Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/American Arts Commemorative Series medallions/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 01:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC).

American Arts Commemorative Series medallions

 * Nominator(s): RHM22 (talk) 07:00, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

This article is about a rather obscure and unloved series of American bullion medallions produced as a competitor to the very popular South African Krugerrand coins. Though their sale numbers were lackluster, they served as the direct ancestor of the American Gold Eagle, a series of bullion coins which are today extremely popular with both collectors and investors. I worked on this article a few years ago, but personal issues arose and I became unable to be an active participant here for a while. However, I think the article meets the criteria, so I hope that this will be a welcome return to FAC. It is currently a good article. I want to thank everyone in advance for your efforts in reviewing and commenting on this article. Of course, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.-RHM22 (talk) 07:00, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Comments from Curly Turkey

 * I don't know anything about coins. Feel free to revert any of my copyedits or to laugh and any of my suggestions.
 * The sales were intended to "[reduce] the U.S. trade deficit, either by increasing the exports of gold or reducing the imports of this commodity", and to "further the U.S. desire to continue progress toward the elimination of the international monetary role of gold.": quotations require in-text attribution
 * You added in-line cites, but this also needs in-text attribution---who is being quoted here? "The source" isn't a good enough answer, as it could be a quote quote in the source. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 08:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Oops, sorry about that; I misunderstood your initial point, but now I see what you meant. I've corrected that to state that the quotes from a Treasury source,-RHM22 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * a large number of suggestions of worthy individuals for the dollar coin that had previously been proposed, which later became the Susan B. Anthony dollar.: a large bumber of worthies later became the Susan B. Anthony dollar?
 * I reworded this by including the information about the Susan B. Anthony dollar in parentheses, but if you're not happy with that, then I wouldn't have a problem with removing it entirely; it's not really necessary to the article.-RHM22 (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * It is a bit confusing the way it's introduced. Maybe you could put it in an endnote? Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 08:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I included a note, but I'm not sure if I've done it correctly, because I never used notes in any of my other articles.-RHM22 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The subjects designated were Grant Wood, Marian Anderson, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Louis Armstrong, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Frost, Alexander Calder, Helen Hayes and John Steinbeck.: it might be best to state what their artistic fields are here, rather than scattering them throughout the text later
 * those honoring painter Grant Wood on the one ounce issue and contralto singer Marian Anderson on the half ounce issue: it might be best to describe the different issues for those of us who know nothing about these things. Are one-once and half-ounce issues to be taken for granted?
 * I changed this to make it clear that I was referring to the one ounce and one-half ounce medallions, but I can add more if necessary.-RHM22 (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I meant something more along the lines of "the medallions were issued in half-ounce and one-ounce yada yada". Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 08:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I split that up into two sentences: "Struck at the West Point Bullion Depository, the medallions were issued in one ounce and half-ounce sizes. The first struck were those honoring Grant Wood on the one ounce medallion and Marian Anderson on the half-ounce piece."-RHM22 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * the Mint announced that a private firm would market the medallions; commodities trading firm J. Aron and Company was selected: did the announcement state J. Aron and Company was selected, or were they selected after the announcement?
 * toothlike denticles: toothlike whut?
 * Haha, that is pretty obscure. It refers to the small designs seen around the rim of some coins, although it's uncommon on modern coins. It's pretty hard to work around that, since it's a word known only to numismatists, so I removed it and replaced it with a description of the term: "Beginning in 1982, this information and small, toothlike designs were added along the inner rim of the medallions, and reeding was added to the edge." Does that sound okay? ('Denticles' comes from the Latin word for 'tooth,' I think, so it's probably a little repetitive to say "toothlike denticles" anyway.)-RHM22 (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Or you could go with "like designs called denticles" to please both layreaders and numasmatists (is that a word?). Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 08:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've added 'denticles' in there as well. I should add that to the numismatic terminology article, if it isn't already there.-RHM22 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * In an interview with New York Magazine in October 1980, Luis Vigdor, assistant vice-president for bullion and numismatic operations of Manfa, Tordella & Brookes, then one of the largest coin firms in the country, compared the medallions and the efforts to market them unfavorably to the South African Krugerrand.: this is quite the mouthful. Could it be cut up or down?
