Talk:Cloud/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: ChrisGualtieri (talk · contribs) 18:29, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

I'll take this. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:29, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Quite a few dead links for this article. Ref 21, 27, 30, 40 and 101. Ref 120 is forbidden. Should be fixed. Some of the references like "Cloud Dynamics" link to a Google book page which is completely hidden, so a page reference would be immensely helpful for verification.

The article has numerous typos and possibly vandalism with "homoosphere" as an example. The article provides no concise overview is filled with dozens of obscure words that are too-technical for most non-experts. This is compounded by a complete lack of proper introduction. Terms like "troposphere" should be linked. I remember reading a high school text book with a chapter on clouds that actually provided a two page summary that set up the pieces before plowing into the complexities covered on this page. Since we aim for high school readership or low college, I believe that this is required for a Good Article.

The key issue is that entire paragraphs going unsourced. What is sorta upsetting me is the fact that the cloud types are thrown up on the page without much introduction and sorting and are more complete than their respective pages. Source 49 and 50 is not the source for a lot of this information. So much of the information is unsourced, questionably sourced or just not matching. I do not think this should have been nominated at this time. It requires an almost complete re-write and restructuring to be coherent. A structure similar to Sea would be a great starting point. I've placed the article on hold, but there is so many issues that I feel this could be impossible within even a month of active working. Also the nominator does not seem to be a major contributor to this article. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:58, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Re: the critique above
I will deal with the dead links on a time-permitting basis. Links die all the time on an article with over 100 references. They are very hard to keep up with.

Why is ref 120 forbidden? What does that even mean?

I will try and deal with links to hidden Google book pages on a time-permitting basis.

Typos identified in the "Bugs" section of "Revision History Statistics" have been fixed. If there are any others, please specify, or better still, fix them yourself.

The article has an intro/overview which may or not be sufficiently concise or proper. Is it too long or too short? What should be put in and what should be taken out?

I have been adding new references with the goal of achieving at least one for each paragraph. This takes time and I'm hampered by the fact I work slowly and I have a life outside Wikipedia.

The term "troposphere" has been linked for a long time. I try to provide links or all technical terms I use. Which terms did I miss? A few examples will suffice.

It looks to me like you're more than "sorta" upset with this article. You're so bugged-out that parts of your paragraph 3 are missing words or are somewhat incoherent. I have no idea what you mean by the cloud types not being "introduced" or that they are supposedly "more complete than their respective pages". However, I'll check out sources 49 and 50 to see what the problem is with them. As for a complete rewrite, good luck with that; nobody at Wikipedia (including myself) has the time or resources to do anything so radical or ambitious. The sections might not be in perfect order, but I believe they follow a logical sequence. If you believe otherwise, please outline what you think the sequence should be based on the order of the titles and subtitles in the article's index. I've checked out the article Sea, but it's a completely different kind of subject that follows its own logic. I couldn't discern much in the article's structure that would be applicable to the cloud article.

That all said, I agree this can't be dealt with in a few days and the article should not yet be nominated for GA. I've been the major contributer to this article since 2010, but I have no illusions I can ever achieve GA quality by myself. I have a good technical knowledge of the subject, but I'm not a skilled writer or editor. Maybe I should never have taken this project on, but if I hadn't, there would only be the short, sketchy, outdated, sometimes inaccurate, and almost completely unreferenced version that existed for most of the decade before 2010. I started off hoping for a team effort with other editors with better writing skills than myself, but I can now see Wikipedia doesn't work that way. There's a very good article on the internet called "The decline of Wikipedia" which points out its dog-eat-dog way of doing business. There is little or no mentoring of newbies like myself by senior editors who seem content to carp and take pot-shots from the sidelines, maybe to try and scare us off. For better or worse, I'm not so easily intimidated by the establishment. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk)13:39, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not upset with the article, but more annoyed that someone who has not done work on the article decided to nominate it anyways. This is a vital article - it is really important to Wikipedia. I will help you, but it will also render me unable to pass this article. I like to think of myself as a good editor, so I will summarize (more clearly) the problems that need to be fixed.
 * Ref 120 was given a 403 Forbidden - meaning it cannot be accessed. The introduction is probably about correct for an article of such large scope.
 * There should be no unsourced paragraphs.
 * The cloud genus descriptions on this page exceed some of the coverage on their own stand-alone pages. An exception exists with Cirrus cloud which is a featured article.
 * The article is currently being pulled in all directions and doesn't have a clear way to give the information to the reader. "Formation in the homosphere: how the air becomes saturated" is a very technical section. Other parts seem to be relatively accessible in stark contrast.
 * I'm going to ask a very experienced editor to help set a path for this article's development and reorganization - because it is likely out of my league too. The same editor who made sea and desert. I tend to do really small topics on civic matters and historic buildings. This is a vital article, it is going to be extremely difficult, but working together people can accomplish great things. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:05, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I repaired a few deadlinks and reformatted dates to conform with the existing style. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:19, 12 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thankyou for your clarification and other help; glad to know you're not as down on the article as I first thought. I guess that first exchange was an occasion for both of us to blow off some steam, and now we can continue our discussion in a more constructive way.  I hope your colleague who did the Sea article will be willing to help as well. I now understand your frustration over this premature GA nomination.  However, maybe something good will come out of it if it ultimately leads to the cloud article finally achieving the rating that any vital article should have.  It's astounding to me this article has languished for so many years as a C-grade, but it looks like this is the first time a contributer who has a good knowledge of meteorology (but not editing) may be linked at least for a while with another who has a strong scientific background and is also an accomplished editor.


