Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/International airport/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 archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 10:58, 19 November 2014 (UTC).

International airport

 * Nominator(s): David Condrey   log talk  07:46, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

This article is about the general encyclopedia topic of international airports and as such I believe it has the potential to be a keystone article of WIkipedia. It recently passed GA nomination with only a handful of the most minor of issues and I'd like to continue improving it to featured status. David Condrey  log talk  07:46, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose and suggest withdrawal. This is nowhere near ready. Reference formatting is in woefully poor shape, the Notable airports section is essentially trivia, several paragraphs are unreferenced, and the history section is much less comprehensive then I'd expect. I have doubts about most of the references. Frankly, I'm surprised this passed GAC. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:59, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Source review—I'm only going to comment on the sources in the article based on the expectations of a Featured Article. As FAs should be polished and professional looking, several of the comments below will be related to formatting consistency.
 * Date formats in the footnotes need to be harmonized. Most of them are in "DD Month YYYY" format, but a few are in "YYYY-MM-DD" format.
 * Access dates are not required if there's no online link. In fact, if there is no URL in the citation template, that date will not show. (I have all of the error messages enabled, and I get  as a result.)
 * Whenever possible, you should be including page numbers. Several books are being cited without page numbers, and we should not be sending our readers looking through potentially hundreds of pages of a book looking for a single factoid being cited. Just as in FN4, you can group pages together to make a single citation to one book.
 * I'm somewhat curious about the capitalization style in use for titles. I'm used to using Title Case over Sentence case for titles, but both are acceptable according to the MOS so long as you use one style consistently. However, I was always taught that the first letter of a title, and the first letter of a subtitle are always capitalized. --from the dawn of aviation : The Qantas Story, 1920-1995 in footnote 4 doesn't fit that rule. (Also, that hyphen should be converted to an en dash (–) in any event to follow our MOS. It's a minor typographic change that promotes consistency in how we present items base on our style guide.)
 * FN1: I'm not sure that the country should be bracketed when "Hersham, England" would work just as well and be more consistent with other locations that list a higher-level jurisdiction like a state or province in a federated country (Australia, Canada, the US). This whole topic should be audited throughout the footnotes for consistency. Well-known cities like New York (FN21) or Boston (FN22) can omit them, as you have done, or you can specifically include them always for consistency ("Boston, Massachusetts", FN8). If you do include them, either always spell them out (as in FN8), or always abbreviate them ("Double Bay, NSW", FN4). The key is to pick a scheme and consistently follow it. (Also, if you're going to abbreviate the state name, it should be consistent from FN to FN, "NSW" in FN4 vs. "N.S.W." in FN32.)
 * FN2 looks to be using citation, a Citation Style 2 template instead of Citation Style 1 like the other footnotes. CS2 uses commas to separate parts of a citation, while CS1 uses periods. These two should not be mixed.
 * FN2 also has its multiple authors formatted as "Learmonth, Bob; Cluett, Douglas; Nash, Joanna" while FN 8 has "Feldman, Elliot J. and Jerome Milch" and FN 28 has "Atwal, Glyn; Jain, Soumya". Using first1 last1 first2 last2 etc. in the templates keeps things orderly and consistent. If you'd like the last author to be preceded by an ampersand, there is yes.
 * FN5, I don't know that the publisher is necessary. The name of the magazine should be sufficient on its own. Also, National Geographic should have an ISSN which is a general identifier that would be a better number to use than an ASIN, which is specific to amazon.com.
 * FN7 has no access date, unlike other online sources.
 * FN10: I'm not sure why the edition is bracketed here.
 * FN11: another CS1-vs.-CS2-type situation, but there is extraneous information included in the title. This actually looks to be a hand-crafted citation that isn't using the benefit of a template to match its format to the others.
 * FN12, 13, 20: these have sources published by the same government agency, but that agency's name is rendered differently when they should be rendered the same. (Personally, if there isn't another "Federal Aviation Administration out there, "U.S." or "U.S. Department of Transportation" is a bit redundant, but including it isn't exactly wrong either. It just should match.)
 * FN14: parts of the citation (publication name, publication date) have been lumped into the article title so they're included in the link. They should be separated out.
 * FN15: "Special Issue 2 ed." doesn't look right. The remainder of the footnote is also similarly odd to my eyes, but without seeing the source, I can't offer better advice in correcting it.
 * FN17: The dash should be a colon to separate title and subtitle. Also, if that's the 2nd edition, "2nd" would be better that "2" as in FN22. Also, which location is correct? Book citations typically only give the first city listed on the title page, not all of them.
 * FN19: no publisher necessary for a well-known magazine.
 * FN23: no location given unlike other book citations. Double check others to make sure all books have a location to accompany the publisher, or drop the locations from the other citations. (It's more typical to include them for books, so I would advise adding the missing locations.)
 * FN24: it looks like website was used with the domain address, but that parameter is for the name of a website, not its domain address. I'm usually skeptical that an organization actually uses its domain address as its website name; you're more likely to see a company name (publisher) like Amazon.com matching a domain address than a website's name (published work).
 * FN25: abbreviation only ("ICAO") for an organization where others are spelled out ("Federal Aviation Administration"). This would also equally apply to FN24.
 * FN27: no publication year, location, page number or ISBN/OCLC/some identifier.
 * FN29: access date lacks the day of the month.
 * FN30: NBC News is a publisher, not a published work. It is a division of the NBC network, and its published works are things like the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today or Dateline: NBC. It shouldn't be rendered in italics, so it should be in publisher instead of work (or one of the aliases of that parameter.)
 * FN31, 34–42: no website name or publisher.
 * FN38: additionally, this one lacks any date, publication or access.
 * FN44: Airport World Magazine should be in italics. It's either the name of a magazine, which in print is italicized, or it's the name of a website that should be accorded the same rendering as the name of a published (online) work.
 * FN45: the publisher is redundant, much like someone listing "The New York Times. New York Times Company." It doesn't have to be removed, but it doesn't have to be retained either.
 * FN46&47: I realize these have different URLs, but they look like they're the same citation. Can you add some more details, like 9: Svalbard Airport, Svalbard, Norway and 15: Dammam King Fahd International Airport, Dammam, Saudi Arabia with The World's 18 Strangest Airports: Gallery Popular Mechanics. Also, you have no dates at all, and for an undated online source, an access date is pretty much required (and still a good idea even for dated online sources).
 * Another general suggestion: there's a via parameter that would allow you to indicate books hosted by Google Books, magazine articles archived/republished on elibrary.com, etc. It's not required, but it does enhance the footnote with a bit more of WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT.

