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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 not promoted by Karanacs 02:42, 4 September 2010 [1].

University of Texas at Dallas

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University of Texas at Dallas (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): Oldag07 (talk), Stan9999

I am nominating this for featured article because it has gone through enormous improvements over the last several months, and all concerns from past peer reviews have been met. Oldag07 (talk) 22:50, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment - While it is a good start, I think this nomination is premature. The last peer reviewer promoted this article to C-class just four days ago and recommended GAN as the next step. I have to agree. I share the reviewer's concerns about the lead and overall quality of prose. But my primary concern is the very heavy reliance on school websites as sources. Surely reliable third-party sources could be found for more of this article. I would kindly suggest withdrawal, more work on referencing and prose, and a pass through GA before relisting here. --Nasty Housecat (talk) 18:23, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good points all around. The reliance university articles have on university websites seems to be a common concern. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that this is a very young school with only a division 3 athletics program. I would appreciate more opinions on this page before closing this nomination. Thanks Oldag07 (talk) 22:38, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments -
  • UT or University of Texas? Better to use the second, and be consistent.
  • See comments on "idiosyncratic capitalization of the definite article" below. It is very common to call this school "UTD". Less so "UT Dallas", but it is still pretty common. There is a need for consistency, but there is also a need to use different names for the same thing over and over. At a glance, "UT" is used just as much as "OSU" is used in Ohio State University and "UT" is used for the University of Texas at Dallas. Oldag07 (talk) 13:43, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Cecil and Ida Green ref (current ref 9) is actually a book, so should be formatted as such.
  • What is ALTA? UTIMCO? ASCE? CSISS? Please spell out abbreviations used in the references.
  • Newspapers titles in the references should be in italics. If you're using {{cite news}}, use the work field for the title of the paper, and the publisher field for the name of the actual company that publishes the paper. You also need to be consistent in this... you've got some instances of Bloomberg Business Week italicized and most not.
  • You cannot say to see another wikipedia article for references, you need them here in this article. (Current ref 35)
  • Current ref 47 (Kiplinger Top 100) is borked somehow.
  • Current ref 104 (Construction goes up) lacks a publisher
  • A concern is that large chunks of this are referenced to either sources from UT Dallas itself of to the websites of the particular organizations/companies that are being described. This is primary sourcing, not secondary sourcing, and surely there are published works on this that can be consulted. If nothing else, the various university sites aren't going to cover any controversies that might have arrisen.
  • I noted there are around 40 outside sources referenced . UTD doesn't have the extensive rich history as some of the older universities, major long standing sports programs, extensive list of notable people and has only been admitting freshmen for 20 years. Due to the short period of existence outside published works are hard to come by.Stan9999 (talk) 19:21, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:59, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
∗∗∗

A couple of notes:

  • I figured I’d link to the astronaut guy’s article in the photo caption lest readers assume he’s utterly non-notable.
  • Cleaned up some really weird table markup, but then I consider HTML Tidy more a safety-net than a hammock. Unpopular view, I know.
  • We sure don’t need a dozen section links to the same article.
  • I’m not sure whether we should respect their idiosyncratic capitalization of the definite article.
    • There was a big debate (two sections) on this page on that issue. The compromise was to respect the university's naming conventions throughout the article. However, we would keep the "The" out of the title of the wikipedia article. Still more input on that debate would be appreciated. Oldag07 (talk) 13:43, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Article teems with glowing praise. Nothing about crime on campus [5] [6] [7], budget cut protests [8], etc. You know, something to re-assure readers this isn’t a paid advertisement.
    • Agree with the statement. However, note that the budget cut protests occurred at the University of Texas at Austin, quite a different place. Admittedly it did say that the costs were higher at UTD. I am not sure if the crime rate notably high on campus. None of the university FA's I have read, mention those stats. Still, I will look for more stuff to try to give the page a more NPOV. Oldag07 (talk) 13:43, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Waterview attracted a certain amount of controversy, being dubbed "the Dorm from Hell" in an April 2005 article in the Dallas Observer" was noted. I am unable to find anything else like that.Stan9999 (talk) 18:13, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Student demographic table is flawed in that it uses mutually non-exclusive terms. Also, I’m sure you mean “Anglo” as a euphemism for White American of any ancestry but that’s a misnomer many would find offensive.
  • {{Reflist|group=Note}} was empty, so I removed the section containing it. You’ll want to re-insert it if you plan to use that ref group.
  • ==External links==, when present, are always the last section.

―cobaltcigs 08:12, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I meant the section called “==External links==” which I moved to the end but which previously was positioned much higher. ―cobaltcigs 19:58, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose—Poorly written.
  1. I am inclined not to go along with some pretentious insistence by a university, and even more by a "system", on the upper-case "The". This has come up before at the MoS. I see there's no "The" sticking out in "the Graduate Research Centre", etc.
  2. "With a number of interdisciplinary degree programs and over 50 research centers and institutes its curriculum is designed to allow study that crosses traditional disciplinary lines and students participate in collaborative research labs." This is a clumsy and over-long sentence. "More than" would be nice. A comma after "institutes" to avoid the jostling of two nouns in a longish sentence. The last clause doesn't flow from the previous clauses.
  3. Where there's more than one "and" in a sentence, and one is ranked more highly in a structural sense, a comma after it would be good: activity", and the
  4. "High research activity" is pretty awful out of context, anyway ... is it cloud research? Better a "high" level of research activity.
  1. Comma after "commencement" and after "alumni".
  2. Remove "located".
  3. "acres" is an epithet qualifying "industrial park", not a noun itself, and should be singular. Remove "located" again.
  4. Bad sentence: "Almost 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m2) of new facilities have been added from 2007 to the summer of 2010 with another 280,000-square-foot (26,000 m2) planned to be completed by 2012." No hyphens. Here, "feet" is the noun, so plural. "planned for completion".

On this basis, the whole article need urgent attention by unfamiliar copy-editors. Tony (talk) 01:28, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actively search for them: creates linkages with others who can be future collaborators. Try looking through the edit-summaries of the history pages of similar FAs and GAs to identify the word people. Tony (talk) 04:39, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments – Some quickies on the Athletics section:

  • Before ASC is used as an abbreviation, there should be a definition provided after the initial use of the full American Southwest Conference. Putting the abbreviated version in parentheses immediately afterward is the most common way of doing this.
  • "Baseball and softball also made its third consecutive appearance in the ASC post-season tournament." Doesn't work well because baseball and softball are two different sports; therefore this should be "their third consecutive appearances...".
  • Remove space before references 117 and 118.
  • "before falling in an OT loss." In this case, I think general readers will understand this better with "overtime" instead of OT.
  • Intramural sports: The first sentence of this sub-section could use a capitalization check, as there are some words that probably don't need the capital letters. Giants2008 (27 and counting) 02:13, 4 September 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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