Talk:Southern Railway Spencer Shops

Southern Railway Spencer Shops was one of the Engineering and technology good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
May 6, 2020	Good article nominee	Listed
October 27, 2022	Good article reassessment	Delisted

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on May 9, 2008.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the land acquisitions for the Southern Railway's Spencer Shops in 1896 were secretly done to prevent land speculation?

Current status: Delisted good article

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GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Southern Railway's Spencer Shops/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Kingsif (talk · contribs) 00:10, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I'm Kingsif, and I'll be doing this review. This is an automated message that helps keep the bot updating the nominated article's talkpage working and allows me to say hi. Feel free to reach out and, if you think the review has gone well, I have some open GA nominations that you could (but are under no obligation to) look at. Kingsif (talk) 00:10, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV ()

3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant ()

Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Images and infobox look good.

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 09:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lead way too long at about a third of the article

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:46, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ignoring the website that took this text from here,

copyvio check is clear

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:11, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

However, at least four sentences aren't cited inline, and some of the refs seem to cover whole paragraphs, so I don't know if OR might be a problem - if there's a source for everything, can inline citations be added?

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:06, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've actually removed some of this, it was unnecessary over-explaining of the text before.

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:20, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

These two "back shops" service centers could not handle this extensive service need.[2] These facilities were "antiquated and poorly equipped and not sufficient for their purposes," Samuel Spencer said. could be made a bit clearer. Also, redundant use of 'these'.
Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 09:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Secret negotiations, building at a new location" is not a good nor standard header

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 09:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Spencer Shops had a small army of thousands of workers. There were skilled workers as well as engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors. Many of these settled down in the area and the town of Spencer was formed. sounds like a story opening - could it be tweaked to have a more encyclopedic tone?

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:20, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

At some point in the article body it should have a wikilink to whichever Shop is most appropriate - workshop or machinery?

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:09, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Made some edits for style, rest of prose looks fine

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:09, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Overall

on hold Few things. Kingsif (talk) 00:49, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Kingsif: All issues have been addressed. Can you take another look now. Thanks. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:11, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed headers. Ref format could be standardized, but seems good enough to pass. Kingsif (talk) 14:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

GA Reassessment

Southern Railway's Spencer Shops

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Unfortunate, but looks unavoidable at this point. Hog Farm _Talk 15:40, 27 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This article is laughably incomplete. The Spencer Shops were in operation from 1896 to at least the 1960s. The article, however, abruptly ends at when the shops first opened and dedicates not a single sentence to their 60+ years of operations. This is ridiculously far from meeting the GA requirement for broad coverage of the subject, and should be delisted unless it is massively expanded from what it is now. The primary source used for this article, [1], gives no indication is is a reliable source, and I have noticed several instances of close paraphrasing of the source in this article's prose. This article should be delisted, it needs to be completely rewritten and massively expanded before we can say it meets the GA criteria. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:19, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Imagine if Cedar Hill Yard (my own FA, but I've picked it as it's one of the two existing FAs on a railroad facility, the other being Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works) ended after the "The yard is expanded, 1917 to 1920" section. See how much more material would be missing? I hope that gives an idea of the extent to which this article is incomplete and does not give its subject an encyclopedic treatment, or even come close to doing so. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:27, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

With regard to the main web source being used, I found the site index which notes; "Copyright © 2007 GoRowan.com All rights reserved and protected. DanTana Enterprises, LTD. Rowan County Information OnLine ® ... We are not the EDC or the Chamber or the Visitor Center. We are better and do it for free!!" This is actually discouraging, because if it was the old website of the county chamber of commerce or an official visitor/tourism center I'd lean towards reliable. This indicates this is a private project. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:32, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Addendum: I have added some information information on the shops' later history. Not enough, but it's a start. I've also found the Arcadia book had a different opening date for the shops than the web source, which is not encouraging. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:43, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delist The page is lacking the detail required from a GA. There are plenty of book based sources that can be used to build it back up again. Gusfriend (talk) 21:44, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. I agree with TAOT that "this article is laughably incomplete", but for a much different reason. This property is on the National Register of Historic Places, yet there is no description of either the complex's architecture or the layout of its component buildings. I don't think we need an example to see how absurd this is, but I would expect, at the very minimum, a paragraph on the architecture/layout of the shops. This alone should have been a quick fail under WP:GACR criterion 3a, not to mention the sourcing and close paraphrasing issues mentioned above. – Epicgenius (talk) 22:10, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Possible copyright problem

This article has been revised as part of a large-scale clean-up project of multiple article copyright infringement. (See the investigation subpage) Earlier text must not be restored, unless it can be verified to be free of infringement. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions must be deleted. Contributors may use sources as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 02:35, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]