User talk:Dga279/sandbox

Hey Guys,

I’d like to first start off by stating that this is a really good start on your project! Here are some changes I’d like you guys to consider.

Sole Food Street Farms

-         Vancouver has a wiki page, so I suggest if you want to put brackets around it in your first sentence. Vancouver

-         Seann  Dory does not have a Wiki page, so maybe remove the double brackets.

-         I wouldn’t recommend quoting exactly "jobs, agricultural training, and inclusion in a supportive community of farmers and food lovers." and "[urban agriculture] can in fact be considered a serious enterprise for urban areas. We’re not talking about community gardens any more. We’re taking it up a level." Although you’re referencing it, it will be a lot better if you reword it and then referencing it.

Description

-         I like here how you mentioned about the 500 trees and put reference to it. This is what you should do with the Sole Food Street Farm introduction.

-         This section is well written. I would suggest adding pictures/visuals.

Sole Food Urban Orchard

-         Minor grammar error. Change In July of 2013, to In July 2013.

-         You might want to cite after the first 2 sentences. “In July of 2013 Sole Food opened the largest urban orchard in North America. They initially planted 500 trees in raised boxes with plans to plant more. The one acre city owned vacant lot is located at Main St. and Terminal Ave. on an old gas station site.” You have a lot of info here, and I’d suggest citing here and also on the sentence about the orchard.

-         Please add some pictures

Overall this is a great start to your project. You’ve got a lot of information which suggests that both of you guys have done research. There were just some minor errors throughout the Wiki page. My biggest concern is the lack of visuals/pictures on the page. Increase that, fix the citations and quotations and this should be good to go! Great job guys!

Fcheng62 (talk) 05:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions
Hey,

I found this a very interesting idea it is something I’ve never heard of before. I think that overall the article could be opened up more to maybe explain the impact on Vancouver and the more local communities within Vancouver. Accentuate between the workers and who the food was actually going to because at first I thought it was helping the low-income residents by producing cheaper foods when in fact the food is more expensive. More pictures would be help a lot too.

Sole Foods Street Farm: - I don’t think you need to include the quote for Ableman personally it made it a little awkward for me to read that and then suddenly jump to how Sole food is a subsidiary of Cultivate Canada.

-	Maybe try re-arranging the sentences in this section. This section seems to be an introduction and I think that putting the last sentence about cultivate Canada after the first sentence then the mission statement then who it was founded by would make it easier to follow.

Description:-	This to me is like the introduction section but more detailed. I think giving your sections more detailed labels would help.

-	One sentence is missing the word “to”. You have “In order grow food”

-	“Different locations exhibit different aspects of urban agriculture, such as unheated greenhouses and vertical planters.”

	This sentence could be moved down a line away from the paragraph above it or be included in it. The placement is just visually awkward right now

	Maybe explain more about this because I don’t understand what you are really getting at. I first thought different areas grew different things but then I realized its more mechanical things. A picture might be useful so we can see an example of what you mean.

Sole Food Urban Orchard:-	This is written to me like more of a “news feed” like something that will be keeping the readers updated on the progress, I’m not sure that is what you are going for.

Acfredrikson (talk) 20:57, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Thoughts to consider
Hi guys, Wow! This sounds like such a great initiative. I had no idea. Good choice of topic.

Here are my suggestions... hope they help.

Sole Food Street Farms: The first part read fine, but I was confused when I started reading the quote. It didn't seem like a natural fit into the paragraph. I think it would sound better, perhaps, if you rearranged what Ableman said into your own words.

Also, you might want to consider moving to Table of Contents box so that it can be next to the writing in the first paragraph. You can learn how to do this in the "help: editing" section. It seems a little tricky to do at first but just play around with it and see if you think it looks better. You may have to remove your first heading. But that cold work if that's going to be the title of your wiki page anyways. Great picture by the way!

Description:

It sounds good, but I suggest splitting it into two paragraphs. You could split it at the second paragraph where it says "Since it's inception...". Then you could make the next heading "Community Support" or something along those lines.

Sole Food Urban Orchard:

I think you may want to go over the sentence structure of this paragraph. I found this sentence... "The one acre city owned vacant lot is located at Main St. and Terminal Ave" ... kind of awkward to read. May add some hyphens, such as "city-owned." But I think it would be better to just split the sentence apart and make two simpler sentences. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robyn001 (talk • contribs) 03:58, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Consider
The “Seann Dory” link is to a page that does not yet exist, so unless you are planning to develop it, there’s not really a reason to have the link.

