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Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Pomona College people/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by Giants2008 via FACBot (talk) 00:27, 29 December 2020 (UTC) [1].[reply]

List of Pomona College people

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List of Pomona College people (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): {{u|Sdkb}} talk 10:09, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello all! I've been working on this page quite a lot, and following a recent peer review, I believe it's ready to face the FLC gauntlet here. A few notes:

  • Since college people lists are necessarily dynamic, the big challenge was ensuring comprehensive enough coverage. I took a ground-up approach, starting with using FindLink to add missing links to Pomona College. From there, I made a PetScan query of biography pages that linked to Pomona but were not categorized with an affiliation. I was able to categorize 95 alumni, 49 faculty members, and three trustees through this method. Once I had the categories in better shape, I was able to peruse them for particularly prominent or Pomona-connected individuals to list. The current list still isn't perfect, but due to the above, I'm reasonably sure I'm not missing some major entry like a U.S. Senator or similar.
  • I used List of Dartmouth College alumni and other WikiProject Higher Ed FLs as starting inspiration, although I hope I've been able to exceed them in a number of ways.
  • I intentionally tried to keep the lead fairly concise (similar to the Dartmouth list, sans the notation key, which is unneeded for an all-undergraduate college), since my editing philosophy is that lists with an associated page (in this case, Pomona's main page) should stick to being lists and leave the more detailed description for the associated page.
  • For the redlinked entries, I included additional citations to demonstrate notability.
  • I was able to find the graduation year or tenure for almost every entry; the remaining instances in which the exact year is listed as unknown each reflect quite a bit of searching to ensure that it is truly not publicly available.

Feel free to let me know any questions, and looking forward to your feedback! Non-mandatory QPQ done at List of Broadway Theatres. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 10:09, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comments
  • The caption for James Howard needs a source.
  • In the "See also" section, can you include a link to a category? I've never seen that done before. It could be perfectly fine though - I don't know.

Very solid work. Had trouble finding anything. ~ HAL333([2]) 21:21, 3 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@HAL333: I've added a source for the Howard caption.
Regarding a category in the see also section, that was present at the Dartmouth FL, but I'm not entirely sure if there's a solid precedent for it. I'm inclined to think it's okay because categories are supposed to be reader-facing pages (evidenced by the help page for them and the practice of marking non-content categories with {{Maintenance category}}; the line does get blurred, though). The usefulness is that the category has a wider scope, including e.g. trustees and alumni that I didn't judge notable enough to add here. I'm not an expert in categories, so someone more knowledgeable might be able to weigh in, or we could ask at the categories WikiProject. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:25, 3 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Jweiss11: I noticed you just removed the category link. Do you have thoughts about this? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:14, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have generally not seen category links in see also sections and am under the impression that see also sections are for articles only. Seems unnecessary to include the category link there given that category is found where you always find categories: at the bottom of the article. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:20, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Source review - Pass

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Okay due to the huge amount of sources I'll take this in chunks:

  • ref 4 missing retrieval date
  • Assuming "pomona college" should be italicized for refs 6–7 – actually when refs are from Pomona College but not the magazine, Pomona College is the publisher not the work so should not be italicized
  • Usually we take the "www." out of website names
  • also pomona college is linked in ref 6 but not the other times
  • ref 20 shouldn't be in all caps – a MOS thing
  • Blogs are not generally considered reliable sources (refs 49, 28, 148) I guess 100 is OK since it's the blog of the subject
  • Linkedin is not a reliable source – refs 38, 78, 173, 185
  • Got to 105, will do more soon. Aza24 (talk) 02:14, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Aza24: Thanks for beginning the source review! Responding in order:
  • Ref 4 looks like it has a retrieval date to me; could you clarify?
  • Done. I de-italicized Pomona in all the refs, by swapping out |work=Pomona College and |website=Pomona College for |publisher=Pomona College.
  • Done. www's removed.
  • Done. Pomona de-linked in ref 6.
  • Done. Ref 20 switched to title case.
  • I swapped out refs 28 and 49. For ref 148, it's the only open-access place I could find Virginia Prince's year of graduation. I've applied to get access to Taylor & Francis through the Wikipedia Library to try to get access to this journal article, which will hopefully have it. If it doesn't, the place it would be would be this biography book (unfortunately not available online), but I have no clue how I'd get access to that.
  • I'm using the LinkedIn citations solely to establish graduation year for people where it is not otherwise available online. My understanding is that this is acceptable per the criteria at WP:ABOUTSELF. Each of those entries contains a separate citation supporting the notability.
Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:33, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Update: Thanks to the wizards at the reference desk, now done for Virginia Prince as well. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:45, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the initiative (and ping) with 148, LinkedIn seems fine under that pretense, no idea what I meant about ref 4 :) Looking through the rest now, sorry for the delay. Aza24 (talk) 06:26, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Next batch:

