Talk:Texas oil boom/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Dana boomer (talk) 03:29, 18 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I will be reviewing this article for GA status, and should have the full review up shortly. Dana boomer (talk) 03:29, 18 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for criteria)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS):
The lead especially has an overabundance of "boom" and "boom era". While I realize that the article being about a boom makes it hard to write without referring to that term, it makes for rather repetitive reading. The last two sentences of the third paragraph, for instance, contain the word boom three times.

There are a lot of short paragraphs in the article, which make the article choppy and harder to read. Some of these should be combined if possible.

I believe the article is overlinked, with multiple linkings to the same term/place throughout the article, and basic things such as state in the lead and well-known countries in the Mechanization section being linked. Although it's not a big deal, I would have a prose/MOS guru, such as User:Tony1, take a look at it if you plan to take the article to FAC.

The information on Houston being the city that the Depression forgot is repeated in the Economy and Urban Development sections.

Just for future knowledge, when you write something like "In 1917, xzy happened..." there should be a comma after the date. I fixed the ones I saw, but may not have caught all of them.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
~~In references such as #4, the title should be decapitalized, even if it is capitalized in the original source.~~

A couple of web refs, such as #64, need access dates.

So the policy has been modified but does not actually say this. Are we interpreting the requirement now to say that access dates are necessarily for all web sites? --Mcorazao (talk) 15:31, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
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):
File:102 329 nobel oilwells.jpg says "Please decide for yourself if it is fair use or not". It includes a Russian PD template, which I believe to be correct, but this sentence should probably be checked and removed.

The image in the Environment section has the caption "False-color satellite photograph of Galveston Bay, courtesy of NASA". From what I can see, this is a USGS photo, not a NASA one.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:

From my initial sweep, this looks like a nice article. So far, I've gone through references and images. I'm stopping here for the night, and will be back tomorrow evening to finish up the prose review and others parts and pieces. Please feel free to start on these comments, or to wait until I've finished the full review. Please let me know if you have any questions! Dana boomer (talk) 03:48, 18 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I apologize for not getting back to this sooner. RL got a little crazy... In reply to the image question that you left on my talk page, I'm really not sure. I'm really not the person to ask on complicated copyright matters - I can usually spot a bad copyright, but I'm not that great at figuring out how to turn it into a good one. I would suggest asking User:Awadewit or User:NuclearWarfare for advice on the image. Prose comments in a bit. Dana boomer (talk) 23:31, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The full prose review is now above. Once those issues are taken care of, as well as the one remaining reference issue and the image things, this article should be good to go for GA status. Thanks for being patient with me! Dana boomer (talk) 00:45, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone through the article and hopefully fixed the things you requested. I am still looking at the Azerbaijan oil wells images to try to figure out what to do (I'll probably end up stripping the image). --Mcorazao (talk) 15:31, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Things are looking really good. The main thing with the access dates is that they allow reviewers/other editors to see when the article was last accessed, which makes it easier to fix broken links through internet archive sites. They also allow editors to quickly identify possibly dated information in articles - for example, if an article says "today, the population of smith city is 5,000", but the accessdate is from 2005, it raises a red flag that the stats may need to be updated. Anyways, the access dates in this article look good now - I tweaked a couple that were using the wrong parameter and not showing up. The Handbook of Texas template is odd, using a retrieved= parameter instead of an accessdate= one like most other templates do. Anyways, the only thing left with this article is the Russian image, so when that is dealt with, the article can be passed. Dana boomer (talk) 20:34, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I still can't figure out how to establish the image's status. I actually tried to pull some other images from this period from other articles but they are also problematic. So for the time being I am just removing the image for lack of a better alternative. --Mcorazao (talk) 05:03, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, with that gone, the article is good to go for GA status. Nice work! I hope that Awadewit is able to help you establish free-use licensing on the image, it's a nice one. Dana boomer (talk) 15:44, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]