Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Leopold Report/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 Karanacs 21:07, 27 September 2009.

Leopold Report

 * Nominator(s): María ( habla con migo ) 23:35, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

And now for something completely different (for me, at least): I present the Leopold Report, a highly influential work in the field of wildlife management in US National Parks. Although it's not particularly lengthy, I've scoured the reliable sources to provide the most comprehensive article possible. It was promoted to GA-status in July and recently went through a Peer Review. Thanks, María ( habla con migo ) 23:35, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Support I just peer reviewed this and all of my nitpicks have already been addressed. I thought it was ready for FA when I reviewed it and the few tweaks since have only made it better. Well done, Ruhrfisch &gt;&lt;&gt; &deg; &deg; 02:33, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Support - Arguably the most concise article I have ever read.  ceran  thor 15:22, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Comments A very different type of article from the ones I normally read but this was really interesting. A few tweaks though: please explain who Phillip Burnham is. You've written critic but that doesn't tell a reader anything about why he is qualified to criticise the Report. Is he an ecologist? Also, why are all the images down the right-hand side of the page? Isn't it standard to alternate them, right-left-right? -- EA Swyer Talk Contributions 17:47, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi, EA Swyer, thanks for the great suggestions. I've added a brief intro to Burnham's qualifications, as you're quite right that he was given very little context; the sentence now reads: "Historian and author Philip Burnham in particular stated in his 2000 book, Indian Country, God's Country: Native Americans and the National Parks, that although..."  I've also alternated the images, although I tend to prefer them in a neat little row. :) María ( habla  con migo ) 18:52, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, it's not "standard to alternate images left-right"; don't know where that came from. Multiple images can be staggered left-right-left – generally to avoid having a portrait looking out of the page without stranding a lone image on the left of the page – but there's certainly no requirement to. – iride  scent  20:03, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Support. Burnham bit looks good now. I didn't know it wasn't standard to alternate images; ignore the comment. Do what thou wilt with the images. -- EA Swyer Talk Contributions 17:42, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments
 * I appreciate the "background" section is only a brief summary, but the jump between the creation of Yellowstone in 1872, and Wilson's creation of the National Park Service in 1916, seems misleading to me. It (to me) has the clear implication that national parks pre-1916 were isolated oddities, and that Wilson created the modern preservation-and-leisure driven park service. In reality, this is a major distortion; Wilson may have given the service its current name, but it was Teddy Roosevelt, years before Wilson, who de facto created the National Park Service (more federal land was set aside as national parks and nature reserves by Roosevelt than by all previous presidents combined, and prior to becoming president it was Roosevelt who pushed through the creation of Yellowstone) – they just weren't administered by a central agency.
 * Brief summary is key, yes. ;) I believe that pre-NPS history is less important to the understanding of this topic than the point of your last sentence, which is currently intimated in the article: parks like Yellowstone weren't administered by a central agency until the official creation of the NPS in 1916.  If there's a clearer way to say this, however, let me know. María ( habla  con migo ) 21:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * "An estimated 4,309 elk" may be what the source says, but it looks very odd. A number as precise as "4,309" implies precision; if the number isn't known, then "around 4,300" is probably less misleading.
 * Fair enough, I evened the number. María ( habla con migo ) 21:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * "The controversy [...] shed a negative light upon the NPS" to me reads quite oddly; what does "shed a negative light upon" mean? There's a big difference between "brought poor or dangerous practices to notice that had previously not been recognized" and "caused some people who didn't understand the issues to think that the NPS were doing something wrong", and this wording could cover either extreme or any point in between. Since this was and is the main binary divide on the popular perception of environmental science, it's something that needs to be clarified as much as possible on an environmental article; was the Special Advisory Board on Wildlife Management convened to address what Udall (and presumably Kennedy) saw as an environmental mismanagement issue, or what he saw as a public relations issue?
 * I've tried to clarify this somewhat; one source in particular notes that it was considered a "crisis in public relations", but nowhere does anyone mention that Kennedy had anything to do with the formation of the board. The controversy also obviously stems from the public outlash, which was mentioned in the previous section.  María ( habla  con migo ) 21:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Again, I appreciate it's cited, but "The Leopold Report was the first concrete plan for managing park visitors and ecosystems under unified principles" seems an extremely dubious claim for something written in the 1960s. The claim surely applies to, for example, England & Wales's National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, or the USA's Multiple Use - Sustained Yield Act of 1960, and I very strongly suspect that with some digging one could find similar proposals in the US at least as far back as Gifford Pinchot. (Consider the creation of the Grand Canyon Game Preserve in 1906, for example, or even the original creation of Yellowstone, which was explicitly pushed through by the Northern Pacific Railroad as an effort to create a tourist attraction on an under-used section of their route.)
 * The source specifically states that the report "represented the first serious attempt to develop a coherent plan for management of visitors and communities of plants and animals under unified principles". Emphasis mine.  So, the implication may be that while there were previous systems in place, they weren't as concrete or as "serious".  Several other sources say as much, although not as succinctly. María ( habla  con migo ) 21:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * All minor and certainly nothing to oppose over, and I explicitly request Sandy/Karanacs/Raul not to treat this as an oppose when closing this, but there are enough "niggling nitpicks" not to support at this stage. – iride  scent  20:52, 20 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:24, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.