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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by SandyGeorgia 05:54, 13 August 2010 [1].

Brill Tramway

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Brill Tramway (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s):  – iridescent 20:33, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Burning cows! Stately homes! Servant girls screaming in terror as out-of-control locomotives hurtle towards them at 4 mph! Queen Victoria in the bath!

The engineering projects of the 19th century are remembered today for their bricks-and-mortar legacy, but ultimately they were stories of human ambition, ingenuity and failings, and the story of the Brill Tramway is a reflection of its times. The Duke of Buckingham, the last member of a once-great landowning aristocratic family on the verge of bankruptcy, was desperate to restore the family's fortunes, even if it meant embracing emerging technologies he didn't quite understand. Trying to create a viable business, the Duke and his successors entered into deals with the capital-driven corporations, which gave the business a short-term boost but ultimately could do everything more efficiently alone, and eventually destroyed the business the Duke and his successors had spent 60 years building. Extra thanks due to a lot of people on this one, in particular Moni, Redrose64, DavidCane and Jappalang.

A few notes:

  1. Although the MOS standard practice is in general to use names for nobility, in this particular case we're dealing with a family with very silly names: Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos; Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos; Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos; William Temple-Gore-Langton, 4th Earl Temple of Stowe; Algernon William Stephen Temple-Gore-Langton, 5th Earl Temple of Stowe; and Mary Morgan-Grenville, 11th Lady Kinloss. As the names are so similar, and so intrusive when written out in full (as they'd have to be to disambiguate them), I've used "the 3rd Duke" etc throughout.
  2. The lack of technical information is intentional. The article was very long; I've moved as much as possible of the "2-4-0 saddle tank built by Manning Wardle" style technical information to a subpage at Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway.
  3. The big map at the start is wider than most images, as it's important it be legible. Playing around with font size and screen width, I can't find any combination at which it causes any problems.
  4. The three diagrams intentionally have null alt-text, as the captions describe the pertinent point of each image. – iridescent 20:33, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Huh? Ref 1 and ref 3 are both to print books, not websites. The only external links to require subscriptions (to non-UK residents) are the DNB entries, all of which are already labelled as such. – iridescent 20:42, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: images in this article look just fine. There only only two very nit-picky "issues" which should by no means prevent promotion, but, if addressed, would make the images unimpeachable in my mind (i.e. an investment in long-term image stability). Again, these are wholly optional:
    • File:3rd duke governor madras.jpg - The PD-UK-unknown license requires "reasonable enquiry", which is a much stricter threshold than "the source neglected to provide authorship information". A work with a 1875 creation date is of course incredibly unlikely to have an author who has not been dead 70 years, but there exist scenarios that are not entirely outside the range of reason/possibility (e.g. a 25-year-old who lived to ca. 91 years of age) - contrary to, for example, a work from the 1700s which would have no such scenarios. Hosting on en.wiki would resolve the issue.
      • The main reason I'm reluctant to move that across is that it's used on quite a few articles, and while at the moment they're all on en-wiki that may not be the case in future (one of the usages is on a current FA, and FAs tend to get translated quite quickly). It's verifiably published in 1875; as you say, while it's technically possible that a 20-year-old engraver produced it, and then lived into his nineties, it's very unlikely. The Graphic is long, long defunct, so I'm not sure how one would go about tracking down the creator. – iridescent 09:51, 8 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • File:Waddesdon Road railway station.jpg - Approximately 1/4 of the horizontal area could be cropped (e.g. the the pathway on the right and ca. 2 cm of the left) whilst still fully maintaining the necessary depiction of the station, thus better fulfilling minimal extent of use (NFCC#3B). Эlcobbola talk 01:34, 8 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • My feeling is that it's cropped as far as it ought to go. I've cropped it to a point on the right where the down-slope of the end of the platform is still visible. Losing that, it loses the sense of how short the station platform was. I left the path to the left to illustrate the failure of the station to stimulate growth in the area; "there were no buildings in the area" can obviously be written as text, but illustrating the station surrounded by fields makes it clear that it's literal truth, not a figure of speech. The path also includes a human figure, to give a sense of scale. Does anyone else have any opinions on whether it should/shouldn't be cropped further? – iridescent 09:44, 8 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've fixed the one problematic link (which was actually pointing to the wrong page), but with all due respect, what on earth does misformatting in other articles have to do with the FAC-worthiness or otherwise of this one? I'm certainly not going to create redirects for the sake of having redirects; the five alternative names for this line all redirect here, and there's nothing else that should be pointing here. – iridescent 15:03, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]


The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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