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Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of tallest buildings in Spokane/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 PresN via FACBot (talk) 00:27, 16 February 2022 (UTC) [1].[reply]

List of tallest buildings in Spokane

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List of tallest buildings in Spokane (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 20:32, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured list because I think it meets the criteria and is of similar quality to other featured lists in this category. I believe this list provides a brief but good overview of high rise development in this midsize western city, is comprehensive, and provides relevant notes and hyperlinks for the buildings that would be of interest to the readers of the article. The article is well organized and visually looks good; people took the time to take decent photographs of the skyline and buildings to illustrate the article as well as to mapping the GPS coordinates of all the buildings in the list. Aside from the Albuquerque tallest buildings list, there are no other featured lists from midsized American cities and I hope to increase the representation in this category with this nomination. T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 20:32, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by RunningTiger123

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Resolved comments from RunningTiger123 (talk) 17:26, 20 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Two quick notes: The first sentence should not use "This is a list of X" per MOS:FIRST, and the "citation needed" tags need to be resolved. RunningTiger123 (talk) 00:21, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I’ll rephrase that first sentence. I thought most of these lists started with that exact phrase like the Albuquerque one does. In regard to the citation needed tags, if you look in the edit summaries, you can see the struggles in trying to find verification for the buildings pre-1910 US Bank Building. That’s the one glaring issue that I was trying to resolve before nominating but I was unable to after shelving work on this last bit and revisiting every once in a while over the last couple months, then looking through websites again and searching Google news archives. It’s a dead end, the knowledge may be lost to time or not well documented enough to include in the articles that delve into the topic. I know that on this website, if it can’t be verified, it basically doesn’t exist. I was hoping that this isn’t the first time this has happened and there’s a way to deal with a situation like this. Maybe someone has access to other news archives to get a source for those older buildings, or maybe we reduce the article scope and omit pre modern high rise buildings (US Bank) or raise the starting height for list inclusion, or we delete the entire tallest buildings timeline and any references to pre 1910 structures. Let me know what you think we can do to address this. Thanks for your help T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 02:08, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a little bit of searching, and I found this page from the Spokane Historical Society (affiliated with Eastern Washington University) that mentions the Review Building was the tallest in Spokane, but only for 10 years. There's either some serious rounding going on there, or there was another building that needs to be fit into the timeline. All things considered, I'd like to include this section, but if there aren't more sources to complete the list, it should be removed – WP:V must be followed per the featured list criteria, and unsourced information fails that. I'll try searching the Wikipedia Library for some more sources. RunningTiger123 (talk) 04:43, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Google Newspapers archive also seems to have a good number of Spokane papers from that time; maybe one of those could help? RunningTiger123 (talk) 05:02, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's kind of you Tiger, thanks for the help. Yes, I saw that tidbit in that Spokane Historical reference and that's why we can be pretty sure the cathedral didn't hold the tallest building title at least immediately after the Review Building; it's very frustrating that the author didn't mention what came after the Review Building. There's no real rounding, just placeholder speculation at this time.
I actually e-mailed a journalist at The Spokesman-Review that wrote one of the articles referenced in the List but they haven't gotten back to me. I know if its not verified it can't be on there, I was just hanging on to hope of salvaging the section. I've tried searching in the Google news archives about the Review Building and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes and its tough sledding. I've seen people use newspaperarchive.com but you have to pay to use it. It seems like you have to be a trained journalist or historian to have the resources and know how to find this kind of information if it isn't readily available on the internet somewhere. Unfortunately, I think the section will have to be deleted which is unfortunate because I bet in most places this sort of thing is well documented. T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 02:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
One last thing you could try is asking someone with access to Newspapers.com to carry out a search (maybe through Wikipedia:Reference desk). It's part of the Wikipedia Library, but access is limited and I don't currently have access; otherwise, I'd check myself. RunningTiger123 (talk) 04:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I wish I knew someone. I didn't think the journalist I contacted would get back to some random person like me so I just deleted the section, which reduces the usefulness of the article and makes it look much less interesting. I liked the section with the cool historic picture and all but without complete knowledge of the situation, I don't think we can have an incomplete chronological list with a gap in it. I didn't notice before, but Spokane Historical has an e-mail that I used to see if they could fill in that crucial 10 year blind spot in the history by indicating what came after the Review Building in the Review Tower article and before the Old National Bank Building in that article so the reader can get more context, I bet it's a single mystery building.T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 03:24, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved comments from RunningTiger123 (talk) 23:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Since the timeline of tallest buildings has been removed for the time being, here's my full review.
  • Images need alt text
Fixed
(edit conflict) Often, if the caption is a straightforward description of the image (i.e., "Skyline of Spokane" as opposed to "Spokane has X high-rise buildings"), the alt text can either duplicate the caption or be something along the lines of "see caption". Strictly speaking, the alt text could be omitted in those cases per MOS:ALT, but I think it's better just to include it in every case.
  • Why is "low-rise" hyphenated when "high rise" isn't?
Don't know. Fixed!
  • No reason to capitalize "The" in "the Great Fire of 1889"
Fixed!
  • Remove <br /> after GeoGroupTemplate
Fixed!
  • Suggest moving citations to a dedicated "Ref." column
Working on it. I am looking into how to do this.
You should be able to simply create a new cell in each row, just like every other cell.
Oh, I misunderstood what you were looking for, I thought you were talking about this -->Template:Ref. I'll get working on making a column just for the references. Update: Fixed!
  • Each row in the table (aside from the headers) needs a cell with !scope="row", and the table as a whole needs a caption (which can be hidden using Template:Sronly) – see WP:DTT for more
    • My suggestion would be to make the "Name" cells the row headers, but "Rank" is also a good option
Finally fixed I think: I hope I did it right... Update: Made the first cell under the Rank column a different color using the !scope="row" code. Looks like the Portland table now except they did it a little differently by changing the color.
  • All year ranges should use en dashes (–) instead of hyphens (-) – for example, "1910–1929" instead of "1910-1929"
Fixed! Think I got all of them.
  • Suggest running IABot to archive sources
Question: Ive never requested a bot before. How is that done? Do I just contact Cyberpower678 or Harej?
Sorry, the link isn't immediately clear from that page. You should be able to use this link to run it (it should ask for some permissions if you haven't used it before).
Fixed! First time for everything. I ran the bot and had all the sources archived in case they go dead in the future.

