Talk:Harrison County, Indiana/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: WTF? (talk) 20:45, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The article is a pretty decent start, though I'm not sure I'd assess it at B-class quite yet, as two wikiprojects have. It's probably closer to C-class in its present state. There's still quite a bit of work to be done. Below is how this article measures up against the six good article criteria:

The article clearly meets B class as layed out here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Indiana/Assessment —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 16:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for criteria)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS):
Mostly meets the manual of style, but in reading, the prose is rather poor and could use a good copyedit. The lead, while it does contain a decent summary, doesn't flow very well together -- it seems more like a few isolated facts combined randomly into a paragraph. A few other examples to point out: "The earliest evidence of humans activity" -- "humans" should be possessive, such as "human's". Also in that same paragraph: "...near the end of eighteenth century" is missing the word "the" before "eighteenth". There's more issues with the prose moving on; too many to list here.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
Most of the pertinent information is well-cited, and the sources seem to be reliable; however there's a lot of information that's in bulleted lists that is not.

The lists are referenced at the top of the list. The whole list shares the source. Do you propose duplicating the footnote on each line?

It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
The article really isn't complete. Most importantly, the education, half of the government section, and half of the geography section are just bulleted lists. These should be written out as prose, though some of the items under 'elected officials' could probably be eliminated -- is it really important to list everyone, such as the clerk, assessor, surveyor, coroner, etc? The list of "major highways" under geography would probably be better included in a transportation section, among other things such as railroads, airports, etc. There's no climate section. What about culture? Forms of media (e.g. radio, television, newspapers)? The order of sections could be improved as well: Start with History, then Geography, Demographics, Economy, Culture, Media, Government, Education, Transportation.

I am not sure I understand when you say it isn't complete, I take that to mean it is missing content. What content do you feel is missing? All the suggested content at WP:County is included. I will separate the transportation section. But there is no media except one radio station and one newspaper; it is a rural county. I feel the education section is better as a list, but can convert to prose. I can also remove the county officials, but they are all countywide offices. I will pare it down to the council and commissioners and trustees. Finally the order you suggest putting sections in is not the standard order as outline at WP:County; there are a couple out of order from the standard though. In regards to climate, this is not typically included on a county article, a see also to Climate of Indiana could get a person to that data. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 16:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
Meets WP:NPOV criteria. Information is presented in a neutral tone.
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
There doesn't appear to be any stability issues.
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Images are tagged and captioned appropriately.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:
The article, in its present state, is not complete and does not meet the six GA criteria. Once it does, it can be renominated at WP:GAN. Cheers! WTF? (talk) 20:45, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I will work on it an get it renominated. :) Thanks for you review. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 16:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I seem to have made the mistake earlier of using a US city guideline for a county article. Counties are certainly not cities, and a lot of information that applies to cities certainly does not apply to counties. Based on the guidelines at WP:COUNTY, I think this article is a lot closer to meeting GA criteria than originally thought, so I have decided to reinstate this and put it on hold for two weeks (until 2/28/2010). Looking at the edit history, it also appears that there is a good deal of editing going on, so I think this timeframe is reasonable.

Here's the critical issues:

The article still needs a copyedit. I don't mind going over it and fixing up little things again, but when I start making too many of these minor edits, that's indication that there's more wrong with the grammar than I think could be fixed up quickly.

When looking at the government section, I don't think the bold text is really in agreement with the manual of style. With the added bolding there, it makes it look a bit too "listy", and doesn't really flow very well together like an encyclopedia ***article*** should. Plus, bulleted lists should be used sparingly. Multiple subsection headings are also discouraged by the MOS. Subsections should be used only when appropriate.

One suggestion would be to eliminate the subheadings for 'structure' and 'elected officials', and rewrite the section using good introduction to the organization of the government. Then, introduce the individual parts of the government (county council, board of commissioners, etc). Include the list of current elected officials immediately after the paragraphs detailing the organization and purpose of said bodies. This would help to break up the white space a bit, which really distracts the reader from the article.

It would also be good to write a short description of what "township trustees" are and what they do, instead of having the link. Also, according to MOS, links should never be used as headers.

Geography. Could a simplified map of the county be found to add to this section? I see that there's a red-dot map at the beginning of the article, but there's no map of the county, and that would help this section. Just a simple map of the county boundaries and labels of some neighboring cities/counties, as well as maybe some of the major highways/roads that go through would suffice?

Since there's only six "adjacent counties", perhaps that subsection heading could be eliminated and the bulleted list could be replaced with a simple prose "listing", with links, to the nearby counties. You might alternatively consider moving the adjacent county template at the bottom of the article into this section. Again, the general idea here is to reduce that big white empty space that's presently to the right of the bulleted lists.

It might also be good to take the bulleted lists of cities/towns/townships and discuss this using prose as well. A simple bulleted list of all the towns in a county is an easy way to organize the info, sure, and might be good to include in a template at the end of the article (actually, links to towns and townships is already in one of those templates). But I think what the reader is going to be most interested in is the relationship of these towns. Where are they relative to the county? Which ones are the largest? The smallest? Where's the county seat? You could even merge the info in the transportation section into geography and discuss the relationship of these towns in relationship to major roads and railroads (the transportation section isn't specified at WP:COUNTY).

Education. A simple listing of schools in the county is not an education section. It says nothing about the total number of students/teachers in the county. It really doesn't say anything about how the schools are administered (all it says is that there are three school districts). Are the school boards elected by the public or are they selected by the county council of board of commissioners? How do these schools rate against other nearby school districts? Have any schools/teachers in the county received any recognition or awards for distinguished teaching?

Demographics. The demographics section is a minor issue. There's only one citation in the section, and it's not terribly obvious that all four paragraphs are being cited by the US census data. The actual fact here is that several years ago, in the early days of Wikipedia, somebody wrote a bot to compile demographics data for just about every city, county, and town in the US from the Census Bureau, and that bot inserted this information into articles. It's not exactly "brilliant prose", and mostly just randomly written statistics from the census. It would be nice if more demographic information about the population could be found, more than just percentages and numbers. Though some of this goes a little past GA. At the very least, I would think that the citation at the beginning simply be placed at the very end of each of the four paragraphs, to make it clear that all that information is being cited from the US census. The UKY reference for historical populations should also be formatted using an inline citation, instead of an external link.

So those are the main issues with the article, based on information at WP:COUNTY. The article is on hold at WP:GAN while these issues are addressed. Cheers! WTF? (talk) 22:05, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As an addendum, I tried to find current articles about counties that are also current GAs. The only I can find is County Borough of Leeds; though it's not exactly the same as a county in the US. Note from this how the tables and bulleted lists in the article are well mixed with text and prose. It seems to be a reasonably good balance. WTF? (talk) 22:21, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok I think I have got all of this except a county map. I am going to try and find one. I also need to get a few more refs in there now to the areas converted to prose. While I have converted the lists to prose, I have converted the list of towns into a table. I think having the data organized in a table or list format is easier for the reader to understand and compare the towns. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 21:50, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think the article now meets the GA criteria and can be listed. I made a few minor edits to grammar and spelling, and reordered the sections promoting the demographics and economy sections over transportation and education. I still think that a map of the county showing the major roads and townships is nice to have in the geography section, but I won't hold up GA any longer over this. Cheers! WTF? (talk) 20:26, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]