That covers formatting, which if you have an eye towards harmonizing the formatting from footnote to footnote for consistency, shouldn't be too hard. Using the same templates and supplying the same data in them will do most of the work for you.

The other half of a source review is an evaluation of the quality of the sources listed. In general, the sources listed pass the "sniff test". They're published by the appropriate government or international agencies, major newspapers, industry journals, major industry websites, or reputable book publishers. (At least none of the book publishers stand out as being unreliable.) I'll let other reviewers tackle the question of whether this is a representative survey of the literature on the topic as they judge the comprehensiveness of the article. You may want to spend some time replacing sources to make sure they're all "high-quality, reliable sources" as required by the criteria. It never hurts to make substitutions aiming to use the best books, journal/magazine articles, travel guides or government publications instead of some online-only sources.  Imzadi 1979  →   10:04, 19 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Opppose I agree completely with Crisco, and also think that this nomination should be withdrawn or closed. As this nomination has clearly been made in good faith, I would like to offer some suggestions as well though:
 * Theres's currently a lack of precision over what the article covers: is this about international airports, or major airports? Not all modern international airports are very big or sophisticated (even in developed countries - Wellington International Airport is a pretty simple affair), but the article assumes that they are. The article should be focused on what makes international airports unique - eg, their immigration, security and international cargo arrangements.
 * The article is largely written from an developed world POV - this is most obviously demonstrated in the 'By historical event' section, but almost all the examples seem to depict how airports work in the developed world, or discuss atypical major international airports in developing countries. Nick-D (talk) 10:14, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll chime in one fact. My hometown is not far from Sawyer International Airport. It is not a major airport at all, but it shares a part-time customs officer with the port facilities in Marquette, Michigan, thus qualifying it for the "international" moniker. This is despite the fact that the only scheduled flights connect to other airports in the US. One of the last times that airport received international passenger flights was on September 11, 2001, after SCATANA was partially invoked, although there are occasional charter or cargo flights that original in Canada or Russia. These are the sorts of details that will fall under the comprehensiveness criterion, which I didn't evaluate in my review above. The jump from GA to FA can be a large one, because GAs only need to cover the major aspects of a topic, but FAs have to be comprehensive.  Imzadi 1979  →   10:44, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Closing comment -- Tks all for raising those concerns so promptly, I'll be archiving this shortly. David, I think Imzadi summed things up nicely with his final point about the gulf between GA and FA; I'd recommend that after working through the issues identified you seek a Peer Review before considering a renomination here (which must in any case be a minimum of two weeks hence, per the FAC instructions). Tks/cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 10:54, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 10:58, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.