Talk:Tellico Dam/GA3

GA Review
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Reviewer: Jonathanischoice (talk · contribs) 23:45, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi, I'm happy to review this over the next few days, I will build up comments below as I go. Please note I'm also reviewing Matiu / Somes Island as well, so I will have my hands full! Cheers — Jon (talk) 23:45, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've added some comments below, and passed some of the critera as satisfactory. I think the article is otherwise in great shape, and I think the remaining issues are relatively minor. I've put the review on hold for a few days so we can address them, and hopefully at the end of that I can reassess and pass the article! Please feel free to comment under each bullet-point below if you need to discuss them (with a  at the start of the line). Cheers — Jon (talk) 22:55, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * we're so close! There's only three really minor things left to do, I think: use of the word "seized" (maybe that's a reasonable use in the US? I don't know), a sentence or two somewhere in the text that summarises the dimensions of the finished dam and reservoir so that their appearance in the infobox can be supported by the text, and optionally collapsing the refs for the three chapters of TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936-1979 into one reference with either sfn or rp. — Jon (talk) 21:56, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Jonathanischoice
 * Regarding the usage of the word "seizure/seize," several sources in the article refer to TVA's methods of property acquisition as an act of seizure.
 * - Dam Greed (ref 24) page 262: "Wildlife, and Fisheries says these land deals betray the farmers whose land was seized years ago."
 * - The Snail Darter and the Dam: How Pork-Barrel Politics Endangered a Little Fish and Killed a River: "and around the Little T valley might need to be persuaded because a substantial majority of the land that would be seized —almost two-thirds of the sixty square miles,"
 * That should provide a justification into the usage of that terminology.
 * The inclusion of information regarding the dimensions of the reservoir have been added to the Construction and engineering section. Additionally, information regarding the property for development is added to the section.
 * I will work on your last requested revision right now.
 * Thanks, AppalachianCentrist (talk) 22:40, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair, and supported by the added Knoxville News-Sentinel ref.—Jon (talk) 23:13, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Jonathanischoice,
 * The TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936-1979, multi-sourcing has been revised with the "{rp}" template.
 * Thanks, AppalachianCentrist (talk) 01:12, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Great news, I'm passing the article now. Super effort, and well done!—Jon (talk) 02:54, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Comments below, by section.

Review comments
Overall I think this is a very good article, just a few things to note so far. Firstly, the good things are the prose, grammar and spelling, use of illustrative images, and good linking throughout.


 * I'm not a Tennessean, but I wonder if seized is too strong or emotive a word for Wikipedia, appearing five times throughout the article. Maybe "acquired" or "forfeited" or some more NPOV wording? I'm happy to be convinced.
 * see discussion, above.—Jon (talk) 23:13, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * This is good, but I think the completed in 1979 fact should be nearer the start, in the first sentence or two.
 * Not required for GA, but an easy quick-win would be to use the coordinates from Wikidata to add a map to the infobox, e.g.


 * Introduce the Tennessee Valley Authority; to anyone outside the US, it may not immediately be clear they are a public electricity utility.
 * The wartime issues link is odd, there's no need to hide it, and it may not be clear to some readers which war; maybe something like "financial constraints imposed by US involvement in World War II" (maintaining the link to the home front article).
 * Introduce Boeing. Is there anything interesting about what Boeing's interest in the project was (and later withdrawal)?


 * Units in feet should provide metric equivalents; ideally, use the convert template.
 * I see this was done while I was writing comments :)
 * The dam's current physical aspects, its displacement of water, volume, reservoir area, etc. are listed in the infobox, but the infobox is supposed to summarise information in the article; so we need a description in the prose. It should be easy to just re-use the figures and the reference (5).


 * passing an amendment in a seemingly unrelated public works bill - "seemingly" is editorialising, and moreover not needed, assuming it was a rider clause. Suggest something like "adding a rider clause to an unrelated public works bill"
 * Ref 32 (Gilmer, 2011) should use the Cite thesis template and indicate that it is a PhD dissertation.


 * Three references (currently 14, 16, and 18) are chapters from the same book, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936-1979. It's not clear which specific claims are being cited. I advise using either a single reference to the book combined with the rp template to refer to a specific page or page-range, or add the book (and possibly some of the other sources, books in particular) to a bibliography section, and use the sfn template; for GA examples of using bibliography + sfn, see the contrabass trombone and cimbasso articles, both of which cite two or three of the same works.
 * If it helps, I've found most of the books on the Internet Archive or Open Library: Cadillac Desert (p. 165 as cited), TVA and the Dispossessed, Footsteps of the Cherokees (1st ed. is on IA, but not the 2nd), Natural Histories, and TVA: Bridge over Troubled Waters — Jon (talk) 21:41, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Flood control storage
The source: claims that "Tellico’s reservoir also provides 120,000 acre-feet of flood storage above Chattanooga, formerly one of the most flood-prone cities in the nation." (Note: I have had to correct sloppy work on the website that trims acre-feet down to acres in the main text. See the side-bar for the correct units.). Although it is a primary source, the flood control capacity, and the benefits for downstream communities is a relevant factual statement (presuming it is correct). If supported by secondary sources, this should perhaps be included into the lead and the body of the article. (However, I am not aware of whether 120,000 acre-feet of flood storage is substantial or relatively insignificant compared with the prospective flood hazard.) The 120,000 acre-feet is approx 148 million cubic metres, or 0.148 cubic km. Marshelec (talk) 02:08, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Property acquisition and eminent domain
These sentences are a bit hard to follow: I can't access the book that is the cited source for this content, but I suggest a possible alternative to these sentences that is more concise: "The proposed project affected diverse communities with widely varying levels of awareness of large government initiatives. Historians of the project have suggested that most TVA personnel did not understand the complexity of the communities that were affected by the Tellico project, and that this led to more heated opposition." Marshelec (talk) 02:49, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * When the TVA began to approach property owners in the Lower Tennessee Valley for the development of Tellico Dam, several communities that TVA sought to "modernize" through this project were at the time in touch with most of the modern Appalachian society that TVA had contributed to since the 1930s. Members of the river shed communities least impacted by modernization reacted most positively to TVA's plans, compared with the more modern communities. Historians of the project have suggested that most TVA personnel did not understand the complexity of the communities that they were intruding into with the Tellico project, leading to more heated opposition.
 * The book is available on the Internet Archive, here. — Jon (talk) 12:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)