— RunningTiger123 (talk) 17:26, 20 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Replies above. RunningTiger123 (talk) 05:01, 24 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]


Hey @RunningTiger123, I know you’re pretty busy right now but the next time you have a moment could you check back with us to see if your concerns have been addressed? It’s been a while since we've heard from you. T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 13:56, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the delay – forgot about this over the holidays. Everything looks good, and I'm happy to support. RunningTiger123 (talk) 23:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comments

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  • Names that start with "The" should sort based on the next word in the name
I deleted "The" from the building names
Fixed it. Thanks T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 02:57, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Further comments

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  • "The Old National Bank Building was also the tallest building in the state upon completion" - is the "also" meant to indicate that it was also the tallest building in the city? If so, actually say that
Fixed! Clarified sentence in the Lead and the similar row note. Replaced Old National Bank Building with the modern name so people dont get confused.
  • Also, when was this?
Fixed! Added date.
  • Some buildings are wikilinked in the lead but others are not. Do the unlinked ones not have articles? Surely they are notable?
Fixed! Added link to the Review Building article which I didnt know existed. I dont think there is one on the Bank of America building.
  • "and has held the tallest building in the city title for 40 years" - given that you already mentioned that it is the current tallest building and was built in 1981, these words are redundant
I see what you mean. I took out the redundant info but kept the age calculation. I think it is useful for readers to just tell people exactly how long ago that was so they can relax and not do math.
  • "This list ranks Spokane high rises that stand at least 145 feet (44 m) tall" - just out of interest, what was the thought process behind this seemingly very random cut-off point?
Mainly notability concerns. The threshold was to try to trim the list to a around 25-30 buildings like the articles I was using as a model-mainly the List of tallest buildings in Albuquerque and List of tallest buildings in Portland, Oregon featured list articles. I was thinking about using a nice round number like 150 feet but I thought that would make the list a bit too short at 21. The list at one point contained 38 buildings which included buildings like the Lincoln Plaza/Building at an Emporis estimated height of only 104 feet and is described on their website as a "low rise". Other similar articles have a threshold to keep the list at a manageable length because there are too many tall buildings, but this article has one because there are too few tall buildings. I know everyone has a different perspective on what "tall" is but 104 feet isn't it for most people and wouldn't be even close to ranking in similar list articles except the Albuquerque one. This town doesn't have many tall buildings and the list size at this time reflects that. I felt listing more would be scraping the bottom in terms of notability.
  • "Tallest building in Spokane since its completion in 1981." - this is not a complete sentence so should not have a full stop. This applies to many of the notes.
Fixed! Deleted all the periods in the notes section.
  • The huge whitespace between the note and the references in many cells looks odd
What do you advise be done with them? The ones that look odd and unappealing are the ones with a larger/landscape? picture making a bigger gap between the note lines. Should I get rid of the breaks? I'm probably over complicating things but I thought listing the references on a different line in the notes on rows that have them will make people understand that the references are for the row entry as a whole and not just a particular note.
  • In the "in popular culture" section, you switch between describing the events of the episode in the present and then in the past tense
Fixed!
  • Footnote a is not a complete sentence so should not have a full stop
Fixed!
Fixed I think: Switched "list" to "article" in the Lead and in the Tallest buildings section I switched out "list" for "table". Does that work?
