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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5

GA nomination

The stability criterion may be an issue. Most of the recent changes were made to 1) cite what was here, and 2) split off daughter articles (which GA criteria seem to say is ok). Thank you. -Susanlesch 17:44, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

GA review

This article is very well written, well referenced, and well organized. It appears to be very completed. A quick glance at the article's history doesn't show any major edit/revert wars recently, so I don't think that stability is an issue. I made a few minor changes, like moving see also links to the bottom of sections -- the government section was kind of awkward with several of these in the middle of the content, so I moved that to the end. I also changed 'notes' to 'references', since a section containing a list of all inline citations is definitely references; 'references' to 'further reading', since these are books and sources that readers would go to for additional information on the topic, but are not directly cited by the article.

The organization of the article seems to make sense. I was a bit confused when I saw 'religion, charity, and health' in the table of contents, but reading the section, all three of those seemed to fit well into that section, since it's related. You might consider moving this section a bit closer to 'demographics', possibly including it as a subsection at the end of demographics, since that could be somewhat connected.

'Law & government' and 'education' can probably be demoted a bit in the priority list (order); many city articles I see today have these closer to the end, as with 'transportation'.

You might want to combine the 'arts & media' section with 'sports', 'in popular culture', and 'list of annual events' into a single 'culture' section, as many of these are related as cultural attractions. It would be good to write out the 'annual events' section as prose, instead of a list, but a list near the end is ok, I guess.

The 'famous minneapolitans' section is somewhat under-referenced, and needs additional citations. But overall, the article is very well-cited, and I don't see a reason why lack of citations in one minor section at the very end should hold up GA status.

A 'see also' section near the end with links to related articles might be a good idea as well. I also noticed the lack of a 'Sister Cities section at the end. This section is for listing cities with connected relationships on an international level, and most city articles seem to include this information; though it's minor, and it should be located near the end of the article.

But overall, this article is a great example of a GA! Keep up the good work! FA status should not be far away! Dr. Cash 17:47, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Dr. Cash, thank you so much for your review. Nice move to say seealso last. I may have more comments later but here are a couple.
First, and this is for Ravedave too, I think permanent consulates and honoray consuls, which are listed by name in Law and government are as or more notable than Sister cities which are now in three places (Law and government, a new Sister cities section in the main article, and the daughter article Law and government). Are sister cities really more significant than consulates? I think sister cities should be in the daughter article.
Also the references section has been fixed to explain the abbreviations. Yes I see why it was hard to figure out before! It now is closer to one of the Chicago Manual of Style models for repetitive citations.
I will ask for a peer review today to see if we can learn more. Thank you again! -Susanlesch 20:26, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
I have copied the new international connection flags to the "Consulates and sister cities" section of Law and government of Minneapolis, Minnesota for now and simplified the text in "Law and government". Maybe a candidate for a separate daughter article International connections to Minneapolis, Minnesota (or?) that would put them in the Template:Minneapolis, Minnesota on every related page? Here are examples from FAs: List of Seattle sister cities, Sister cities of San Francisco, California, Sister cities of Boston, Massachusetts (two or three featured article cities do list them with flags). -Susanlesch 22:06, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
  • The WikiProject Cities discussion of sister cities received a vote in favor so I am thinking about restoring them and asking for the list to be deleted for now. Sorry to waver on this and for not noticing the opinion from 14 March before I made the list (the older discussion indicated they are low priority, the newer comment places more importance on them). -Susanlesch 17:41, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

FA suggestions - Sports

I went through and give the sports section a good workover. There are a couple sentences I didn't know what to do with though, I think it would help the FA drive if these two things could be addressed:

First playing in 1884, the Minneapolis Millers baseball team produced the best won-lost record in the minor leagues and fifteen players who were later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

1. "produced the best won-lost record in the minor leagues" ... Best record ever in the minor leagues? Over a period of time? A specific year? What was the record?
2. "fifteen players who were later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame" ... For this sentence, I would suggest proving a reference, or list out at least a few of the players.


Gifted amateur athletes have played organized sports notably starting in the 1920s and 1930s at Central and Marshall high schools as well as De La Salle.

