Talk:Bay Freeway (Seattle)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Imzadi1979 (talk · contribs) 12:10, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

As per my usual practices, I recommend changes to improve articles that go beyond a strict reading of the GA criteria. These additional suggestions are provided under the belief that a Good Article should also be a good article; obvious deficiencies and inconsistencies should be eliminated to give our readers a polished product in certain respects, even if the GA Criteria do not require us to consider them. However, in keeping with the spirit of the GAN process, failure or satisfaction of these additional suggestions will not determine if the article is listed as a G. They are merely intended to help improve the article.

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

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Using the duplicate link detector, there are a number of links duplicated in the History section which are linked for the first time in the body in the RD section. Normally re-linking is fine within the body from major section to major section, but an editor should consider proximity, especially when the RD is so short.

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, no copyvios, spelling and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   I have some specific, but minor, prose comments below. They are not bad enough to warrant a no on 1a, but their presence keeps me from ticking 1a as a yes.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   I'll provide more detailed comments on the formatting of the references below. None of the suggestions impact GA status.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   Overall, this his very good.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   Likewise, very good on this criterion.

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   Usually this is the easiest criterion to meet for a road article as they rarely attract the sorts of editor attention leading to stability issues.

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   I'll just note here that the link for the original on File:Bay Freeway (1970) map, cropped.jpg no longer pulls up the original image on Flickr, but that image was verified by the bot on Commons. There's little that can be done, but it should be noted as a known issue for the future.

   The period should be dropped from the caption on that same image as that caption is not a complete sentence. Otherwise the images and captions meet the criteria.

   It would be nice if a map were made that could be displayed in the infobox. The KML file can be used to create such a map by several of the members of WP:USRD/MTF. Put this down for a wishlist item if the article is taken to ACR in the future.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   I'm holding the article just until some minor prose points can be addressed. Honestly, I could probably pass the review now because of how minor they are, but I'd feel better clearing them up before listing as a GA. As for the comments related to the references, feel free to do with them as you wish at a later date because they don't impact GA status. They're offered on the chance that this article is taken further on the assessment scale in the future. Imzadi 1979 → 13:23, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

'Prose suggestions

• Maybe the alternate name should be added to the infobox?
• In the lead: "alongside the repealing of" → "alongside the repeal of"; just reads better to use the noun over the gerund here.
• In the RD: "an six-lane elevated freeway on a curved box beam" → "a six-lane elevated freeway on a curved box beam <noun>"; box beam reads like an adjective to me that's missing its noun. As an adjective, it probably should be hyphenated as well.
• "would have began" → "would have begun" ? Also that sentence seems to drag on an inordinate distance, so it might help to chop it in half somehow.
• In the History: "the state of Washington" usually the word "state" is capitalized when referring to the government versus the geographical entity. The same goes for "City of Seattle".
• "The Mercer exit on Interstate 5 was" → "The Mercer exit on I-5 was"; the abbreviation is given in the lead and used in the RD, so it's odd to jump back to the full name partway through the article.
• "officially designated as the" → "officially designated the"; "as" here is unneeded and seems to muddy the flow of the the sentence.

"on February 10, 1970 and" → "on February 10, 1970, and"; a comma or some other appropriate form of punctuation is necessary after the year in American-style dates. The same thing for any "City, State" constructions in running prose.

• "During the April hearing, former Department of Highways director" you might want to work in the name of the state or the word "state" as in "During the April hearing, former state Department of Highways director" lest readers get confused that it could be a city department. (Yes, I found the answer by hovering my cursor over the link, but not everyone will do that.)
• "with a completion in early 1975" → either "with a completion date in early 1975" or "with completion in early 1975"
• "relocation of utilities, and was located below the water table" → "relocation of utilities, and it was located below the water table"; it reads like a compound sentence with the comma structure, but there's no subject/pronoun after the conjunction.
• I'm not sure that every time words "Mercer mess" is repeated that it needs to be in quotation marks after the very first usage, assuming the first one is a direct quote. It comes off as scare quotes rather than repetition of the name of a concept.
• "widening of the Bay Freeway to 6 lanes" → "widening of the Bay Freeway to six lanes"; spell out single- digit numbers like that.

Reference formatting A good reference satisfies two principles: it provides enough information so that a reader can locate the source, and it conveys that information in a consistent format. My suggestions address the latter principle.

• The headlines in the article are inconsistent in which case they're using. We are allowed, as a matter of style, to use either Title Case or Sentence case for headlines and titles in citations, but we are encouraged to pick one and stick with it. Under the principles of minimal typographic change, converting a headline printed in a newspaper in one case style to the other is allowed; the APA guide would say that all have to be changed to Sentence case no matter what while The Chicago Manual of Style would say they have to be changed to Title Case, regardless of how the original publication rendered them.
  • Title Case capitalizes the first word, the last word and every noun, verb (including forms of "to be" like "am", "is", "was" and "be"), adjective and adverb in the title. Prepositions containing 5 letters or more are capitalized, while articles and shorter propositions are left in lower case unless they are the first or last word.
  • Sentence case only capitalizes the first word and any others which would be capitalized if the title were a sentence in the middle of a paragraph.
  • The first word of a subtitle is also always capitalized, regardless of which case style is used.
• To pick an example that would need to be changed no matter which style is chosen: "City Told Of Need For Bay Freeway" (n33) should be either "City Told of Need for Bay Freeway" or "City told of need for Bay Freeway".
• Subtitles are normally separated from their main titles by a colon, so Bay Freeway—Design Report 1 would really be better as Bay Freeway: Design Report 1.
• It would be nice if you'd include either the ISSN, or if the paper lacks one, the OCLC number, for The Seattle Times in the citations that weren't retrieved online. While the newer articles were likely published simultaneously to their website and the print editions, the older ones can only be found in a library. Adding a identifier like that assists readers in finding a library with copies of the newspaper. Even in a case line n48 with the Spokane Daily Chronicle that is republished on Google News, I would still add the identifier in case Google has to remove the paper from their archives at some point or limits access to it. The same goes for copies pulled through NewsBank or similar services.
• One last suggestion, but I've found that TV station websites are notorious for just removing news articles without any archive, and some papers are as well. To counter this, I've taken to pre-emptive archiving articles through http://webcitation.org/archive.php whenever possible. Then I add |archive-url= |archive-date=<date I made the archive> and |dead-url=no to the citation template. For newspapers, I've also tried to see if the article was published in the print edition, and if so, I add the page numbers and treat the online link as a courtesy to the reader.

All in all, the citations are in very good shape, it's just a matter of polish. Imzadi 1979 → 13:23, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

With all of the GA-level items fixed, I'm promoting the article. That doesn't mean that further improvements can't still be made, of course, so I hope that any additional changes are continued. Imzadi 1979 → 03:59, 2 April 2015 (UTC)