 * If the article aims at low college as well as high school, I think there has to be some technical content (or at least adequate links to same); it's just a question of how much. I've seen some of the meteorology that is taught at high school level, and it's pretty basic.  It's in high school that many if not most students decide what their real life interests are, and I believe they need to have easy access to articles with content that goes beyond what's in their school textbooks.  Still, if there's a concensus that parts of the cloud article are too technical even for this demographic, I'm very open to scaling it back.  However, I think it should be kept in mind there is also a Wikipedia cloud article in simple English for elementary school students and anyone else who wants only a basic introduction to this topic.


 * If it may help at all, you can tell your colleague I'm a bit of a slow learner and a slow worker (keyboard-challenged!) when it comes to Wikipedia editing, but I'm committed to co-operating to the best of my ability, even if it means accepting guidelines that might sometimes go against my own (faulty) instincts. I was initially negative about the prospect of doing a complete rewrite of the article (as opposed to simply rearranging sections, paragraphs, and/or sentences which would be fairly easy), but if it should prove necessary, I'll be willing to take that on as long as I have the time and the patient editorial help I need to accomplish it. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 12:40, 13 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The other editor declined on the technical aspect - this is a matter that is more complex than a general topic. The problem lies in that the nominator is not a contributor and someone else is now bearing the issues for it. Not exactly fair, now is it? It is obvious that it needs a lot of work, but the question is - how do we accomplish it? I think we should take what we can from Desert and start with the etymology of "Cloud" and I would extend this to the major types of clouds as we seek to first ground the readers knowledge of source terminology while educating them on some preliminary topics. I think we should then move into the history of cloud science as a brief overview of the subject to mark era and details for those who are unfamiliar with clouds and earth science, then we move the classification of the clouds (genus and type), then we actually get into the formation and so on and so forth until we get to the extraterrestrial clouds. Tropospheric classification could be its own article in all actuality, but that does not stop us from providing a strong and concise overview either - this will be the key section as it represents the core subject when most people look up in the sky. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 14:37, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Improvements in progress

 * So far, I've restructured the article along the lines you suggested so that the sections about cloud formation and distribution come AFTER the sections about classification instead of before. The main article after the intro now has a short referenced paragraph about the etymology of the word 'cloud' which I can maybe expand a bit more if that would improve it.  The section about history of nomenclature has some info I've added about etymology of some cloud types, but I need to expand it a bit and add some references.  I have the beginnings of a section about the history of cloud science that I'm working on in my sandbox. I've been looking at the Wikipedia meteorology timeline for some ideas, and the article has a few parts that relate specifically to clouds, but many of its inline references are rather poor and some are stone dead. For me, modern cloud science begins with Luke Howard who invented the basis of modern classification in 1802-03, but it might be worth including that analytical writings about the subject may date as far back as C.3000 BCE if I can find adequate references. My next priority after that is to get at least one inline reference into each paragraph of the main article, then we can look at where to go from there. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 00:16, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Wow, don't you feel that the article is a lot stronger now from that restructure? The reading is grounded so much better! It may not seem like much, but this new structure will allow for better nuance and splitting off for more analysis on separate pages in the future. Also, sections like "Formation in the stratosphere" and "Formation the mesosphere" could be combined to "Polar stratospheric" and "Polar mesospheric" since they already have a "Formation and distribution" sub heading. The article has made absolutely wonderful progress and I won't feel guilty about jumping in with fixes of my own at this point. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:47, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Bit of a note, the English Wikipedia has superior standards for content on broad topics than our foreign language counterparts, do not "reinvent the wheel" if you do not have to. I dislike the Swedish page for depth and poor use, but the German page has something worth transferring over! The reliance on covering cloud symbols should be pushed to another page and summarized here, allowing for not only a chance a Featured List - but also being a practical appendix serving specialized use for those seeking additional information. This article is much larger and more in-depth than our counterparts, but remember it is okay to split off excessive detail on this page to sub-pages that can be expanded with almost unfettered detail. "Formation in the troposphere: how the air becomes saturated" is probably one of those sections that can be put back to Cloud formation (a redirect as of this post). I'd love a great overview of how clouds are formed, but let's see what we have to work with first huh? Size is not such an issue once everything is in a proper place and perspective, but organizing it can do wonders. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 06:10, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Thankyou for your very positive, encouraging, and helpful feedback! Actually, the text about polar stratospheric and mesospheric clouds got split up because I got a bit overzealous with your suggestion to put the formation and distribution text after the classification text. I reorganized it so that classification of clouds above the troposphere were in the same broad section as tropospheric classification, so that stratospheric and mesospheric formation appeared lower down the article after tropospheric formation. This might have been justifiable if the sections about the very high clouds were as large and extensive as for tropospheric clouds, but they are very much smaller and therefore not served well by being split up. I now have a compromise arrangement that starts with tropospheric classification followed by tropospheric formation and distribution, then repeating the same pattern for clouds above the troposphere.