I think this statement definitely needs an example or three. Gopher backer 05:29, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi Gopher backer. Good catch. The Millers record was probably in their league, and at the time. Will fix. Would you like to add a sentence about the two or three most important athletes overall in Minneapolis sports of all kinds and eras? Can you think of a related article where the two new Metrodome paragraphs might go eventually? As written they put 28% of the Sports section on the dome. I can offer to try to concentrate your thoughts into a sentence or two. Would that help? -Susanlesch 10:52, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I did some searching, and I could only find one really prominent sports figure that grew up in Minneapolis during that era, John Kundla. A lot of other figures associated with Minneapolis (like several Gopher football players or the Miller baseball players) didn't actually grow up in the city, rather they came here to play. I think I'll just remove that line and if someone can improve it later go ahead and add it back. Gopher backer 01:51, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Oh, and yeah, go ahead and do what you want with the Metrodome article. Gopher backer 01:54, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Hello, Gopher backer. Corrections welcome. The Sports section order was pro-amateur-dome-pro(table), now switched to amateur-dome-pro-pro(table). Does that work? The other way I can understand--and there are sure to be more ways--is pro(table)-pro-dome-amateur. The dome is still there for the most part, just condensed a tad and with no heading. Do you or anyone prefer one of these Gopher photos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? The casual one with the cheerleaders is cool but those five also have free licenses on Flickr (and can be cropped). -Susanlesch 12:39, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I think the sports section looks okay, except for two suggestions: I think the metrodome paragraph would go better at the bottom, especially since things are talked about in that paragraph that don't have to do about sports. I think that when something starts to stray slightly off topic like that, it becomes a little akward to to go from menting community events at the dome back into sports. Does that make sense? The other thing would be to stagger the images in the sport section instead of stacking them. Gopher backer 03:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Yes, both good ideas. Done. Maybe someday there will be a lighter image of the marathon (it's really cute but dark). The stagger looks good and yes dome at the end makes sense. -Susanlesch 14:02, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Cities that are FA

Just to give a picture of what other American City FAs look like: Cleveland, Ohio - San Francisco, California - Detroit, Michigan - Marshall, Texas - Boston, Massachusetts - Ann Arbor, Michigan - San Jose, California - Seattle, Washington -Ravedave 18:10, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

References

The references section needs work. The top cite section should probably be folded into each ref. Encyclopedia Britannica should not be used. References like this should probably be skipped [1] (#20). It looks like that page sites other material so it would be best to cut out the middle man. Which PDF provides the information for ref #21? It's a link to a page with many links. There should be at least one, if not several "history of Minneapolis" type book references. I would highly recommend stopping by a library and just grabbing all the mlps books you can find. I did that for Minnesota and it not only provided references but it also gave me some good places to improve the article. It really is the quality of references, not the quantity that counts. I would do it again but my little one has really put a crunch on my wiki time.-Ravedave 04:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Hi, Ravedave. You are of course most welcome to add more references and citations. Alas, I have no training in meteorology (do you?), but would note Charles Fisk does. His weather records (your #20) take the unique situation in the Twin Cities into account including a very early weather station and Fort Snelling, and add decades of valuable years to the annual mean. If you are concerned about middle men, take a look at aggregators and analysts who play telephone (the can and string game) with NOAA records (the records the U.S. Census uses) which go back only to 1971 and forward to 2000. If retrieved carefully, NOAA is highly useful for comparison with other U.S. cities who had no early weather station and thus no data. Fisk is more interesting if you are for example interested in long term trends. May I suggest continuing this conversation on Climate of Minneapolis, Minnesota? Fisk and an "Unreferenced since March 2007" flag were added to a 99% uncited article last week. You are most welcome to add NOAA both here and there, of course. Hmm, Encyclopedia Britannica is a Wikipedia secondary source per Types or source material. No? I agree more books will help improve the article over time. Incidentally, I added one yesterday, a textbook used in U.S. colleges. You may have seen the explicit request for a book reference in the To Do list for this article? -Susanlesch 05:00, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Stability comment removed

I've removed the following HTML comment from this article: "This article is nearly stable. Please consider adding to child articles instead. Remember that uncited additions may be reverted."

It seems to me like this kind of goes against the whole wiki concept where 'anyone can edit'. If anonymous users are vandalising the page, it would be better to seek an administrator's help and request semiprotect. If people are adding material, as long as it is in good faith, that is fine. If it's uncited, it's better to find a reference than simply revert it -- if someone adds something that is uncited to a GA, one or two of these is not going to immediately jeopardize that status -- just find a reference, or ask the person that added the info to cite their sources, referring them to WP:CITE or WP:V.

The one place where some type of comment like this might be acceptable is the external links section, as these sections commonly are targeted by linkspammers. You might wish to add a comment similar to the one that's on the Google article here. Dr. Cash 19:45, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

  • No problem, I thought they might help because the article had no references until recently. Or rather, in January it had six citations. But then someone else above here is concerned about reference quality. And somewhere else asked if this article could be FA in a week. End rant. You can't please everybody. -Susanlesch 01:29, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
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