Wikipedia:Peer review/Missouri River/archive2

Missouri River[edit]

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Despite having a majority of support votes, this article failed its 4th FAC a few weeks ago because of significant spotchecking issues. I'm taking this to PR in the hope that an editor will be willing to go over the referencing in this article, which "does not appear to have been done carefully" according to the reviewer who resultantly brought down the FAC in its final days.

Thanks, Shann _º n 05:04, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments As you know, I peer reviewed this before, but missed its recent FAC. Since reading the latest FAC, I have looked at the article with a much more critical eye on its references and sourcing and can see why there are concerns. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be based on reliable sources as the information must be verifiable (and to avoid original research). Reading this article while paying closer attention to references and sources used, I can see why references are a concern - the refs I checked are not wrong, but many of them do not fully back up the claims made in the sentences or paragraphs they are supposed to support. I also found statements that needed a ref but were not in the ref cited, and even some information in refs I checked that did not seem to be in the article. In short, this article is something of a mess when it comes to references.

I will point out as many examples as I can of places that need to be checked / cleaned up, but I do not have the time or access to all of the refs used to check everything.

Looking at the Geobox and Course sections

I started with something simple, the source and here there are issues with both references and consistency. First off the USGS page for the river here says in part that it is "The longest river in the United States. Heads in Montana at the junction of the Jefferson River and the Madison River..." The problem looking at the Geobox is that there are both a primary source and a secondary source listed, as well as the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison. For the primary source the Geobox has "Brower's Spring", which at least one source identifies as the ultimate source of the Jefferson, but the ref used is the USGS GNIS page for Hell Roaring Creek and that does not mention the spring or the fact that this ultimately flows into the Jefferson and then the Missouri. The map in the GNIS page for Hell Roaring Creek does show the location of the source, but it is not named and appears to be a small lake or pond, not a spring. The Geobox also names the secondary source, but this is now the Madison River, not whatever the ultimate source of the Madison River is (the Geobox is inconsistent as to how it deals with these two river's sources). The confluence froming the Missouri is cited to the USGS GNIS page for the Missouri River, so that is OK.
The Brower's Spring claim appears to only be supported by one ref used in the article, the story "The True Utmost Reaches of the Missouri" in Montana Outdoors magazine here. Although it is used in the article, it is not cited as the ultimate source of the Missouri in the Geobox or in the Course section. I would cite the article in both the Geobox and Course sections. I would also look at what the Montana Outdoors article says, as its last sentence says "The total distance is 3,745 miles, making this great American river system the world’s third longest, after the Nile and the Amazon." The MO article is cited only once in the Wikipedia article, and is used only to back up this sentence in this article: Thus measured to its highest headwaters, the Missouri River stretches for 2,639 miles (4,247 km). When combined with the lower Mississippi, the Missouri and its headwaters form part of the fourth-longest river system in the world, at 3,745 miles (6,027 km).[41] While the total length matches the Montana Outdoors article, its rank in the world does not match (3rd vs 4th) (and looking at the Wikipedia List of rivers by length, the Yangtze is third (and Mississippi-Missouri fourth, though both are uncited, and the total length of the M-M does not match this source either). I also note that the USGS GNIS claim that the Missouri is the longest river in the United States is not in this article, although it does say it is the longest river in Morth America.
Finally looking at the Source section, it does not make the ambiguity of the Missouri's source clear (the confluence is the official USGS GNIS defined source, one article in a magazine and an 1898 book cite Brower's Spring) - I think this needs to be made much clearer in the Wikipedia article. I also note that the whole Course section is sourced only to USGS topo maps. While these are good references, the river is so large that it requires some work on the part of the reader to hunt down the appropriate map for whatever is described - are there no good general books on the Missouri that describe its course (some books are cited in the references and further reading, which seem like they would work)? Some of the statements in the Course section also need refs beyond what a map can provide. The Yellowstone being the larger river and the Platte being the longest tributary are both facts that need cites beyond a map.

Watershed

I tried to check one statement here The watershed's largest city is Denver, Colorado, with a population of more than six hundred thousand. Denver is the main city of the Front Range Urban Corridor whose cities had a combined population of over four million in 2005,[19] making it the largest metropolitan area in the Missouri River basin.[18] Ref 19 is a dead / broken link. Ref 18 is a searchable 433 page PDF and looking at every instance of "Denver" and "metropolitan area" and "urban corridor" (not found) and "front range", I did not see anything to back up this statement.

General comments

I think at FAC if an article is reasonably well-written and has reliable sources that are correctly formatted (as this article does), then most reviewers assume good faith that the refs cited back up the article. Unfortunatley that is not the case for a large portion of the refs checked in FAC and in this PR. I do not doubt that Denver is in the watershed, but am not sure if it is the largest city in it, etc.
The Further reading has four references that seem like they should be used in the article itself.
OK, everything I have checked so far has problems, so I am stopping. What is needed is to read every sentence and check it against the references used, adding refs as needed. Since this is also the conclusion of the FAC, I am not sure what the PR has added (beyone more specific examples of the problems involved).
Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in all peer reviews, in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:13, 22 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]