Talk:1872 North Cascades earthquake

1872 North Cascades earthquake has been listed as one of the Geography and places good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: November 2, 2014. (Reviewed version).

A fact from 1872 North Cascades earthquake appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 December 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the area most affected by the 1872 North Cascades earthquake was largely unpopulated, resulting in limited damage?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2014/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/1872 North Cascades earthquake.

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GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:1872 North Cascades earthquake/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: MusikAnimal (talk · contribs) 01:58, 28 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I will be taking on this review. Please allow several days for me to complete the review, although it's possible I'll have it ready for you tonight :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 01:58, 28 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No rush, and it's good to see the that the cup is active. Thanks for jumping in here. Looking forward to your input, Dawnseeker2000 03:45, 28 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

Is it reasonably well written?
A. Prose is "clear and concise", without copyvios, or spelling and grammar errors:

B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:
Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
A. Has an appropriate reference section:

B. Citations to reliable sources:

C. No original research:
Is it broad in its coverage?
A. Major aspects:

B. Focused:
Is it neutral?
Fair representation without bias:
Is it stable?
No edit wars, etc:
Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

B. Images are provided if possible and are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:
Overall:
Pass or Fail:

Concerns

Lead

Is there somewhere to link to with "intensity of VIII (Severe)"? Maybe Richter magnitude scale? Yes, there's the Mercalli Intensity Scale, which is linked in the table as the header "MMI". I've also made a change by adding it to the lead so the reader gets it right up front
Should "Severe", "Very Strong", "Moderate", etc. be capitalized? Do they correlate to the Richter scale? The values/names don't appear to match what's listed at Richter magnitude scale#Richter magnitudes. On this one,we're using the moment magnitude scale for the energy released, and we're also supplying the values for the perceived intensity of the shaking, which is where the Mercalli Intensity Scale comes in. I think it's fine that they're caps.

Preface

I get that the M in M7.3 stands for magnitude, but maybe we could also wikilink this to Richter magnitude scale for readers unfamiliar with the notation and are somehow unable to deduce what it is. What are your thoughts? Overusing the word "magnitude" is the goal here, and using this shorthand is something that works well. I think most people are familiar with the word magnitude, and know in general terms that it relates to the strength of an earthquake. They know that there's a numerical value for magnitude, so seeing the numbers there they can easily make the connection to the word. Moment magnitude is also linked twice in the article to help bridge the gap.
Let's wikilink subduction zone. OK, I added a link to several instances in different sections of the article

Earthquake

Should we explain who Bakun et al. are? So something like "seismologists Bakun et. al concluded...". Do we know Bakun's first name? What about Wentworth, do we have his full name? What about Malone and Bor? I only ask for full names because as a reader, I'm curious who they are (seismologist, friends of Bakun, etc) and also I may want to learn more about them on my own. I added the word "seismologist" to introduce our scientists, and no, we don't have their first names, but I've added their initials across the board. A reader can always follow the links in the refs for more information. The names aren't critical here, and just needed to address them by name to differentiate the two studies.

Malone and Bor... depth of 60 kilometers (37 mi) – this earthquake took place in the US. Should we then use "37 miles (60 km)" instead (MOS:ENGVAR)? I noticed we're also using American English date notation. Same with the last sentence ...between 40-60 kilometers (25-37 mi). Yes, thanks for catching these items. I'm good at getting the bulk of the idea into the text, but often overlook these small details.
I like the table and how we it nicely presents the data, but the formatting seems a little inconsistent with other articles. Here we're letting the browser decide how to format it, when we could use the more common "wikitable" class, by appending class="wikitable" to the first line. OK, made the change. I know literally nothing of tables, and have just been using the one version that I know works, so thanks for the tip
One more thing about the table. We're listing out the reference in plain text, rather than using a footnote. I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but it is just a convention I'm not familiar with. Meanwhile we have a named reference "Bakun_3256" that refers to the same pages. I feel like if we can find a way to use an inline citation without compromising aesthetics, that would be preferable. I think in this case having the ref with the page number in plain text is fine. It's simple and let's the reader know the source at a glance.
Could we link to reference then?

Aftershocks

For example... nearly 30 km (19 mi) ... 30 km (19 mi) along with again questioning using km instead of mi, I also must question the abbreviation vs giving the unit name in full (MOS:UNIT). There'd be but four total instances of the unit name in prose, so perhaps spelling it out is the more fitting. Thanks for catching this. It comes down to me just writing the units as I see them in the source. I've converted them to U.S. units and dropped the abbreviations.

That concludes my initial review. I think we'll be able to address these concerns quite easily in a reasonable amount of time, so I am putting the article on hold. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:22, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the detailed responses! As you've probably noticed, I'm not that familiar with seismology and the like :) I'm quite satisfied now with what we have now, only thing is the source in the table. Could we link to the corresponding source in the References section? I have not worked much with Harvard citation style, but we should make the text link to 1872_North_Cascades_earthquake#CITEREFBakunHaugerudHopperLudwin2002 where the full source is shown in detail. You could use a normal wikilink, but I feel like there's a template for this sort of thing. Any ideas? Once that is linked I think we're good to go. — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:19, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your very thorough review and the refinements and improvements to the article that have come from it. I really like the linked ref in the table and am probably going to adopt that style from here on. Many thanks, Dawnseeker2000 19:36, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Y Looks good! With all the issues addressed, I hereby promote this article to good article class. It was a pleasure working with you, and congratulations! — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:05, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]