Talk:Indian Railways/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 20:13, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Comments
In many ways this is a nice article, richly detailed and illustrated, cited to many good sources, well-organised, and thoroughly linked into Wikipedia's, ah, network of railway articles. It has clearly been attended to over the years by many editors who enjoy all things railway, and some who are certainly proud of the scale of India's railway system, to boot.

However, as currently constituted there are some rather serious issues with the article.


 * Omitted is any substantial coverage of what we might call the non-functional requirements or qualities. The structure (companies, infrastructure) is covered in detail, as is the function (passenger, mountain, freight). But the qualities of the system and the services it provides - speed, punctuality, reliability, safety, crowding, profitability to name a few - are covered at best in a scattered and indirect way in sections on other topics, yet they are precisely what distinguish one railway company from another. To take safety as an example (we could discuss all the mentioned qualities, and others, this is just an instance), the article has an empty section with a "main" link to a list of accidents and incidents (a list which is itself problematic and poorly-cited), but no discussion at all of safety: not its history, nor its causes, nor policy, nor progress. Signalling improvements are in fact mentioned, but not their purpose. In short, the whole aspect of the article which would discuss how good an engineering company IR is, is missing. Omitted, too, is what might be called the old or dark side of the company. Consider the photographs File:India crowded train.jpg from 2007, or File:Crowded Thane station on 31 Dec 2012 02.jpg. These might illustrate a discussion of how IR was working to improve comfort and safety, and reduce overcrowding on trains and platforms.


 * Present is, pace a recent AfD, a large overlap in many sections with Rail transport in India. Now we can all see that in theory, an article on railways in a country (let's call this R) would be different from an article on a country's railway company (let's call this C). The R article would describe the types of railway, the rolling stock, the routes, the track, the signalling, the history of R, and so on. The C article would describe the company's corporate structure, the company history, its management, its staff, its labour relations, mergers and acquisitions, competition, profitability, quality of service (see the item above). It would say rather little on all matters R. All of this would be easier to separate out, clearly, if the history of C was sharply distinct from the history of R - say, the railways of Ruritania had originally been run by the Moldoranian Imperial Railway Company, then by Ruritanian Iron Roads, then by Ruritanian Railways, and finally after privatisation by Ruritanian Northern, Ruritanian Western, and Ruritanian Urban. The place of Ruritanian Railways in this scheme of things would be visibly different from the "Rail transport in Ruritania", covering only a short period and concerning one of several clearly distinct ways of running the network. Coming back to Indian Railways, the article should, all the same, be written like our putative Ruritanian Railways article, explaining the company's approach, comparing it to other national rail companies, discussing its corporate style and approach, and so on. Apart from the very brief chapter "Organisation", I see very little of all this in the article. Instead, I see a whole lot of material about equipment and infrastructure.

Many reviewers would conclude from the above items that the article should immediately be quick-failed. My approach is to discuss issues with GA nominators, who are certainly knowledgeable and interested in their subject, and to consider how the article concerned can be reshaped. Often even apparently major changes can be made quite rapidly: but first, we need to agree where the article is headed. I look forward to hearing your response. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:55, 20 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi, first of all, thanks for taking up the review and letting know of the first hand comments.
 * a. First point, agreed. The article covers the infrastructure in a comprehensive way but on the operations/functioning part, there is not much information apart from some information in the respective sections. This would need a substantial research (I might work on that) and would be an addition to the article.
 * b. On the second point, IR (C) and RT (R) are two different articles with C forming a subset of R with the history of R encompassing the history of C. Concerning India, while more about the company or operations can be talked about to improve C, I believe still there will be a lot of overlap as C is a state owned entity and almost all R in India is handled by C.
 * Thanks! Magentic Manifestations (talk) 06:24, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
 * On (a), the question is then should we hold this GAN open for a substantial time or close it now and let you work on it at leisure; on (b), you seem to be justifying a much larger degree of overlap than I envisage (everyone will accept that there must be some, but this article's focus cannot be largely on R matters as it is now). I think, given that we agree there is a large amount to be done and that it will take an indeterminable amount of time to do, and that we seem to disagree on the desired end point for the article under (b), we should end this GAN now. I look forward to seeing the rewritten article when it is ready. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)