Wikipedia:Featured article review/Death Valley National Park/archive1


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

The article was kept by User:Marskell 11:06, 9 October 2008.

Death Valley National Park

 * Notified Mav, Vsmith, and WikiProjects: California, Earthquakes, and Protected areas.

This article, promoted to FA status back on February 5, 2005, requires improvement to maintain the current standards expected of a Featured Article. My main concern is that the article is lacking references and inline citations. -- Longhair\talk 23:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Could the nom (or anyone) go through with fact tags. Even though even the very brief glance I did I can see that with only three inline citations it is easier to point people responding for what to look for cites on. I'm also going to notify two additional projects listed on the article talk page. -Optigan13 (talk) 23:50, 31 August 2008 (UTC)


 * No need for that until after my first referencing pass. --mav (talk) 00:47, 1 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Hold This article does need more inline citations but already lists all the references used. Please be patient - I already have two other FARs and an article almost ready for FAC that I've been working on so I might not be able to do much here at least one other FAR results in a Keep. BTW, isn't there an informal concept to limit the number of active FARs any one person or WikiProject is expected to address? --mav (talk) 00:47, 1 September 2008 (UTC)


 * The most basic informal rule here is that you can simply ask me and Joel to leave things open. If you want to defer work for some time, give a hold or a wait. This just started in FAR so there's plenty of time. Marskell (talk) 12:40, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Note I haven't moved the Geology article to FARC for this reason. Marskell (talk) 12:47, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Understood - thanks. I added a hold . --mav (talk) 15:31, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Sandy beat me to it, but work on addressing FAR concerns has now started. My ref-pass shouldn't take too long; hopefully we will be mostly done by the end of the weekend. --mav (talk) 01:55, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't know why "Telephone history" is there, and it's full of undefined jargon. If it's kept, it needs better linking and a lot of WP:NBSPs.  I'm not going to work on it yet, because I can't understand why it's there. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 22:21, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * "Telephone history" section moved to talk - not needed for the article anyway. --mav (talk) 00:40, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I moved around all the images to make image layout conform to WP:ACCESSIBILITY and WP:MOS; I don't know if I ended up with the optimal location for each image in the "Geologic history" section. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 22:22, 18 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Inline cites for Geology of National Parks added. Still a few more sources to go through. --mav (talk) 00:58, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Inline cites for Geology of U.S. Parklands added. Still a couple more sources to go through. --mav (talk) 01:55, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yet more inline cites added. Only a few paras left uncited now. Once that is done, I'll do a final copyedit and fix the telephone section (which was added after this article became FA - I've never really liked it anyway). --mav (talk) 03:47, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Section-by-section copyedit and final ref-pass now complete. I think we are done now... --mav (talk) 00:40, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Good work mav. I pinged Sandy for a second opinion. Marskell (talk) 08:40, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I just gave it a copyedit and MOS cleanup. I left a couple hidden comments in the text (noted in edit summaries) requesting clarification on some sentences I couldn't parse. The only other remaining issues I can see pertain to images. There are so many images in Geologic history that the text is repeatedly sandwiched between images, and there are two image galleries in the Biology section. Given that there are 28 images in the article as a whole, can we prune some of the poorer-quality/less-relevant ones? Some likely candidates: Image:Zebra tail lizard.jpg has a deprecated license; Image:Death valley flowers 1.jpg has enormous artifacting; and Image:Sphinx moth on rock nettle at Mosaic Canyon.jpg doesn't appear to have been taken at DV. Maralia (talk) 00:46, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Mosaic Canyon is entirely in the park and empties into Death Valley. But yeah, some images need to go. :) --mav (talk) 03:15, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Maralia and Jbmurray have both been through, so we should be in good shape here, but there are a lot of images; I struggled with how to organize them, and they need more work. Sandy Georgia (Talk) 02:32, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'll see about removing some images and rearranging the ones that remain. --mav (talk) 03:15, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Several images removed and other moved. I also added some sub-sections to the geology section. --mav (talk) 04:37, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

As the instigator of this review, I just want to add that this article has progressed ten-fold from what I initially saw six weeks ago. Credit goes to those involved in recognition of their efforts in bringing this important article back up to FA standards. I'd say it's very close to a FA, if not already there. -- Longhair\talk 03:22, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for initiating the review - I'm normally too busy to do more than maintain my old FAs from deteriorating unless I'm prodded by a FAR to improve them to current standards. The inline cite requirement has been a killer for many old FAs. --mav (talk) 03:30, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for giving you more work? I guess that's a compliment of sorts. We've got ourselves a very nice article now :) As I said above, a credit to all involved. -- Longhair\talk 03:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It is an opportunity to polish the FA star. :) --mav (talk) 04:37, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Wow! Some really good copyeditors have done a great job in the past day on this article. Great work! --mav (talk) 03:24, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.