Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Railpage Australia/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 not promoted by SandyGeorgia 20:03, 24 December 2009.

Railpage Australia

 * Nominator(s): Merriwarail (talk) 08:53, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because it describes a pioneering rail enthusiast website Merriwarail (talk) 08:53, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Oppose. Several problems with this article, including prose, formatting of citations and lack of sourcing. Major contributors have not been informed of this nomination and your first three edits to Wikipedia were the setting up of this nomination. In the future, please ensure that you have read the FA criteria and have no doubts that the article meets these requirements. The links on your talkpage should be of use to you. Thanks,  Pyrrhus  16 ''' 20:15, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Oppose, suggest withdrawal per Pyrrhus16. I see lots of proseline, which needs organization and trimming to terse paragraphs that are "engaging, even brilliant". There are also some dead external links—swap in archived versions or other sources. No dab links, though, which is good. --an odd name 20:45, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Withdrawl Nope. Thank you for contributing to our here site, but this article is not nearly ready yet. With a little work though it can go for WP:GAN, however. Comments incoming:
 * Lead is too short. The lead should summarize all the contents of the page.
 * The spelling of railway varies throughout the article, between railway, rail-way, and rail way. Pick one.
 * Railpage is the largest railway-oriented web-site in Australia and was among the first 100 web sites to be hosted in Australia. When was it founded, exactly?
 * Ref 3, that's not a reference it's a note, and if you want to cite it you have to bring it into its own reference.
 * Paras 2 and 3 need references.
 * Section is too short to serve its purpose, needs expansion.
 * The name lives on. Way too informal.
 * [citation needed] needs fixing.
 * could be further developed. The two began to develop the site further, who later transferring it to a dedicated server. Develop the site is repetitive. Last part of the second sentance is a grammatical anomoly.
 * The section is written in fragments of varying lengths. You can't do that you have to organize them into paragraphs.
 * Almost no citations...
 * Late in 2003, after several months of development and with the help of several developers and testers; RP2 was launched on Saturday 10 April 2004 at approximately 5pm. Why ";"? Should be ","
 * The domain www.railpage.com.au alone serves in excess of 30 gigabytes of data per month. Wait, isn't that the sites only domain name? If there are others they should be mentioned as well.
 * As of April 2008, the site had reached 16,000 registered users and 1,000,000 posts. This seems more a milestone (1,000,000 posts) then a statistic, so should be introduced using "On".
 * Section title: Uses in society isn't very appropriate, try "Impact" or something similar. In general titles are supposed to be nouns or noun fragments, see WP:TITLE.
 * As of July 2007, Railpage has 5 citations on Google Scholar. And why is this important? if it was 21,000 citations I would care, but this is irrelavent. Should be removed.
 * "trainspotting" is mentioned in the article, should be linker or explained.
 * Ah! The splintering ><!
 * The migration of the main Railpage website from Fang to the new server was completed on the 3rd July 2007, and launched on the 5th July 2007 From fang?
 * Refs 4, 5, they do not produce reliable information. A mere ~130 responses is NOT a representation of the entire group, as it is used in the article.
 * Citations are too short.
 * The link to the website in the external links section is doubled.

Don't take this too hardly, the quality of work needed at WP:FA is a lot more demanding then appearences would convey. I have to doubt weather this article even has enough material available for an FAC. Res Mar 21:37, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Close I think this is a sock nom. This page had been involved in some sock dramas before  YellowMonkey  ( bananabucket )  23:17, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, now that I look at it I see that the nominator never made any edits to the article...hmmm. Res Mar 02:00, 24 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Oppose: Fundamental research flaws, "As of July 2007, Railpage has 5 citations on Google Scholar.[15]" as an example: Scholar is not an indexation service (going to notability impact, etc) but a search service. SELF all over the place.  Rethink research direction before bringing back! :) Fifelfoo (talk) 01:08, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Comment: I'm a moderator at Railpage, and a member with the same name as the nominator has recently been banned from our forums. I don't have any proof that the two are related, but if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, etc. etc. I think this nomination is mischievous at best. I just hope this isn't the beginning of another AfD war, like the one that occured in 2007. Johnmc (talk) 04:17, 24 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.