 * I removed the part of the sentence which mentions that the quote is from an interview with New York Magazine, since it isn't really relevant or necessary to that sentence, and of course it's also cited as such. Other than that, I can't really find any way to reduce the size of the sentence. I think it looks better now, but I'd like to hear your thoughts as well.-RHM22 (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 05:45, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much, Curly Turkey, for your thorough copyedit and suggestions! I've addressed all of your concerns, but I'm also adding a few notes to your above suggestions to explain and make sure they're all good with you.-RHM22 (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've addressed all your further concerns, I think. Please let me know if I missed anything or made mistakes (especially regarding the endnote, with which I'm not very familiar). Thanks again for your time and effort.-RHM22 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'm ready to support. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 20:30, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Support I probably have some articles on these medallions someplace from my last trip to the ANA library, I mean contemporary ones from Coins and CoinAge but I'll have to look for them, they are on my old laptop, which no longer travels. However, the article is just fine without them. I'll email them to you, but it will be at least a week as I am traveling. Could you shoot me an email via "Email this user"? I think you still have my old email and I can't find yours.
 * Background
 * "The intent of the act" This sentence should be split at the semicolon.
 * Putting an image to the left of a block quote loses the indented effect and probably should be avoided.
 * I set the two images in the 'multiple image' template, which I hope is a bit neater.-RHM22 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "remain stagnant" maybe "remain unchanged"
 * "Helms gave" ... "Helms goes on" probably the tenses should be consistent.
 * It looks like this was already corrected by Curly Turkey.-RHM22 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "the Bank omnibus bill" probably either both Bank and omnibus should be capped, or neither.
 * I did some research, and from what I can tell, the official title of the bill wasn't 'Bank Omnibus Bill,' so I changed it all to lowercase.-RHM22 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Reception
 * "Manfa" is this correct? I thought it was a longer name.
 * That was a great catch! The correct name is "Manfra." I think that typo was in there since I wrote the article, so it's good that you caught it.-RHM22 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * That's it. Well done.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:34, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Wehwalt, for your thoughtful review and support! I believe I've addressed all of your concerns, but I left a few notes above to discuss if not.-RHM22 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Image review
 * File:JesseHelms.jpg is tagged as missing author info, and is also missing a date. Nikkimaria (talk) 21:24, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that, Nikkimaria. I believe I've updated it correctly, crediting the original image to the U.S. Senate and the upload to Japan01 here on the English-language Wikipedia.-RHM22 (talk) 22:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Comments from Mike Christie
Just a few minor comments. -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:44, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Suggest saying in the opening sentence that there were ten medallions in the series.
 * "Critical of the Treasury's plan, North Carolina senator Jesse Helms stated that": how about "North Carolina senator Jesse Helms criticized the plan, saying that"?
 * "Helms gave the following statement": I think you could make this just "Helms said".
 * "He noted that the House Subcommittee on Historic Preservation was sent a large number of suggestions": should this be "had been sent"? Or if the point is that the suggestions both had come in in the past and continued to come in, how about something like "regularly received suggestions" to emphasize that?
 * The source isn't really clear on that, but I believe that the suggestions were still coming in at that time. However, just in case, I changed it to "received," which should cover either scenario.-RHM22 (talk) 21:17, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * "Vigdor stated that they were difficult to market": perhaps "According to Vigdor"? And maybe switch "stating" to "asserting" in the following sentence -- he is making an assertion and something more definite than "stating" seems appropriate.
 * The comment about selling them in sets of five of the half-ounce or five of the one-ounce made me realize that it's not obvious which five are in each set. Four of them don't have weights in the mentioned in the inscriptions listed in the table, and two are not described in the text; the Twain medallion's weight can only be deduced by noticing the caption of the Cather medallion picture.  How about adding a weight column to the table?  And maybe a designer column?
 * Adding that information to the table is a great idea, and I have done it. Does that clear it up sufficiently?-RHM22 (talk) 21:17, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I would assume all the coins are not under copyright. How about a gallery of some (or even all) of the designs?
 * They are indeed in the public domain as works of the U.S. federal government, but coins and medals are considered three-dimensional objects, so any photograph automatically generates a new copyright. In the past, it has been very difficult to find freely-licensed images for coin articles, but another member has recently received permission to use a large repository of images for the encyclopedia. I will contact him to see if he can secure some images of these pieces.-RHM22 (talk) 21:17, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Mike Christie: Thank you for your thoughtful comments! I believe I have addressed all of them (some with minor changes), however I have also left some notes above, between your suggestions.-RHM22 (talk) 21:17, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Support. My comments above have been addressed; this looks good to me. A pity about the coin image copyrights; now you mention it I remember running into that before. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:13, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you again for your comments and support. I contacted that fellow editor, whom I mentioned above, in regards to some more images for this article. I think that I will be able to get them, but I'm still waiting to hear back from him. It used to be extremely difficult to find any decent coin images, to the point that we (myself and the other numismatic contributors) would sometimes have to resort to using low quality monochrome images from pre-1923 Google Books.-RHM22 (talk) 23:25, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Mike Christie: I have an update regarding your proposed image gallery. Thanks to the very generous and invaluable efforts of Godot13, I have added an image gallery depicting all ten medallions to the article.-RHM22 (talk) 07:43, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
