Wikipedia:Peer review/List of Iowa state highways/archive1

List of Iowa state highways

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I've been working on it on-and-off for a couple years. I've never submitted any work I've done on here to any scrutiny, so here I am. With some work, I think this list can become an honest FL.

Thanks, --Fredddie™ 01:40, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a good start on what might qualify as an article or a list. Here are some suggestions for further improvement.

• I'd be inclined to put the text first and the list last. The text is interesting, whereas the list, although not without interest, is mainly functional.
  •  Done Reordered. --Fredddie™

• The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections. The existing lead doesn't mention "History", "Funding", "Signage" or "Secondary roads".
  •  Done Lead rewritten.

• I think the highway icon numbers are too big. You might try using smaller ones such as those in the main text of Interstate 70 in Colorado.
  •  Done Replaced list with sortable table. --Fredddie™

• Would it be useful to create a table with more than one column? The Interstate 70 in Colorado article has such a list for the highway exits. The list for Iowa highways might have a column for the highway name, another for its length, and one or two for each of its end points. Featured lists are often sortable, and it might make sense to make some of the columns of this list sortable. You can find examples to imitate at WP:FL. See, for example, List of tributaries of Larrys Creek.
  •  Done Replaced list with sortable table. --Fredddie™

• The punctuation should come before the ref tags. I fixed several of these, but there are others that need fixing. For example, "Today, the primary highway system represents over 8% of the total 114,000-mile (183,000 km) public road miles in the state[18][5]."
  •  Done Fixed.

• The convention with multiple references for the same sentence is to arrange them in ascending order. In the example above, they should be arranged as [5][18].
  •  Done Placing the text first seems to have corrected this. --Fredddie™

• "Iowa has over 800 miles (1,287.48 km)" - The two numbers should have the same number of significant figures. If, on the other hand, you want to use 1,287.49 km because that's the precise distance, then the miles should be expressed as 800.01 miles.
  •  Done Made the conversion less precise. --Fredddie™

• The date formatting in the article is inconsistent. Some are m-d-y, while many are d-m-y. For U.S.-centric article, m-d-y is the norm.
  • Comment This I am well aware of and will fix. At one point, I thought {{Date}} would autoformat dates per Special:Preferences, which I now understand is a method that should be killed with fire. After I submitted this article to WP:PR, I made an attempt to subst the dates to one format, but it didn't work.
  •  Done I'm 99% certain I caught them all. --Fredddie™

• "The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 set aside $75 million over 5 years[23] ($1.4 trillion in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation[24]), of which $146,000 per year was earmarked for Iowa." - Something's wrong with these numbers. A sum of $75 million would not inflate to $1.4 trillion over this time span.
  •  Done Using {{Inflation}} now. --Fredddie™

• "Gasoline, regular and ethanol-blend, and diesel fuel is taxed in the range of 19- to 22.5-cents-per-gallon... " - Convert to cents per liter as well?
  •  Done This took some creativity, but {{Convert}} works in mysterious ways.--Fredddie™

• "All county routes are signed with the MUTCD-standard blue pentagonal shield, however some older signs still remain[29]." - MUTCD should be spelled out, abbreviated, and linked on first use.
  • Comment MUTCD is linked with full text in a hatnote above this section. Is this sufficient? --Fredddie™

• The alt text for each map should give an overview of what the map says rather than describing the map colors or lines. WP:ALT#Maps has a pretty good explanation and some examples.

 Done Alt text for maps is much better now. --Fredddie™

• Purely decorative images such as the highway icons with numbers should have the alt text turned off. I'm not quite sure how to do this in this article because of all the templates, but the explanation at WP:ALT#Purely decorative images might be helpful.
  • Comment I created the template in use here. I intentionally set the alt text for the shields as an asterisk. If you were to look at this page in Lynx, the list would be a bulleted list. I've looked at it in Lynx with and without the asterisk and feel it's easier to read with the asterisk.
  •  Done Fixed with sortable table. --Fredddie™

This is not a complete line-by-line review, but I hope my suggestions will prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:09, 3 February 2010 (UTC)