Talk:Landscape design

Wiki Education assignment: Practical Research Methodology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 January 2023 and 13 April 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hos321 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Hos321 (talk) 15:12, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Inappropriate content

Hos321: I have repeatedly reverted your insertion of material, and now I will explain why. Software packages do not belong in this article. There is already an article Landscape design software, which is listed in the See also section, so it serves no purpose to list four packages you happen to know about in this article. In any case, the software packages have nothing to do with the heading you use, "Meeting The Client". For these reasons, I have repeatedly removed your repeated insertion of this inappropriate material. Aside from this, the material you have repeatedly inserted does not conform to Wikipedia style standards.

• MOS:HEAD says: "Section headings should generally follow the guidance for article titles (above), and should be presented in sentence case (Funding of UNESCO projects in developing countries), not title case (Funding of UNESCO Projects in Developing Countries)."
• Even in title case, the word "the" is not capitalized, except when it's part of a name, such as The Hague.
• MOS:CONFORM says: "Underlining ... should generally be normalized to plain text."
• Boldface and font sizing markup such as <big>...</big> is not supposed to be used in headings.
• The apostrophe is not used for plurals, except for abbreviations with more than one period, such as Ph.D.'s, and individual letters, such as A's.
• Wiki headings (with equals sign markup) and non-Wiki headings should not be inserted with no content text following.
• The word "software" is a mass noun, not a countable noun, and does not have a plural. Also, it is a common noun, not a proper noun, so it is not capitalized.
• MOS:YOU says: "Avoid addressing the reader using you or your, which sets an inappropriate tone (see also Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Instructional and presumptuous language)."
• Wikipedia:Wikipuffery says: "A more neutral tone and the provision of factual information, cited to a reliable source ... is the appropriate style. Don't tell readers that the subject is great." This is apropos of your "tremendous landscape design features" (emphasis mine).
• MOS:SINCE says: "terms such as now, currently, present, to date, so far, ... should usually be avoided in favor of phrases such as during the 2010s, since 2010, and in August 2020." This is apropos of your "for 20 years now".
• MOS:REFPUNCT says: Refs are placed after adjacent punctuation, not before (apart from the exceptions below) ... Exceptions: Ref tags are placed before dashes, not after. Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.

Before you edit this article again, please comment here. If you edit again and insert content similar to what you have inserted before, without discussing and gaining a consensus for your changes here on this talk page, I will revert. —Anomalocaris (talk) 04:42, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Hos321: Thank you for not reinserting all of the same material, but once again I have to revert you, because your edits are again unhelpful.

• MOS:DOUBLE says: Most quotations take double quotation marks (Bob said: "Jim ate the apple.").[m]
  • click the MOS:DOUBLE link to find the original, where the "m" links to a footnote explaining why reasons why double quotation marks are preferred.
• Bowles & Wyer, not Bowles Wyer, is the actual name of the company, and it is a British company, so why do you repeatedly mark it as U.S. English?
• See above comments on underlining, Boldface and size in headings, apostrophe in plurals, and software as a mass noun. You inserted one line that went against four guidelines I just gave you.
• MOS:BODY says: "Between sections, there should be a single blank line; multiple blank lines in the edit window create too much white space in the article." You inserted five blank lines in one place.
• Image captions that are complete sentences should end with a period. However, the caption you inserted as a sentence without period is not as good as the original. If you want to inform the reader of the architect's nationality, the caption "André Le Nôtre, a French landscape architect (1613–1700)" would be better. The caption is supposed to describe the picture, and the picture is of the architect, so it's best to identify the architect and not provide a sentence. If it must be a sentence, the linking verb should be "was" not "is", as the architect is dead. Per MOS:RANGE, use the en dash (–), not the hyphen (-), to indicate a range, such as the dates 1613–1700.
• WP:REFNAME explains how to use named references, to avoid repeating the same reference. This is the fourth and hopefully last time I will have to undo your reversion of my insertion of named references to avoid repeating a reference.