No, you need to re-write the opening to eliminate anything like "This article contains XYZ" altogether. No article (be it a list or otherwise) should start like that (see MOS:FIRST) - we wouldn't start the article on Spokane itself, for example, with "This article is about Spokane". The Albuquerque list you mention above was promoted more than 13 years ago when standards were very different -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 20:00, 21 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Gotcha. I deleted the first sentence entirely and the description of the table. Thanks for the clarification. :) 2001:5B0:4FC0:90A8:710A:ECF3:6FA4:EDF2 (talk) 06:19, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Unless I'm being unbelievably dumb, I can still see a first sentence of "This article ranks the tallest buildings in the U.S. city of Spokane, Washington by height"?? That needs to go and be replaced by a brief intro to what Spokane is i.e. just a couple of sentences along the lines of Spokane is a city in the US state of Washington, etc. -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 10:09, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Youre not hallucinating, I accidentally reverted the fix after I messed up doing the row headers and reverted to back to before I took out the sentence. It has been taken out again.
One last point (I think) from me - where you say "located in eastern Washington", I would rephrase that to "located in the east of the US state of Washington". Not every reader is in the US so this will make it clear what country we are actually talking about here (there's also a Washington in the UK and potentially other countries too), and also (once we have established that it's the US) will make it clear that we are talking about the state, because to probably 99% of non-Americans, if you said "it's in Washington", the first thought would be that you were talking about Washington DC. Oh, and wikilink Washington -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 20:44, 24 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good point, never thought about that. Ill make those changes. Thanks for the advice Chris :)

Comments Support from Gerald Waldo Luis

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This article looks pretty good for FL, and I only have a few comments.

Resolved comments from GeraldWL 08:04, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
* In "Cityscape", the caption should not end with a period as it's not a full sentence (or at least, that's what I'm taught at this FLC of mine).
  • For the "References" column, use Template:Refh instead of "References" per consistency with other FLs.
Im going to read up on how to make this happen and try to find some examples. It's late in the day where Im at and Im not good with working on the tables. Thank you for your suggestions and comments Gerald! T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 08:22, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've put it for you there-- it's pretty common in fls-- and no problem! GeraldWL 09:33, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I see that for the refs publishers, you only link the first mention. Ref 4 must have The Spokesman-Review in the

Accessibility review (MOS:DTAB)

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  • Tables need column scopes for all column header cells, which in combination with row scopes lets screen reader software accurately determine and read out the headers for each cell of a data table. Column scopes can be added by adding !scope=col to each header cell, e.g. ! Rank becomes !scope=col | Rank.
  • Please see MOS:DTAB for example table code if this isn't clear. --PresN 02:01, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed I think! Thanks for the suggestions PresN :) T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 08:24, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their help with improving this article and their patience in dealing with a first time FL nominator that is bad with the table markup. If anyone has any other improvements, I’m all ears. As for me, I ran out of ideas as of now but I am still trying to think of stuff I can add to it. I’m going to keep digging for sources to see if I can fill the 10-year gap in that deleted tallest building timeline and in the future, I think I’ll add a Tallest under construction list like you see in similar articles where we can list buildings that will make the list in the soon. At the moment, I don’t think there are any but there are some residential towers that reportedly will be under construction in the next year or so. Thanks again all! T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 01:09, 3 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Was wondering about that myself but I saw the Albuquerque one didn’t have a state either and then didn’t think much of it. It's a little hit and miss with the naming conventions on similar articles. Little Rock, Knoxville, Grand Rapids, and El Paso are also somewhat obscure cities missing the state. I’m all for changing the name and didn’t know I had permissions do do something like that. I’ll read up on wiki guides on how to do it and change the page name to "List of tallest buildings in Spokane, Washington".
Update: The page has a new name. Thanks a bunch for shedding light on the naming conventions.T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 05:32, 4 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

