Talk:Martensdale, California/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: JPxG (talk · contribs) 20:59, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Copyvio / POV / stability

• Y Earwig's checker says this is fine.
• Y Quite stable. The article existed as a stub for eleven years, more or less untouched, until an AfD which it survived handily. Then it was expanded quite a bit -- there's been no controversy about content that entire time.
• Y This doesn't seem to be pushing any particular POV. The statements are encyclopedic.

Media

• Y Image is freely licensed.
• Y High-quality, and illustrative of the primary drama the article covers.

Tone / prose

• Y Follows MoS, is well-written and easy to understand. No oopsie woopsies here!
• Y Does not editorialize, WP:SYNTHesize, or devolve into a go-off about anything.

Referencing

• Y Three independent, academic sources in the bibliography, and four other sources referenced.
• Y Everything is paired with an appropriate inline reference.
• Y Every source except the Gazetteer could be verified using my computer, which I did, and everything that's in the article was also in the references. Great!

Scope / completeness

• Y Article stays on topic, and tells you basically everything you need to know about Martensdale's rise and fall.
• N What's there now? The land was given back to its original owners, and then what?
  • Still looking. I found a newspaper statement mentioning a 1949 reunion picnic at the site, which I've added, but I haven't been able to turn up anything else
• N Where is it? It says it's near Lerdo, in Kern County, but is quite scant on the details of its actual location. GNIS has no "Martendale" or "Martensdale", but surely there's some historical record that can be located (from Kern County, perhaps)?
  • Took quite a bit, but I finally found another paper by Enns-Rempel, who states that Martensdale was near what is now a specific road junction. I think state that it was near what is now the junction of Lerdo Highway and California Highway 99 is about as specific as we can get; I'm starting to doubt that anybody bothered to take down the coordinates.
•   In the Fresno Pacific source, we see "Until about June of 1909 all Martens' promotional efforts focused on the land he had purchased in February near Wasco. In June he began showing potential buyers another tract of land in an area known as Lerdo about ten miles east of the first site." This looks like a clue...
  • Yeah, I looked back into the context, which states that it was 10 miles east of Wasco, CA. I also found sources stating that it was 6 miles east of Shafter and 34 miles SW of Woody. But since we can tie it to the general location of a road junction with the new source, I'm not sure if the mileage distances would add a whole lot.
    • Would it be worth putting in 35.49976, -119.16361 as a coordinate, or would that be too WP:SYNTHy? That's the precise location where 99 intersects Lerdo Hwy, for lack of anything better: it might be able to populate an infobox or mapframe. jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
•   The Bakersfield Morning Echo clip says that a civil suit was filed in the superior court in Kern County by one H.H. Schultz. Maybe that'd have a location in it.
•   Here is the area on USGS's TopoView. Looking at the maps from 1906 through 1914, I cannot find anything about a Martensdale, but I might not be looking in the right place (and it may never have reached the USGS's attention, since Martensdale doesn't show up anywhere in GNIS either).
  • I'd looked yesterday, hoping to find a public domain topographic map to add to the article. It seems to have been too ephemeral to make it onto USGS maps. I did a lot of searching and found some old Kern County oil field maps and some 1910 fire insurance plats, but nothing of the right place or time. For a map to show this place, it would have to be made over the winter of 1910 and show a very specific place of Kern Co.
    • Would it be nice to at least have the 1910 USGS map, so there's something at all showing location? jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
•   Here is Kern County's GIS tool. Lots of layers, spent a while messing around with this. Maybe there is somewhere on their website to get historical maps?
  • Unfortunately, I looked but couldn't find anything

Conclusion

I like the article. It rules! There is a little more information I would like to see (for example, what happened afterwards?), but apart from that, excellent and would be happy to pass. @Hog Farm: thoughts? jp×g 21:31, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Okay, looks like we have a location, which is enough for me to feel good about passing this. Woot! jp×g 04:33, 24 March 2021 (UTC)