Please consider these points carefully before you edit this article again. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:49, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Breaking the logic

Hos321: Thank you for editing without introducing the same problems you introduced before. Once again I have to revert you, because your edit has broken the logic of one section. Here is the section before your edit, except I am changing the list to bullet points to clarify that it's a list.

Design factors include objective qualities such as

• climate and microclimates
• topography and orientation, site drainage and groundwater recharge
• municipal and resource building codes
• soils and irrigation; human and vehicular access and circulation
• recreational amenities (i.e., sports and water)
• furnishings and lighting; native plant habitat botany when present
• property safety and security
• construction detailing
• and other measurable considerations.

In your version, you broke up "topography and orientation", adding details about topography and starting a new sentence at "Orientation". But you can't start a new sentence in the middle of a list of nine types of "objective qualities". In your version, everything after the period is disconnected from "objective qualities". I tried to solve it by changing the period to a semicolon and lower-casing "orientation", but that didn't work, because "topography and orientation, site drainage and groundwater recharge" are logically grouped together. You may be on the right track that some of these nine "objective qualities" could be expanded, but it has to be done right. One way might be to leave the existing first paragraph in the Design approach section, and insert after it details about each of the nine objective qualities. That's just an idea, and it might not be the best idea. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:08, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Hos321: I thought you might be on to something this time, and I tried to see if I could just make a few small tweaks to your version of the paragraph that begins "The landscape design phase". Please see MOS:SEMICOLON, which explains one of the uses of semicolon:

Semicolons are used in addition to commas to separate items in a listing, when commas alone would result in confusion.

Confusing: Sales offices are located in Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California, Singapore, and Millbank, London, England. Clear: Sales offices are located in Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; Singapore; and Millbank, London, England.

In my discussion above, I said that there were nine "objective qualities", but I was careless, there are actually eleven, because two of the bullet points each have a semicolon, meaning that two of the bullet points are actually two separate objective qualities. No need to detail that here, they are in plain sight above. The main point is, this article has a long sentence with eleven "objective qualities" separated by semicolons.

The first problem with your version that I tried to solve was your changing "A and B" items to "A, B", which does not work. For example, you changed

human and vehicular access and circulation

to

human, vehicular access and circulation

In the original, we have two "and" phrases spliced together. I'll put in an ellipsis to make that clearer:

human and vehicular ... access and circulation

It's each of one paired with each of the other: human access, human circulation, vehicular access, vehicular circulation. But in your version, there's no way to make sense of it. There are several possible meanings, but none of them make sense:

(1) human (2) vehicular access and circulation ... in this case item 1 doesn't belong here

(1) human (2) vehicular access (3) circulation ... in this case items 1 and 3 don't belong here

(1) human, vehicular access (2) circulation ... in this case item 1 is an illogical item because humans and vehicles are different kinds of things, and neither item belongs here

This is just one the several places where it doesn't work to replace "and" with a comma as you did. I tried changing your commas back to "and", hoping I could save your work. But then I ran into more problems. For example, in the original, there are two items about the flow of groundwater right next to each other: "site drainage and groundwater recharge". In your version, there are three items about the flow of groundwater, interrupted by other ideas: "(accommodating control runoff, movement and views), site drainage, how to design around trees, tree roots, maintaining an existing grade, groundwater recharge". What a mess. runoff, drainage, and recharge need to be together and uninterrupted.

Properly located, "minimizing soil compaction" seems like a good addition, although it could probably be further improved with something like "minimizing and mitigating soil compaction". But it needs to done right. You've comma-spliced it to "irrigation"; at minimum it needs a semicolon.

The existing list was a list of "objective qualities", each of which is an aspect of nature and landscapes, a process, or a field of human knowledge. Your final three items, "interlocking patios, retaining walls and decks" don't fit the pattern. The list involves "drainage", not "channels"; "circulation", not "paths, paving, roads". The three new specific human-made constructions you inserted don't fit the existing pattern.

So it's one big mess, and, sadly, I'm going to revert again. —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:23, 13 April 2023 (UTC)