Wikipedia:Peer review/List of longest streams of Oregon/archive1

List of longest streams of Oregon

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{{subst:PR/archive} I've listed this article for peer review because Little Mountain 5 and I are planning to nominate it at FLC, and we want to be sure it is ready. Kmusser and Pfly kindly tracked down information from GIS datasets to fill in all of the blanks Little Mountain and I could not fill with data from other reliable sources. We have most of the data for an expanded list that includes all of the Oregon streams of 40 to 50 miles (64 to 80 km), but to keep from making the main list unwieldy, we moved these "shorties" to the article's talk page. Two questions: (1) Is the main list OK, or does it need further improvement? (2) What, if anything, should we do with the "shorties"?

Thanks, Finetooth (talk) 16:03, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by H1nkles

I don't have a lot of time to do a full review at this point, I will hopefully return in a couple of days when I can give this some proper attention. But I did want to make a few comments:

There are a couple of prose tweaks that I would suggest for the lead including:

Remove the last sentence as redundant. You've already stated that the list is for the longest streams of 50 miles or longer, and that they flow in whole or in part through Oregon, no need to restate it.
Why did you add, "in the case of the Snake River"? You don't specify what rivers flow through the other states, it seems a bit inconsistent to do it for Wyoming.
Is it necessary to have a hard space between 31 and rivers?

But that really wasn't your question in bringing the list to PR. Rather you want to know about the list itself (amazing, very high quality, a lot of work done for sure), and what to do with the "shorties".
What to do with the "shorties"? Here's my thought:

Rename the list "List of major rivers of Oregon". Then that leaves open the possibility of doing a list of "minor streams" consisting of all streams less than 50 miles in length.
Also why do you use "streams" in the title rather than "rivers". To me anyway, a stream is a small river. So it causes disonance for me to read that the Columbia is a stream. To use an extreme example it's like saying the Mississippi stream or the Amazon stream. Just doesn't sound right to me. Again a personal choice I suppose. I see there is a discussion about this on the discussion page so if this has been hashed out already then please ignore.
I would say though that using Major instead of Longest could help categorize the streams a bit. Those are my two cents. H1nkles (talk) _{citius altius fortius} 00:03, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for your helpful suggestions. We'll be considering each of these carefully over the coming days. We look forward to any other thoughts you might have. Finetooth (talk) 20:21, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: This looks amazing; I know how much work has gone into it - thanks to everyone. I noticed that it has really been fleshed out since my previous talk page comments. I have some nitpicky points, but I think this should do well at FLC. Here are my suggestions for improvement.

I agree with H1nkles on the last sentence being somewhat redundant. Not sure if it would need to be rewritten or just removed.
As for the Snake and Wyoming, since it is the second longest river in the list and more than three times as long as the third longest river, I think it is fine to mention it in the lead. Perhaps specifying that it is the second longest and only other one over 1000 miles in the lead would help? I also assume it is the only river to also flow in Wyoming?
As for renaming the list and using the generic word "streams", I am fine with streams and know this has been discussed before. I worry if rivers were used in the title, people would then try to exclude the creeks. If "major" is used (either as "major rivers" or "major streams"), I am afraid that it might lead to confusion as to the inclusion criteria - the lead already discusses that some rivers / streams which are major in terms of flow rate are not included here. My guess is that if the list were by basin size, there might be some different major streams as well. I think the current title makes it clearer what the criterion for selection (length) is.
Having said that, it also seems to me that this is a model for many other similar articles and I wonder if it might help to ask on the WikiProject Rivers talk page about the title - use of streams vs rivers or perhaps rivers and creeks, and on use of major vs longest. I do note that many of the most active participants there have already helped out here.
As for including the streams longer than 40 miles, this is another place where the article will serve as a model and input from the Rivers WikiProject may be useful. I am not sure if the list of shorties on the talk page is complete or not. There are only 11 on it now, so that does not seem too bad to add here, but my guess is that there might be many more. Adding 11 more would bring this list to 87 members. I think the specific question here is at what point does the list get too big - on my monitor it loads fairly quickly, but the last 14 streams do not display the globe symbol next to their coordinates, presumably because of the size of the list. I also note that 50 miles (80 km) is nice as it is a round number in both English and metric units. 40 miles and 64 km is not quite as nice.
As for including all streams less than 50 miles in length in their own list, I know Pennsylvania has 571 streams with a watershed area greater than 25 square miles (65 km²), so I think it would be unwieldy to go much lower than 30 or 40 miles in length (as Oregon is over twice as large in area). I do think H1nkles raises a good point - what would a list of intermediate length streams be named?
Now to specific points in the article itself. I like all of the images in the article, but it seems a bit odd to have two of the Rogue River and none of the Columbia or perhaps the Snake (which are the longest by far in the list). I am not sure if you'd want to have a second gallery at the bottom, with four more images? I also miss the Willamette panorama.
I would mention the intermittent streams in the lead as they are decribed as such in the list. Probably best in the second paragraph, which talks about flow rates already.
Would setting the "such as" phrase off with commas help make this clearer (or is that violating a grammatical rule)? One set of streams[,] such as the Nehalem River[,] flows directly into the Pacific Ocean or into larger streams flowing directly to the Pacific... There is at least one other occurrence of this construction in the lead.
Are the two GIS datasets both nationally produced? If so, should this be mentioned (I think federal government work is at least more consistent and may be more accurate than general books)
Probably want to make sure the remarks are formulated consistently - I noticed both Source in the Strawberry Range and Source in Strawberry Range, for example. Mostly seems to be whether or not to include "the" before mountains or ranges,
I know some of the basin areas were arrived at by summing the areas of subbasins. I wonder if at least the names of the basins that were summed should be noted somewhere, perhaps on a subpage (Chemistry articles sometimes have a sources / data subpage). My thought was that it would then be clearer how the area was arrived at in each case (allow for checking more easily) AND it would allow editors working on articles on the subbasins to find those areas more easily. Just an idea and may be too much work.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article (or 600 ;-) ) at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 05:25, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the kind words and comments. These suggestions are very helpful, and we will be considering each of them carefully over the coming days. Finetooth (talk) 20:21, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]