Talk:Watsessing Avenue station/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: East of Borschov 05:46, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

As reviewed Sept. 02 2010

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): (AGF - offline sources) c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

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

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

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Prose concerns (1A)

The article needs proper, wholesale proofreading/copyedit. Some sentences sound odd in part or in their entirety. Some are well understood after a bit of mental work; others are too ambiguous or plain WTF. A confused reader cannot reliably make the sense of them (see Edison example below) - this causes more complaints on factual statements, references etc. This is not a complete list, just examples:

• "The proposal in Bloomfield, who had criticized the railroad for making a disgrace of the community." [who criticized whom?]

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The station at Watsessing Avenue remained used under the days of Conrail." [I understand what it means but...]

Removed.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "Construction was completed on a 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long segment of the Montclair Branch from East Orange to Glen Ridge and was opened [who was?] on November 15, 1912."

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The lot also is paid spaces [not dollars?] six days a week and free on Sundays, with a cost of $20 parking per quarter (three months)." [Are Sundays free or not? Or can I pay $20 for three months and then not pay .25/hour weekday rate?]

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The design of Watsessing Avenue's new station was difficult at best, due to the limited right-of-way." [why "at best", it's not rocket science]

Removed.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "While making the depression, a new trench was dug, which had retaining walls constructed without moving the alignment [clarify] to delay railroad traffic [what's so special about it?]. When the station design was finished, tracks were shifted to make room. [for what?]"

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "On April 1, 1976, the days as a Lackawanna Railroad station came to an end."

Reworded.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The station continued to stand through [??] the Montclair Connection on September 30, 2002, which ended [who ended?] the Montclair Branch and began as the Montclair-Boonton Line, still the first station on the line after Newark Broad Street Station."

Fixed.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The station served as the third station on the Montclair Branch, which was first electrified by technology used by Thomas Alva Edison in 1930" [did Edison use it in 1930 (he died in 1931, so why not), or ... ?]

Fixed.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Consider delisting from GAN if you cannot fix it all or recruit outside copyeditors. I'd recommend copy-pasting plain text, excluding all format and footnotes, printing it at double intervals, and then just read it from paper. Check Tony's tutorial too.

Copyeditors for me anymore are hard to find. No matter who I try. I refuse to ever remove stuff from GAN. I always will be determined to finish what there is.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Excessive minute, ephemeral detail (3b)

I'd strongly discourage inclusion of fluid, ephemeral data like timetables or the capacity of local parking lots. They change all the time. This is a good reason to have WP:NOTDIR. Ask yourself: who will maintain the in-article timetable, train numbers etc. in 2012? in 2014? Specific examples:

• As for the long paragraph on departures and arrivals, I'd recommend trimming it to something like "In the summer of 2010 [or even narrower time scope] 23 of 30 inbound trains stopped at Watsessing station. The first one stopped at X.XX, the last one at XX.XX." - no train numbers. If you need to cite ephemeral data, say when did you take the snapshot.

Train #s gone. The summer of 2010 is incorrect due to timetable dates.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:11, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• Parking lots. 14-car lots aren't really important. Just say "There are two parking lots, of such-and-such combined capacity, paid $$$/hour on weekdays and free on Sundays."

Disagree on the 14-car lot thing, because that is the main lot around the station if you've noticed.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:11, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Unnecessary words

Many grammatically correct sentences are loaded with unnecessary words.

• "A second lot is present at the intersection of Myrtle Street and Walnut Street." [present is unnecessary. OT, googlemaps shows that the entrance if from mid-block Myrtle; the lot is separated from the intersection by some trees.]

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:11, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Need to clarify

Some of these concerns stem from the same prose quiality issue:

• The article uses word depot for railroad station building. This is in line with US English usage, but needs to be clarified for the rest of the world. Have you considered not using the ambiguous word?

Railroad station building sounds even more ambiguous. Depot stays as far as my opinion goes.

• PBA in the lead needs to be linked (even if the acronym is expanded, Benevolent Association must be linked). The PBA website mentions only one location (1 Municipal Plaza), far away. Do they still use the station? Again, a matter of time-stamping information that may change at any moment (tenants come and go).

Linked. As for the status, its still signed as there, don't know how to explain that.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• The passage on 1911-1912 mentions many dollar figures, but riddles the reader - who paid what? Just how much of the costs were born by the town, and how much by the RR? "The park cost the township $50,000 to buy" - did they buy it from the RR or from other owners? May I suggest: read every statement and fix or remove anything that raises questions instead of answering them.

Clarified as much as possible.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "The station depot was built over the railroad tracks with four concrete arch girders to structure the building." - girder and arch are two distinct structural elements. They don't mix up (it's kind of square circle).

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "A four-inch ceiling was constructed and the station was widened to take more movement of trains." - More like what? Like adding another track, or widening the clearance of the pre-existing tracks? Also, consider separating description of ceiling from clearance. Also, clarify which ceiling - the platform sheds, or the bottom of the station house above the tracks?

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "It reduced service, reducing the once two-rail alignment to one" - Does it mean "It removed one of two tracks" or simply "shut down one of two tracks"? Plus, two reduce in one sentence.

Fixed, one track was removed until 2002.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

• "In 1983, this took effect and just one year later, the line became a temporary diesel rail line as the overhead catenary wires had to be adjusted." a) what took effect (previous sentence makes it ambiguous) b) what does "adjusted" mean? Is it just routine maintenance, or something big like switching from DC to AC?

Clarified.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Image captions (6b)

Please replace depression in captions with something else (track realignment? grade separation?) to disambiguate from the Great Depression. Which is the first thing that springs to mind reading U.S. history articles.

I've changed it, but I absolutely disagree with people. How does having track in front of it make some think of the 1929 Depression? :| That's not so important in my eyes. But to satisfy you, I changed it.Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 19:15, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Cheers, East of Borschov 05:16, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Also I will be out till Monday afternoon just so you know. I wasn't expecting a review that fast, so :| Mitch32^{(Transportation Historian)} 18:18, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

• Excellent, much better now. I'll come back to the article on Saturday - right now cannot concentrate on reading for too long. East of Borschov 07:37, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

As of Sept. 12, 2010

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): (AGF - offline sources) c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

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

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

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   East of Borschov 08:57, 12 September 2010 (UTC)