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Article looks good but here are a few comments:

  • I don't think there should be a section called "tallest under construction" as it is just an empty table. Suggest removing this section. Any new building that is constructed can go directly to the main list.
Fixed, I have taken the recent addition out. Most articles of this type have a list of the under construction buildings, so I thought it would almost be expected by others and I thought the article needed a secondary list in lieu of having to delete the Tallest buildings timeline because the history isnt well documented enough.
  • The two sentences "If two or more buildings are of the same height, they are listed in order of floor count, then alphabetically. The "Year" column indicates the year in which a building was completed." should be notes for their respective columns, not in the lead paragraph for this section, since they are about the list, not the contents of the list.
Fixed. Good point.
  • I also don't think the notes column is very useful, it's mostly blank. You could add a sentence to the lead paragraph just above the table that says "The tallest buidling from 1929-1981 was...." That would be way more useful and convenient for users than a mostly empty column, the only other notes are a few pieces of trivia, that can be added as "notes" if you really want, but they are not super informative anyway. The note on the review building would fit nicely in the article lead in the sentence on the review building. Mattximus (talk) 15:44, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking I'll probably change this.I could go either way on this, but I think I'll break with convention and take out the Notes column and tack on any notes and associated references as a edn note like you suggest. Should mention every other similar list that I've seen has a mostly blank note column, which I dont see as a problem since it does keep the relevant information visually close to the subject matter, but I do think it takes away from the article aesthetically and looks odd and limits the possible length of any note. Thanks for the food for thought Matt T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 23:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I made the change and I like the way it looks. I took out the date ranges for the tallest buildings notes since the pre-1910 history is incomplete and sketchy and the 1910-present history is already talked about at the end of the Lead. Thanks for the great suggestions T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 00:00, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wow this actually looks a lot better. My only suggestion is after the sentence "does not include antenna masts." You can add a sentence or two stating "The tallest building in Spokane from x-x was x building and from x-present was x building" or something like that, just to highlight some important information from the table. Otherwise I do like this list. Note C should probably have a citation as well. But apart from these two, I will support. Nice work on this list! Mattximus (talk) 14:41, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Added an inline to the Emporis existing buildings general reference at the end of former Note C, which is now Note D since I added another factoid note. Also wrote down in prose the known information from the tallest buildings timeline list, that was deleted because the history between 1900-1910 seems to be not well documented and convoluted. Thanks again for the great suggestionsT85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 01:52, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Source review

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Fixed
  • Citation 2 is a promotional piece by the local chamber and should be replaced with a more reputable source.
Fixed. Deleted it; that basic info is in the first citation.
  • I'd rather see Citation 5 replaced with a more specific source that pertains to Spokane. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to check the Spokesman-Review archives on Newspapers.com?
Fixed. Referenced another Spokane Historical article.
  • Citation 7 has stray brackets at the end. It should also use "Spokane Historical" as the publication name, rather than a publisher.
Fixed I think? Deleted extra brackets. I need clarification to fix the second issue. I thought the publication name and publisher were the same thing, Spokane Historical. If you are talking about the "others" in the reference, that is just meant to convey to readers that the website is a public history project of Eastern Washington University.
  • Spokesman-Review is overlinked in citation 8
Fixed
  • Some of the Emporis/SkyscraperPage citations could be cut down; are all of them being used to cite information that is not found in the other?
Like most similar articles, I included as a reference all of the typical websites for each listing that has basic building information such as height, mainly Emporis, SkyscraperPage, and CTBUH. I personally think that more information is better and I don't think there is a real pressing need to start deleting references. People can look through each one if they are interested or if they prefer one website over the others and it provides additional verification without harming anything. I strongly believe the references should stay.

Just a few comments, will do a spotcheck later. SounderBruce 08:38, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good, thanks a bunch! :) T85cr1ft19m1n (talk) 08:46, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Source review passed; promoting. --PresN 15:24, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FLC/ar, and leave the {{featured list candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through.
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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