Talk:1914 Lubin vault fire

BLZ's review
Separate from GA considerations, I want to leave notes here about improvements to the page that may fall outside the GA criteria. This first batch of comments all pertain to references and/or reference formatting.

I'd like to emphasize that virtually none of what follows is required by the GA criteria, and you should absolutely prioritize the GA review process for now. However, because much of what follows is based on my "big picture" recommendations about options for implementing a citation style, I wanted to make these comments known early so you have time at your leisure to consider.


 * "'Lubin's Big Blaze', Variety, June 19, 1914, p. 20. Internet Archive (I.A.), San Francisco, California. Retrieved September 14, 2021."
 * First, it's more properly referred to as "the" Internet Archive.
 * Not sure how I feel about the "I.A." abbreviation used throughout. To the extent that an ad hoc abbreviation like that is going to be adopted and used in citations, you've done it in probably the best and most correct way; I might quibble that (I.A.) in the first reference above could be ("I.A.") with quotation marks to make it slightly clearer that it's an ad hoc abbreviation coined and adopted in-page. Even so, it's just not a common abbreviation for the site, and I worry that it could be potentially confusing to a reader who may be unclear what it's meant to signify.
 * Compare this note from Help:Citation Style 1 § Work and publisher, which speaks to a similar issue: "Many journals use highly abbreviated titles when citing other journals (e.g. J Am Vet Med for Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association) because specialists in the field the journal covers usually already know what these abbreviations mean. Our readers usually do not, so these abbreviations should always be expanded." The abbreviation issue described in that quote is similar, though the "I.A." abbreviation is potentially more confusing, as it's not even a specialized convention but rather a single-purpose expedient.
 * More concretely, I don't think it's right to put "San Francisco, California" after the first mention of Internet Archive in the citation above, which misleadingly suggests that the Internet Archive is the publisher of the content. Within the terminology of a "Citation Style 1" template like, Internet Archive is a "content deliverer" distinct from the original publisher, analogous to ProQuest, and would be named using the parameter.
 * I want to be clear that there's a longstanding consensus on Wikipedia that an editor or a particular article is not required to adopt any particular citation style, so long as it's internally consistent. However, given the reliance on third-party content deliverers in your citations here, I highly recommend using Citation Style 1 templates. I would do it like so:
 * To be clear, you can achieve the same or similar effect without the template by simply appending "via" somewhere in your citations to clarify the third-party-ness of the content deliverer. This is particularly helpful when there is an identifiable publisher and content deliverer, as is the case for the next citation I want to comment on...
 * To be clear, you can achieve the same or similar effect without the template by simply appending "via" somewhere in your citations to clarify the third-party-ness of the content deliverer. This is particularly helpful when there is an identifiable publisher and content deliverer, as is the case for the next citation I want to comment on...
 * To be clear, you can achieve the same or similar effect without the template by simply appending "via" somewhere in your citations to clarify the third-party-ness of the content deliverer. This is particularly helpful when there is an identifiable publisher and content deliverer, as is the case for the next citation I want to comment on...


 * "Eckhardt, Joseph P. 'Chapter Seven: Spectacles and Disasters', The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin. London: The Associated University Presses, pp. 182–183 (hereinafter cited 'Eckhardt'). ISBN 0-8386-3728-0."
 * First: missing year of publication? Seems to be 1997.
 * Second, here's two other major advantages of using the citation templates: (1) the wide range of parameters and the (2) ability to link back to a source from subsequent short citations. I already noted above that the above citation is a good example of where you would want to note both the publisher and content deliverer, when it seems here you've simply lopped off the latter. The convention of using "via" remedies that. Another useful parameter is, which allows you to denote access limitations or restrictions on URLs. In this case, the book you've cited can be loaned from the Internet Archive with a free citation. This is especially useful where, as in the case of this article, you cite many Internet Archive library resources that are freely accessible in their entirety (i.e. the old trade magazines) but at least one that is not as free. I usually like to add a note in the "via" parameter to clarify the meaning of the gray padlock symbol (or a  note, when that's the case).
 * You can also name, and separately link to, a chapter or section. The usage above is slightly misleading because the chapter link is not to the beginning of the cited chapter as such (the whole of Chapter Seven seems to run pp.157–193), but only to the cited page range for that footnote; incidentally, this kind of subtle ambiguity is a good argument for creating a separate bibliography section (at least for longer works, like books or longer journal/print articles, for which you typically want to cite to a specific page or page range) and then exclusively using short citation form within footnoted citations, which is also something I also encourage (but wouldn't and can't require).
 * As it turns out, you elsewhere cite page ranges from Eckhardt that fall outside of Chapter Seven, so it's actually not necessary or clarifying to specifically name Chapter Seven at all.
 * As to "linking back", you can use templates like (within  tags) and/or  (no ref tags necessary) to easily link back to a full length templated citation.
 * Taking into account all of the above, here's how I would do it (except I would take out the "chapter" parameters, per my comments above, but I filled in chapter parameters here for purposes of demonstration):
 * In a "Bibliography"/"Sources" section:
 * }}
 * In a shortcite reference footnote:
 * (link optional; note that there's no need to denote URL accessibility here because, in this case at least, the linked preview contains all the content referenced within the link name)
 * Two ways to generate the above within a reference footnote (I simplified by leaving out the page range URL):
 * (automatically generates its own tags and the period punctuation)
 * Two ways to generate the above within a reference footnote (I simplified by leaving out the page range URL):
 * (automatically generates its own tags and the period punctuation)
 * (automatically generates its own tags and the period punctuation)


 * ProQuest citations
 * Content in the ProQuest database can and should be linked with its unique identifier using (or  for short), which can be included in a  parameter. Like several of my other recommendations above, this is not strictly required, but it does greatly enhance verifiability. I have some access to ProQuest through the Wikipedia Library program, but my access only extends to only one of the sources you cited: . Even though I'm in a relatively rare position—as compared to the general reader—of being able to peek into ProQuest, I can only search for and verify one of the several cited sources, so the identifiers would be useful.