  • Really not sure about the reliability of ref 108
  • ref 109 missing author
  • some issues with 129/130 – missing publisher/work/website (or some cobination of them) missing retrieval dates and when I go to the source it says "Your connection is not private, hackers may be trying to steal your passport" lol so...?
  • 119,120, 123 missing retrieval date
  • 124 missing a publisher, work or website parameter
  • "State of California" as publisher for ref 131?
  • retrieval dates for basically all of the "Biographical Directory of Federal Judges" ones
  • Whats the deal with all the mixed "citation"/"cite web" templates?
  • 203 needs publisher and ISBN (978-0-9794984-0-4 I think)
  • retrieval dates for ref 275, 277, 287, 293, 314, 315 retrieval date
  • 313 needs an identifier of some kind (world cat has an oclc)
  • Reliability looks fine over all
  • Completely optional but I would recommend running the internet archive bot as lists like these with hundreds of varying web sources often fall victim to dead links. If you don't want to run it I would be happy to myself, just let me know. Aza24 (talk) 07:05, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Aza24: Replying in order:
  • Done. I replaced ref 108 with two more reliable refs (both to museums).
  • Done. Author added to ref 109 (now ref 110).
  • Done. It looks like there was some sort of expired security certificate—it let you through if you checked the "trust this website" box, but that's not ideal. I updated the URLs, which should hopefully fix the issue, and filled out the retrieval dates.
  • Done. Retrieval dates added to the {{CongBio}} references.
  • Done. United States Senate Committee on Finance added as publisher.
  • Done. State of California added as publisher.
  • Done. Okay, this one was more of a challenge than expected. These references all use {{FJC Bio}}, which unlike the CongBio template isn't a nice wrapper of a standard citation template, but rather an ancient custom-built mess that had already sent me diving into the source code of the FJC website just to retrieve the IDs. It didn't have any |access-date= parameter available. So I added one, which has gotten the display here working correctly, but it's pretty hacked-together (it only respects the {{use mdy dates}} setting because of an additional |date-format= parameter which I also added). I'm still sticking to using it, since I believe in centralizing, but that template is, uh, definitely not passing the hypothetical WP:Featured template candidates anytime soon.
  • Done. The {{Citation}} uses were all relics added to this page before I started working on it. I changed them all to the more specific variants, which has fixed the CS1 vs. CS2 comma inconsistency issue.
  • Done. So this was another rabbit hole. The ISBN looks to be for the third edition of the book, but that edition (and maybe the others) looks self-published, so I went searching for a different source for Mill's 1945 graduation date to replace it. Once I figured out her maiden name (absent from her actual page; will fix that soon), I found an article from 1947 describing her as a current student. Ack. With a little more digging, the alumni magazine has her as class of 1948 based on a class note here, so I changed it to that and added the magazine as the replacement reference (the L.A. Times one still works for her notability description).
  • Done. 314 (now 315) doesn't have a retrieval date because it's an offline reference. I added the retrieval date for the rest. If 314-now-315 is still an issue, we can just remove it; it was there mainly to establish Sumner's notability when he was a redlink, which is less of an issue now that he has a page.
  • Done. Added OCLC number for "Granite and Sagebrush" (as well as "The History of Pomona College" next to it, which also seems like it needs something).
  • Sounds good.
  • In queue here. I haven't activated IABot before, so if I need to do anything else, please lmk. It gave me a "page too big" error when I tried the initial method.
Thanks again for doing the review! (and giving me an excuse to distract myself from the U.S. election coverage...) Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 11:45, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No problem – and thanks for your attentiveness. The review definitely gave me a distraction from that as well... eek, the only thing scarier than the anticipation of the election is thinking about a world that has WP:Featured template candidates :) Pass for source review. Aza24 (talk) 00:58, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Alexandra

  • This list of Pomona College people - Like regular articles don't begin with "This is an article about X", lists shouldn't contain this type of self-reference. See MOS:FIRST.
  • and today has approximately 25,000 living alumni. - Don't use language like "today", "currently", "recently", etc, because it's the type of writing that becomes outdated with time (versus language like "as of December 2020"), and makes the reader wonder exactly how up to date it is - without checking references, they cannot know if "today" means a month ago or if it was written ten years ago. See MOS:REALTIME.
  • The lead feels a little short, and I notice it does not mention any specific people. Do sources refer to any of these people as particularly prominent when discussing Pomona? If so, may be a good idea to mention those in the lead; otherwise, that's fine (and we do want to avoid recentism).
  • How come the presidents table cannot be sorted?
  • Aside from this, it looks good. Please ping me when you have addressed the above, and I will take another look. Thank you!--AlexandraIDV 14:31, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks so much for the review, Alexandra! Replying in order:
    • Re MOS:FIRST, that's a good catch! Nearly all of the current college people featured lists use the "this list" framing, so if others here prefer it, it might be worth reevaluating in a more general forum how much consensus there really is behind the MOS guidance, but for now I've rearranged the lead so that it starts with the description of Pomona rather than declaring itself a list.
    • Re MOS:REALTIME, I've removed that language.
    • Re mentioning specific people in the lead, my view is that generally, lists like this shouldn't do so, since no one person stands out so much that they rise to the level of defining the group as a whole. Jennifer Doudna, a 2020 Nobel Prize laureate, has been getting a lot of attention lately, but that's recentism. I think it's better to just list people in the body, where they can be presented in a nice table format rather than a messy prose list, and to highlight particularly prominent individuals by including photos of them. The point I made in my opening comment about lists with associated pages sticking to being lists is also related.
    • Re sorting of the presidents list, I left that out (a) since it's short, meaning there's less need, and (b) since the chronology aspect is a lot more important (for alumni/faculty, it would be plausible to make the default sort alphabetical, but we'd never want to do that for presidents).
    I hope those edits/explanations help address your concerns! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:42, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Thank you for your edits and replies! I did make this edit to make sure we adhere to MOS:SEASON (feel free to adjust specific wording), and think this list is in great condition now.--AlexandraIDV 08:58, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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