Even before you suggested making the article more concise by splitting off some text to other pages, I was thinking at least parts of that big section called "summary of etages, forms, genera, species" etc. could be moved to the "List of cloud types" article (especially the cloud code numbers and symbols) while descriptions of the species, and other subtypes could be me moved to the individual Wikipedia articles for each major cloud type, and the descriptions of the genus-types could be moved further up the article and merged with the section "Etages and cross-classification into genera". I have higher priorities right now like improving and increasing the number of inline citations and doing a few other things you've emphasized, but it's something we can talk about in more detail and make some decisions as this project progresses. One part of the article I've already made more concise is the table of contents. I've reduced the TOC limit and reformatted some of the titles/subtitles.

I'm wondering if maybe we should have any further discussions about this on our user pages rather than the talk page, at least while we're talking more about the finer points of what I'm doing. I guess it depends on how much of what we're saying to each other might be of interest to others and how much of it is only of interest to us. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 12:00, 18 November 2014 (UTC)


 * this is technically a GA review so my hands are tied unless I fail this, but it is a major improvement and I think it is getting there. I just can't be on the fence and play both roles. Should I fail it and join in or keep on as reviewer? ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:56, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I've continued to make improvments since your Dec. 1 message. I've gone over some broken or incomplete citations to check and make alterations when text doesn't properly fit citation. I've now reached the    milestone of having at least one citation for each paragraph or equivilent in the article.  But of course there often need to be several in a paragraph because of the subject matter, even when it's not controversial, but just in need of sourcing for the sake of good editing,  So these improvments are still ongoing. I think I'm largely finished the new sections on Etymology and history of cloud science, the second of which I've tried merging with the next section about the history of nomentclature.  I think I might be finished with the "heavy lifting" before the end of this month and be able to get more into the fine tuning and polishing.  Of course, I'm getting into Christmas rush, so that may impact my progress somewhat.


 * As for your question about your own future role in this project; I'm in favor of whatever protocol would allow me to finish this upgrade by no later than Jan 2015, and then have it reviewed by an authorized senior editor who could pass it, fail it, or maybe bring it up 1 level to a B grade. Your help has been vital for my progress and I thank you for it.  If this unfortunately means you cannot give the final review, then maybe another senior editor should do that and you could continue to monitor my progress without any conflicts of interest and offer me, if I need it, that final assist that could push the article over the top!  My concern is if the article doesn't pass this nomination, it might be very hard to renominate it again to another reviewer who might not be keen to look at it again so soon after a recent unsucccessful nomination. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk)12:10, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll watch over it and maybe fix and make tweaks, I just cannot be a significant or major contributor before reviewing or radically departing from a role as a reviewer. I checked, a few reviews done by people when I was inactive involved copyeditings to other minor tweaks. Restructuring content and rewriting or adding significant chunks of content sorta crosses the line. This is going to be your Good Article, and you are working hard for it. It is a very different article from when this page was nominated by some random passerby, but that is a good thing. Though a bit of a note on development of the article "See also" has a lot of links and maybe you could work the relevant side topics into the article. Mist being one such article. Though remember, do not try to do everything, the clouds have their own pages for a reason and Cloud should simply summarize the details or risk being overly long. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 16:20, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

