Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Hanford Engineer Works/Archive1

No consensus to promote at this time - Hawkeye7 (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 06:20, 23 March 2023 (UTC) &laquo; Return to A-Class review list

Hanford Engineer Works
Instructions for nominators and reviewers
 * Nominator(s): 

During the FAR of Hanford Site, I decided to create a new article on the World War II establishment. This brings it into line with the articles on Los Alamos, Berkeley and Oak Ridge, all of which have subarticles on their role in the Manhattan Project. The sources complain about how Hanford has been overlooked compared with Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This seems to be the case, but not for any scarcity of sources. On Wikipedia the fault is mine. I began overhauling the Manhattan Project articles over ten years ago, but did not deal with Hanford, because Hanford Site was already a featured article. I did gather material though, and overhauling Hanford Site for its FAR made me aware of how poor the coverage of Hanford was compared with the other sites. So I took the opportunity to create this article, which is entirely new. The article has recently passed GA. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  02:47, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

Oppose from Gog the Mild

 * More than 11,000 words on less than three years in the life of an, admittedly very large, installation!? A lovely read but it goes into far too much detail. Fails WP:SS, WP:AS and A2: "does not go into unnecessary detail." Gog the Mild (talk) 19:06, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The article covers 1942 to 1947. That is five years, not three. It is very tightly focused; there is only one paragraph worth of background on the Manhattan Project, so the reader has to consult the parent article for this. Similarly, it comes to an abrupt ending on the Manhattan Project termination date; the reader has to consult the other parent article, Hanford Site to find out about what happens next. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  22:42, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * WP:SS: The parent article should have general summary information, and child articles should expand in more detail on subtopics summarized in the parent article. The child article in turn can also serve as a parent article for its own sections and subsections on the topic, and so on, until a topic is thoroughly covered. (emphasis original)
 * This is a child article of Manhattan Project, and WP:SS requires that the topic must be " thoroughly covered". I contend that it is. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  02:03, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Oppose

 * Agree with Gog; this article needs a fairly significant trimming to meet the criteria. Picking the Personnel section as an example, why do we need to know the pay the various workers received per day, or what percentage of them were catholic, or rates of absenteeism, to understand the topic?
 * The article meets our criterion: neglects no major facts or details. The point about the pay rates is that the Manhattan Project was paying well above the going rates of pay. Nonetheless, the remoteness of the site, austere living conditions and long hours made absenteeism a redcurrant problem. The point about the religious breakdown tells us about the demographics of the workforce, noting that DuPont hiring practices favoured white, protestant workers. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  00:11, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I also don't fully understand the scope of this article, particularly as it relates to Hanford Site; if we take the lead articles of both articles, one is left with the impression that the Hanford Engineer Works was "a nuclear production complex"...at the Hanford site, "a...nuclear production complex". How does one have a complex at a complex? I suspect that Hanford Engineer Works and the Hanford site one and the same; for example, Britannica uses the two terms interchangeably. I can see having sub-articles about B Reactor, N Reactor, etc., where you are talking about specific buildings at the Hanford Site. Or you could split this up (and still do a fair bit of culling) for articles like Construction of the Hanford Site and Operations of the Hanford Site during the Manhattan Project, but this Russian-nesting-doll complex-within-a-complex makes no sense to me. Parsecboy (talk) 19:31, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The article is about the site during the Manhattan Project. It is therefore a subarticle of both Manhattan Project and Hanford Site. The term "Hanford Engineer Works" was in use only during the Manhattan Project period (1942-1946); "Hanford Site" came into use in the post-war period. The article is therefore analogous to Clinton Engineer Works, which is only about wartime Oak Ridge. It was a plutonium production site but today its main business is radioactive waste disposal. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  00:11, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Right, that's my point; the two terms are effectively synonymous; Wikipedia does not generally have two articles on the same topic during different periods of time; we only have an article on the Willis Tower, not one also about the Sears Tower (and if the Willis article was so long that it warranted sub-articles, we wouldn't structure them to suggest that the Sears Tower was a building at the Willis Tower location). And the Hanford Site lead needs to be rewritten, by the way, as it currently suggests that HEW was a sub-component of the HS, which is plainly wrong. Parsecboy (talk) 11:11, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Splitting by time period is a reasonable way of spinning off a subarticle, and has been done for three of the other Manhattan Project articles (Clinton Engineer Works, Metallurgical Laboratory and Project Y). We often do it for campaign articles and even articles on military units, with separate articles on World War I and II. In this case the Manhattan Project has its own set of subarticles. The lead of Hanford Site is correct: "Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the site was home to the Hanford Engineer Works". During the war the facility was the HEW and the Hanford Site was known as Site W. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  18:46, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * WP:Splitting: When two or more distinct topics with the same or a similar titles are being written about on the same page, even if they are closely related, a content split may be considered. This is what I hate about splitting: people complain (usually without justification) that articles are too long, then challenge the split. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  19:19, 19 March 2023 (UTC)