In the description section, you mention unheated greenhouse gases and vertical planters. I think that these terms would be more useful to your page if they were defined, even minimally. As for the vertical planters you talk of, I found a page on Wikipedia on “vertical farming” that you might want to link with.

“Because it is a social initiative, priority is placed upon improving the community: employees, many of whom are current or recovering drug addicts receive paid training, and 10% of the produce harvested is donated to neighborhood agencies [5].”

^The text above has great information in it, but would be better explained if you divided it into parts, namely after the colon. If anything, the sentence describing donations should be separate.

It might be interesting to just list some of the restaurants that are using the local produce.

http://solefoodfarms.com/press/farming-in-vancouvers-downtown-eastside/ - this article says that the farm is non-profit, but you haven’t mentioned that.

Good progress!

Nerdreyes (talk) 06:30, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Comments from Ruth
I think this page is good but a few improvements will make it much better.

Things to improve your page:

·        If you are going to mention Cultivate Canada you need a better explanation of what they are and how they are linked to Sole Food Farms. You also need a reference for this.

·        Maybe include map of the four locations?

·        “The newest site…”, This page will hopefully be around for a long time so what happens if they build a new site. Instead say “The site built in 20xx…”. Same goes for the word currently. Replace with “In 2014”

·        “Generous grants/grants..”?, very subjective. How much exactly? Include numbers.

·        “Different locations exhibit different aspects of urban agriculture, such as unheated greenhouses and vertical planters.” This needs to be expanded. What different locations? Where? Which locations have which aspects of urban agriculture?

·        “In July of 2013 Sole Food opened the largest urban orchard in North America”.. where?? North America is a big place. Put location and city in the same sentence.

·        “The orchard should reach commercial production in 3 to 5 years:” 3-5 years since I read the page? Put year i.e. by 2017-2018

·        You have a reference in the references section twice.

·        The description under your photo needs to contain more detail. Where and when was it taken? Which farm is it a photo of?

·        “Significant community support”. Again vague and subjective. You need to include some evidence.

Overall comments:

·        I don’t think this page flows well. For example how does the sole food urban orchard fit into the rest of the article? There are only four farms in total or four farms in East Vancouver? This is not clear.

·        If there are only four farms in total then perhaps you can discuss each one individually? Give each one its own section?

·        This article makes Sole Food Street Farms all good? Is there any downsides or controversy? There are already a lot of community farms in Vancouver. How is this different? Have a deeper dig to see what you can find and not just relay on the first few hits you get by doing a Google search.

You need to have more links to other Wikipedia pages in your article such as:

·        Urban areas

·        Vancouver

·        Vertical planters (What exactly is a vertical planter? If there is no wikipidea page you have to explain what this is is a sentence or two)

With these improvement this page will be a great contribution to Wikipedia!!

RuthVancouver (talk) 17:23, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Advice from Rosie
The above advice is all very good and should be followed. The two major issues are (1) The information is patchy, with lots about the orchard and little about other issues. (2) It reads as if it was based on a few newspaper articles, which in turn were based on press releases. Addressing these issues will make this page a very valuable contribution, one you can be proud of.

To address issue 1: Describe all four gardens, at least briefly. Go look at them all if you haven't already. Add an introductory paragraph (above the Table of Contents) that summarizes the entry.

To address issue 2: Do some research. For example, Googling turns up concerns about tax evasion (http://themainlander.com/2012/09/21/temporary-urban-farms-used-for-tax-evasion/) and contaminated soil (http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2012/02/23/vancouver-urban-farm-sites-face-hurdles-due-to-soil-contamination/). Replace the generalizations with some more solid evidence.

Rosieredfield (talk) 18:07, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, Rosie, but the two articles you linked to don't contain any relevant information we haven't addressed in the article already. The first one especially seems to have been written by someone who hasn't really researched Sole Food, as they argue against its sustainability on the grounds that the leases are too short to really create anything sustainable. In fact, the vertical planters described in our article were developed to ensure that the work that had been done wouldn't be erased when Sole Food's lease ends. Rentarob (talk) 01:32, 10 April 2014 (UTC)