On the home stretch
If I'm understanding you correctly, maybe you haven't quite crossed the line that would prevent you from giving the article its final review. Definitely I would prefer to have you as my reviewer because you've taken the most interest in my work and you know the most about what I'm doing and the strengths and weakness's I bring to this epic task. You make a very good point about creating a "see also:" for the subject of mist. For some reason, mist has never been mentioned in the article, and it never occurred to me to mention it either. It has been my approach for quite awhile to create links between key points in the main article and other "pages" or articles by using double brackets in the edit text, the "see also:" which I've used in one place to create a link to the "List of cloud types", and of course the inline citations. The latter is a skill I've taken a long time to figure out, and I'm still very slow at it. I know there are even other ways to create links including "main article:" and at the bottom of the page, "external links:". For me, knowing which type of link to use with each relevent theme or point can be a bit tricky at times. I can see that sorting out the main themes from the side themes is a vital part of that process. I'll make it a high priority to work in a reference to "mist", and maybe "haze" and "smoke" as well, since they can all be involved in the creation of clouds, or can appear as surface-based layers or layers aloft in their own right. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 00:06, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, some of the terms are weird. When in doubt, copy the formats that you like. Most are actually really simple. Take a look at Template:Further. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:35, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

My work has continued, with a good part of my efforts over the past 3 weeks being centered on shifting text from this article to other more appropriate linked articles in order to make this article more concise and cloud-centered. I've added a few words about mist as an elaboration of the text about fog with particular reference the visibility criteria for each. So far, I haven't included haze or smoke because neither are hydrometeors. If you think I should include them anyway (both are sometimes observed or encountered as layers aloft), I can do so as long as I include that particular qualification. I think I have an approach to doing citations/references that I'm comfortable with. I'm still rather slow at it because I don't have good keyboard skills (I took keyboard, then known as "typing", as an optional subject in my first year of high school and bombed my second term with a mark of 28%!!). However, I'm slowly but semi-steadily adding new citations as I find new sources using Google. I've had a look at the German language article and it has some interesting graphics. I don't know enough German to be able to evaluate any of the text unless I undertake the rather cumbersome process of running it all through Google translate. If there are some particular parts of the German article you think I should take a close look at, I'll have to ask you to specify which sections you have in mind. I'm taking a few days off for Christmas, then resuming again to try and have this beast in the cage by or before the end of January, the time objective I set for myself soon after we started our dialogue. I wish you all the best for the holiday season and thank you again for your ongoing assistnce! ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 12:45, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * To all involved in this review, with no activity taking place in the past 20 days, if no further progress is made within 48 hours I will close the review. The whole point of putting an article on hold is to fix issues within 7 days...this article has been on hold for 51 days....-- Dom497 ( talk ) 00:49, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I am now closing this review.-- Dom497 ( talk ) 03:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Cloud GA review fiasco
Well here we go again. This time my efforts are being panned by a senior editor who doesn't appear to have much idea what I've really been up to. No activity on this article for the past 20 days?? REALLY???? Perhaps this editor should take a look beyond the discussion page to the actual article and the edit history and see just how much activity there's really been. If this article still isn't quite up to GA standard, that's one thing, but don't falsely cite me for indolence!!

I've been told by one senior editor that the article has come a long way in the past 51 days, but now another tells it has all been for nought so far. I've been told the article need more citations, so I've added more citations. I've been told the article needs sections about the origin of the word 'cloud' and a concise history of cloud science, and I've added both. I've been told the article needs to be more concise so I've made it more concise. I've been told the article needs to be restructured with the sections about classification ahead of the sections about formation, and I've done that. Now I'm being told by another senior editor it still isn't good enough.

So please, somebody, tell me what do you want me do do next. Is the article in its present form still only a C-grade like it was back in 2010 when I did my first edits? The article was very incomplete then and was using an outated classification system abandoned by the WMO back in the 1950's!! I think it must be closer to a B-level by now. If an A-grade is beyond my competence, is there anything I can do to bring it at least to a B level? ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 23:34, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Temporary (or permanent) moving of faulty cloud classification table
An elaborate but out-of-date classification table has been moved at least temporarily to this page to see if it can fixed. Details to follow. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31(talk) 12:44, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Requesting peer review
I have been trying ro raise the cloud article from a C-grade to at least a B-grade for a long time. I think I've addressed issues raised during the unsuccessful GA review earlier this year, but I still need very specific comments about other content and writing style that may be undermining my efforts. I believe the introduction is good according to one senior editor who has commented on this discussion page and says this should now be a B-grade article. Apart from the intro, I think most other sections of the article are in need of a PR, although I think I've taken a balanced and neutral approach to the section on forms, etages, and cross-classification into genera.

I don't seem to be having any success following the instructions to create a new peer review discussion page; I just keep getting sent back to this page. This whole process needs to be made more user friendly. ChrisCarss Former24.108.99.31 (talk) 23:43, 29 July 2015 (UTC)