Talk:Allentown Bridge

User:Onel5969, by a checkmark in your list of 55 articles, I think this article is asserted to have been improved. Maybe it has been changed, but I am not sure if this article is to be considered adequately improved or not. Without analyzing the current article vs. sources available very closely, though, I'll say I don't like this. Jargon and incoherence in writing suggest too close paraphrasing, such that this appears both plagiarized and inaccurate, as if non-understood jargon was revised willy-nilly.

It still includes a copyright violation photo (which, yes, will be deleted soon by action at Commons, but if this and other articles are being fixed, the known-to-be-copyvio photos should be removed in the process.

Reference to a PD template directly suggests to me that text was copied in / "incorporated". If that template cannot be removed in an "improvement", i.e. if there is no assertion that the copied-in text has been thoroughly removed, then "improvement" has been inadequate IMHO as discussed elsewhere.

And, I'm not sure the PD claim is valid... akin to the situation with NRHP documents, HABS/HAER documents may not be public domain.

About sourcing the 2nd source is the same as the 4th source, but they are presented as different. And they omit the photo that was part of the NRHP registration (which would be remedied by use of the version available at NARA). The third source's URL is bad.

Although i dislike wp:TNT-type reasoning enough to have composed counter-essay wp:TNTTNT, perhaps it would be better to have this literally deleted to remove the copyright violations and plagiarism and other problems.

To be critical of actual text, look at a few examples:

"In 1922, a major upgrading of the highway between Adamana and the Arizona state line with New Mexico." -- Not a sentence!

"AHD engineered a design for the structures, the design for the bridge near Allentown called for a medium-span deck truss with twenty-foot cantilevered ends." What does "engineered a design" mean? That AHD designed something or not, like did they bring about a design from some non-AHD source? What is the connection between the two phrases? It doesn't make sense.

"Due to a realignment of U.S. 66 in 1931, the Allentown bridge, along with the Sanders bridge, were no longer on the route." - Not grammatical.

"Today the bridge only carries local traffic on the Navajo Nation." By citation to a 1987 source?

I am impatient, perhaps, but I am not willing to try to fix all this. It seems a mess. Therefore I feel it necessary to either have this article deleted, or to have it completely improved by someone else, or completely strip this down to be clearly innocuous (and pretty much useless and poor, too, but at least not seeming to claim any merit as a work written by the Wikipedia authorship collective). I am going to strip it down now, for at least the time being.

Onel5969, I would be interested to see an alternative, perhaps composed at a subpage here, say Talk:Allentown Bridge/rewritten which would be better, or to have discussion about how my judgment might be too harsh or what. But having brought my attention here, I don't want to leave without this being fixed enough to leave in place even if you and i do nothing more. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 10:20, 20 January 2023 (UTC)


 * When stripping it down, I further find myself unwilling to fix any of sources 2-4 as citations (note not one was a proper citation giving author and date of preparation and publisher, say), and so I just remove them. I see further problems that I also find myself unwilling to fix
 * Was the bridge built in 1923 or in 1930? Claims of both were in the text and/or the categories. So I remove any such claim.
 * Further, was the bridge designed by Midland Bridge Company, as asserted by "architect=Midland Bridge Company" in the infobox, or was it designed by AHD? So I remove both claims.
 * About "architecture = " in the infobox, what does "steel rigid-connected PFan deck tma" mean? That looks like it is possibly a string of typos, to me.  I don't think the text (which I already removed) had explained what PFan or tma or rigid-connected mean.  I do recall that "pin-connected" is a thing in some bridges, and maybe "rigid-connected" is too, but I dunno.  And how is that "architecture"?  It is not being claimed that is an architectural style, comparable to architectural styles like "Greek Revival" etc. that appear in the "architecture=" field of many NRHP infoboxes.
 * --Doncram (talk,contribs) 10:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
 * These are excellent notes. Let me take a look and if you do not mind, I'll ping you when I've finished  Onel 5969  TT me 12:51, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you again for apparently not taking my input too badly. I felt crabby while writing that, sorry, and am maybe too harsh.  I could share flipped experience where i was much criticized for many of my NRHP articles (or you or anyone could find by browsing), and back then I would not have wanted anyone else to just strip down what i had produced.  Indeed maybe some more positive other(s) oughta be recruited to play a reviewer/developer role.
 * Searching on that one phrase "steel rigid-connected PFan deck tma" does bring up the new URL location of the AZ DOT source (at https://azdot.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/long_inventory_forms_apache.pdf with coverage of other Apache County bridges), and that does seem definitely to be a good source, including as it includes 2002 photos worth mentioning. Hmm, there must be a series of such for each Arizona county, and I should at least mention the resource at wp:NRHPHELPAZ and at the list of NRHP-listed bridges in Arizona, will do so next.  This is a good thing to find for developing other Arizona bridge articles.
 * I would be willing to do some positive editing as part of a campaign, but playing this negative role as a critic (maybe making some positive suggestions in the process but only editing in a tearing-down way) is "helpful" too perhaps, I hope, I dunno. I have participated in numerous past editing campaigns with one or a few others at a time, generally working on a list of articles in a work page, and having shared discussion there.
 * You're a sport, thanks! --Doncram (talk,contribs) 18:45, 20 January 2023 (UTC)