Talk:Little Butte Creek/Archive 1

Page move
Just a heads up this needs to be moved to Little Butte Creek (Rogue River) because there are three creeks so-named in the state--one in Grant County, and another teeny one in Jackson County. Katr67 (talk) 22:44, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Moved, thanks.  Little  Mountain  5   01:25, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Peer review
I thought I'd post comments here just as if I were doing a formal peer review. Nice job overall. The article is well-written, broad in coverage, neutral, stable, and seems factually accurate and verifiable. The lead image is very nice, though for GA you'll probably need another couple of images. Here are some suggestions, nitpicks, and quibbles:

Geobox
 * I've never seen a river described as having more than one source before. I see the logic of what you've done, but it might cause confusion. The USGS uses 42d 25m 11s N by 112d 37m 06s W for the source of the main stem and the same coords for the mouth of the south fork and nearly the same coords (2s diff, maybe a mistake) for the mouth of the north fork. I think the convention is to use the USGS GNIS definition of the source unless there's a special reason not to. (When I was working on the Columbia Slough, I realized that the GNIS definition of the source was historical and no longer accurate. When I e-mailed the USGS about this, the authorities agreed and changed the definition, so the GNIS is not infallible. However, I haven't encountered any deviation yet from the GNIS separation of main stems from forks. They are treated as separate streams.) Not defining the source as a point leads to a problem with determining the length of a stream. I ran into this problem with the Willamette River and, more recently, with Tryon Creek, and it seems to be a general problem since so many rivers have upper tributaries called forks. By convention, stream length refers to the main-stem length only, from source to mouth. A reader looking at your geobox might wonder whether the 43 miles includes the lengths of the forks. I'm not saying that what you've done is wrong, only that it might be confusing and that the convention differs from what you've done.
 * Fixed, but the ref just says 'Little Butte Creek' for the 43 miles...

Map
 * Creating maps is time-consuming and requires great patience. I like what you've done, but I have a couple of nitpicky suggestions. Would it be helpful to add the metric distance (60 km) to the text in the lower left? Should Klamath County be labeled? Should the Rogue River be labeled? On your licensing page for the map at the Commons, it would be helpful to fact-checkers or anyone who would like to look at a source to link to the source as closely as possible. For example, instead of providing a link to the ODFW overview page for the Little Butte Watershed Assessment, which forces readers to figure out which blanks to fill or buttons to push to get to the source document, you could save them some trouble by linking to the zip file (buried in the lower left-hand corner of the ODFW page) directly here. Ditto with the Census map. I'm assuming you used the reference map section of the AmericanFactfinder wing to select a base map, and its url is here.
 * Fixed.

Lead
 * Eventually the lead will need to be a summary of the whole article. The existing lead doesn't mention History, Watershed, or Flora and fauna. Often my leads lag behind while I'm adding new material because it's not possible to write a complete summary until the article is complete. Sometimes, though, I write interim leads that work OK until all the sections are more-or-less finished.
 * Fixed up a little.
 * The last sentence of the first paragraph echoes the last sentence of the second paragraph.
 * Fixed.

Course
 * "The creek's mouth is located at 1,204 feet (367 m), a total of 4,509 feet (1,374 m) for the south fork and 3,434 feet (1,047 m) for the north fork." - This might be misinterpreted as lengths rather than elevations. It's unusual to compute the drop in elevation of a fork beyond its own mouth unless there's some special reason to emphasize it.
 * Removed.
 * "Overall, Little Butte Creek drops approximately 25 feet per mile (4.8 m/km)." - We are left to wonder whether this refers to the main stem only or to the average drop of the three streams.
 * Not sure, the ref just states 'Little Butte Creek'.
 * What was the purpose of diverting water into the Klamath River watershed? What percentage of the diverted water is returned to the Rogue River watershed?
 * Expanded.
 * "It flows west, receiving Beaver Dam Creek and Dead Indian Creek." - A convention for describing stream courses is to indicate which bank a tributary enters from; e.g., "receiving Beaver Dam Creek from the left bank". Since Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for left bank and right bank, I've been using links to Wiktionary.
 * Fixed.

Discharge
 * "three on the north fork, and two on the mainstream" - "main stem" rather than "mainstream"? Main stem could be linked.
 * Fixed.
 * "A gauge on the north fork near its mouth... " - Wikilink gauge?
 * Fixed, I didn't even notice these pages. :)
 * "about 14 percent of Little Butte Creek's total drainage basin" - To keep items from becoming inconveniently separated by line break on computer screens, it's helpful to add an nbsp code to glue the parts together. The convert template does this automatically for anything inside the template, but constructions like 14 percent need to have them added by hand. You can look at this in edit mode to see all six characters of the code, and a full explanation lives at WP:NBSP.
 * Fixed.
 * Were the extreme high and low discharges associated with any particular extreme weather events?

History
 * You might add to the opening paragraph what happened next to the Indians. Did none flee? What happened to the captured people? Did any end up on reservation(s)? If so, which one(s)?

Butte Creek Mill
 * "The mill is now included on the National Register of Historic Places, and is the only gristmill in Oregon to still grind flour." - Generally it's best to merge orphan paragraphs like this with other paragraphs or, if desirable, to expand the orphans.
 * Expanded a bit.

Watershed
 * "48 percent of the watershed is... " - Sentences in Wikipedia use words rather than digits to start a sentence; i.e., "Forty-eight percent of the watershed... ". Ditto for other sentences in the article that start with numbers. The "50 percent" later in the sentence is fine except that it needs an nbsp.
 * Fixed.

References
 * Even when a source uses all capital letters for a title, Wikipedia converts them to title case. Thus "SOUTH FORK LITTLE BUTTE CR NR LAKECREEK,OREG." I think should be rendered as "South Fork Little Butte Cr Nr Lakecreek, Oreg." It's still a bit mysterious but not so attention-getting.
 * Fixed.

General
 * Possibilities for expansion might include recreation (fishing, boating, swimming, parks), and pollution (point-source and non-point-source).
 * Added pollution section.
 * Is the total population of the watershed available?
 * Images need alt text for readers who can't see the images. I'm just learning how to write these, and I've added them to Columbia River and Tryon Creek and a few other articles, but I have many many more that I need to update. To write alt text, you need to imagine what a blind person would learn about the image or map by hearing alt text read aloud by a machine. WP:ALT has details, and you can look at ongoing discussions of alt text at WP:FAC.
 * Fixed.
 * The dab finder tool that lives here finds one link that goes to a disambiguation page instead of the intended target.
 * Fixed.

I hope these comments prove helpful. Please ping me if any of them are unclear. Finetooth (talk) 19:33, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much! I've had a few unexpected things pop up this week, so it might take me a few days to get to these, but I'm not ignoring it. Sincerely,  Little  Mountain  5   00:54, 7 October 2009 (UTC)