 * That looks great! Glad to see it was possible.  Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 23:26, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Coord note -- Hi RHM, we'll need a source review for formatting and reliability, and since it's been a couple of years since you were last here (I believe) I'd like to see a spotcheck of sources for accurate use and avoidance of close paraphrasing -- will request both at WT:FAC. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:16, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Certainly! Thank you. My last time at FAC was in mid-2012, I believe.-RHM22 (talk) 15:10, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Source review and spotchecks
 * FN19: page formatting
 * How are you ordering Other sources?
 * I don't know about this. It was done by another editor a while ago, and I don't really know why or how those are separated. I've merged them all alphabetically.-RHM22 (talk) 21:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Umm...sorry, but how are you ordering them? Alphabetical by what? Nikkimaria (talk) 03:27, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Nikkimaria: Well, the best I could do was to order them alphabetically by author or editor. The different templates shuffle all the information around. Maybe I can fix it so the author(s) will appear first, before the other information in the cite templates.-RHM22 (talk) 04:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * This is now fixed. I added the editors to the Coin World books, and I changed the 'publisher' parameter to 'author' on the press releases. That's more accurate anyway, since they may not have been published by the Treasury, but they were definitely the author.-RHM22 (talk) 04:58, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, in that case we should just rearrange the DoT refs - since they all have the same publisher they can be ordered either by date or by title alphabetically (likely the latter, as that's what seems to be happening for the AP refs). Nikkimaria (talk) 05:33, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh, sorry about that; I absentmindedly forgot to order them alphabetically based on title. That's fixed now. Sorry for taking so long to get this simple thing sorted!-RHM22 (talk) 05:53, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * "Mint Director" - should use single quote marks within the title
 * I took a look at that, and I noticed that the link was wrong for some reason. I've corrected it now. The quote marks are in the title of the press release, so I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to remove them.-RHM22 (talk) 21:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * This would seem to be covered by the Typographic conformity section of MOS:QUOTE. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:27, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you! I didn't know about that. I'll fix it now.-RHM22 (talk) 04:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The "According to the Treasury" quote from FN1 is slightly different from the source - not substantially, but please correct
 * FN12 is returning an error message. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:28, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you mean the link in the bibliography section? If you're based in Canada, I think that Archive.org might block some of their content to non-U.S. people because of copyright concerns. I could send you some screen captures of the necessary pages if you'd like.-RHM22 (talk) 21:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Interestingly enough, I'm now on a different computer (still in Canada) and it works fine, and looks fine. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:27, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * That is strange. It must have been a website bug.-RHM22 (talk) 04:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Nikkimaria: Many thanks for your SR and spotchecks! I believe I've addressed all of these except for the last one. I've added some notes below yours above.-RHM22 (talk) 21:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Comments from Squeamish Ossifrage
Support, essentially. I have a few nitpicky observations that surely won't interfere with promotion:
 * J. Aron & Co. currently redirects to Goldman Sachs, where it's mentioned in the 1980–1999 History subsection. Is it worth linking there (perhaps making an appropriately-formatted redirect to that section)?
 * That's a good idea, and I've done that.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * "1984 marked the termination of the Mint's contract with J. Aron and Company..." The manual of style discourages starting sentences with figures, including years. Perhaps instead "The Mint's contract with J. Aron and Company terminated in 1984..."
 * Thank you! That's a great catch. I've fixed it, and I think the wording is better now anyway.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Is the reverse of the Frost medallion conventionally described as "inscription" rather than, perhaps, "poem"? I recognize that it is both of those things, but the latter makes the connection to his work more clear, perhaps.
 * I changed it to show that the poem fragment quoted on the reverse is a portion of "The Road Not Taken".-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The Egan source is missing some information about the journal issue: this was volume 13, number 41 of New York.
 * Another great catch! Thanks.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Its not really essential, since the citations cite specific page numbers, but I don't suppose you have the page ranges for the Ganz and Gilkes articles (or the volume/number for those issues of COINage and Coin World)?
 * I've added those as well.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The Yeoman source is missing an ISBN number (I believe it to be 978-0-7948-2494-5).
 * That is correct. I've also used this same copy of the Red Book for a few of my coin articles.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and made this a fully-hyphenated ISBN because I care about that way more than is probably healthy. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:09, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

In general, very nice work on a surprisingly obscure bit of modern American exonumia. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 23:00, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Squeamish Ossifrage: Thank you for your support and comments! I believe that I have addressed all of them.-RHM22 (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. I look forward to seeing this article with its bronze star. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:09, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 01:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.