looks fine to me now, thank you BuySomeApples. Gatoclass (talk) 15:09, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gatoclass: Awesome, this nom looks ready to be approved then, right?

Yup. Gatoclass (talk) 11:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

BuySomeApples, I have added you for a DYKmake credit since you have contributed substantially to the article. But that means somebody else will have to verify this nom now. Gatoclass (talk) 12:03, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gatoclass: Would you mind doing the honors? BuySomeApples (talk) 18:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Sure :) Gatoclass (talk) 05:30, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Approve As the followup reviewer here, the improvements to the tone of the article are quite impressive. Newness and length aren't an issue and no copyvio issues apparent (the detector just picks up the quote used in the article, since apparently a lot of news sources liked to use the quote too). The hooks are all good, though I prefer ALT1 as the most snappy and interesting. One thing I will note, SnowFire, is that there's a lot more reviews out there that can be added to the article (see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], and [9]), so I hope you do add these at some point to shore up the article more. Anyways, looks good to go! Silverseren^C 01:35, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• • @Silver seren: Thanks for the kind note.
  • Yeah, I saw many of those online reviews when initially researching the article. More than just those even - there's also Cory Doctorow saying something approving recently (if not a formal review exactly), or this review in Physics Today, or the space.com links above (interview, review which aren't actually used (the review is cited once, but not in Reception, just as an excuse to link it in the article). This is the tricky part about reducing the size of the "explanations" - for example, The Economist review is clearly implied to be positive, but it's almost entirely just reciting what the book says and agreeing that it's correct (albeit with skepticism that their suggestions will be accepted - which is ALSO what the book says anyway). There's not really a "review" in there other than being a reason for a very long summary, which is part of why I'd rather have 2,000 words to discuss the work itself as something validly sourced . But alas. I just think it's hard to cram into a Reception section if you know what I mean - I feel like it's already running long with "Journalist XYZ liked it" comments, and I don't know where else it could go without the risk of becoming repetitive. SnowFire (talk) 02:49, 14 January 2024 (UTC)