I may add other peer review comments later, but it just so happened that a lot of the first few issues in the article that I honed in on were all related to citation style in some way, so I thought it'd be better to bundle these. This is a lot to chew on, and again much of it is totally optional and subject to alternate solutions, so no pressure to process, respond to, or act on any of these comments anytime soon. —BLZ · talk 22:27, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh yeah, one more comment that is slightly more pressing, actionable, and GA-relevant:
 * "Beyond the human toll of injuries and one probable fatality, the fire wiped out a huge collection of films that was described even in contemporary trade publications as 'priceless'. [... one sentence later ...] [two citations—one a contemporary trade publication, the other a more recent secondary/tertiary source—plus a parenthetical footnote with another citation to a contemporary trade publication]
 * Ambiguous which "contemporary trade publications" are being cited here for the word "priceless". It does not appear to be a citation to the later secondary source, which does not use the word "priceless", but it's difficult digging through to determine which cited publications are intended to back up this (specifically quoted!) claim. —BLZ · talk 22:41, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Another comment:
 * "Millions of feet of film were consumed in the flames ..." (from lead); "... quickly setting alight millions of feet of highly flammable film stock ..." (from "June 13 fire and explosions" section)
 * First: I spot here an issue similar to the one called out in my preceding comment. With respect to the second quoted sentence from the article body "June 13" section, it's not immediately clear which citation(s) appended to the following sentence apply to the claims in that sentence. All of them? Just one? Just as quoted content (like "priceless") is especially important to cite with particularity, the same applies to claims found in the lead but only cited when restated in the article body. Claims like these should be made especially easy to disentangle and verify.
 * Second: I have another "big picture" and open-ended question, this time about content rather than form. The word "millions" is certainly eye-popping, but still I imagine it will be difficult for a general reader in our 21st century times to appreciate the loss of historic film in terms of "reels". It would be useful to add an explanatory footnote with a rough conversion of one foot of film reel = a range of time. It's highly specialized knowledge to know how long one foot of early 20th century film reel ran, but everyone knows—and can feel and appreciate—how long a minute or an hour lasts.
 * No doubt there would have to be qualifying statements. I understand that the runtime of a silent film reel of this era would have been somewhat variable and subject to the frame rate of playback. Furthermore, I'm sure a large portion of the destroyed reels were redundant copies of a particular item, meaning the total length of reels destroyed would not be equal to the total runtime of unique film lost. Notwithstanding the potential need for qualifications or clarifications, I think some general explanation of how much runtime was stored in a typical reel would go a long way to convey the scale of loss. —BLZ · talk 23:19, 18 October 2021 (UTC)


 * BLZ, thanks once again for your very thorough and helpful suggestions. I will certainly adjust my content accordingly as I continue to refine my article for GA consideration. Yeah, I wanted to provide modern readers with a greater sense of and appreciation for the sheer extent of the fire's damage. With regard to the reels themselves, I initially planned to have a subsection devoted to describing variations in running times of silent footage and reel capacities, but addressing topics like that can quickly become tangential, spinning off into other discussions. A "reel" has an array of interpretations that need even further clarification or explanations. Generally speaking, as you know, the "standard" reel in the silent era had a capacity of about 1,000 feet, a length that translated (depending on variations in projector speeds at different theaters with different equipment) into a maximum running time of about 15 minutes. Still, keeping in mind your observation about "variables", the Lubin vault no doubt accommodated a wide assortment of negative and print reels: those including a single title, split reels with pairs of regular theatrical releases, and still many others containing multiple, very brief subjects and titles. Those films—running perhaps 30 seconds to a couple of minutes—included Siegmund Lubin's early experimental films, "curiosities" produced for viewing on Kinetoscopes, and short screenplays of just a couple of minutes for screening at the local nickelodeon. Without a full accounting of Lubin's loss, I felt getting into all this would become overly involved and, in the end, only be speculative with respect to the vault units' actual content. Strudjum (talk) 04:43, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Turning to your suggestions, BLZ
Just so you know, I took your advice to "absolutely prioritize the GA review", its criteria, and the very helpful recommendations recently provided by GhostRiver in that process. I think I have addressed all of those recommendations and will now be turning to further improve my article by going over carefully your suggestions. Having such assistance from both quarters is much appreciated, and it is really gratifying to have direct contacts with you and GhostRiver and to have such great input from you two. Strudjum (talk) 17:37, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Sounds good! I'm likely be occupied this weekend but I'll let you know when I can get back to it. By the way, congrats on GA. You should consider a Did You Know? nomination, since this would be the article's last chance for eligibility (as a recent GA). —BLZ · talk 14:36, 22 October 2021 (UTC)


 * FYI: Hey, no rush at all; just take a look when you get a chance in the coming days. I have incorporated your suggestions regarding source citations, although given the extent of the references, I opted in this case to make most changes within the existing formats, including the "via" attributions to the Internet Archive, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, etc. In my future articles, I plan to employ the "" formatting, which does provide for a more consistent and in many ways an easier structure to standardizing source citations. Strudjum (talk) 17:32, 22 October 2021 (UTC)