Wikipedia:Peer review/M-28 (Michigan highway)/archive1

M-28 (Michigan highway)

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I would like to send this over to FAC at a future date and I would like some non-roads editors' opinions.

Thanks, Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from User:GeeJo

Alrighty, non-road-expert eye at your service. Here are my initial thoughts:

Route description: Wow that's an in-depth description. Looking over other road FAs such as Kansas Turnpike, Interstate 355, and New York State Route 174, the norm seems to be four to five paragraphs. This one has twelve.

I think some of the extra length is easily explained. M-28 is 290 miles long. NY 174 is 16.7 miles and I-355 is 32.5 miles. The Kansas Turnpike is comparable in length at 236 miles. Yes, I know the turnpike has a shorter route description, but it also has an exit list in prose format which also expands upon the route description. A lot of the information that could be included in the turnpike article is also in separate articles on the constituent highway designations of Interstate 35 in Kansas and so on. M-28's junction list is a table, and it's one single highway designation from end to end except the portion concurrent with US 41. If you have further suggestions on any pruning, I'd be welcome to hear them. Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Route description: M-28 is referred to by name seven times in the first few lines, and it doesn't get much better looking farther down. Replacing some of the "M-28"s with descriptors ("the highway", etc) might improve the flow a bit.

A round of commenting in M-28's A-Class review over at WP:USRD was on grammatical structure. That reviewer wanted a stricter usage of language that shied away from pronouns and other substitutes. Your suggestion to replace some of the direct mentions of the highway's name is a welcome comment to me since I wasn't fond of some of the sentence structure that resulted in attempting to satisfy the reveiwer's comments. Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Route description: There are several instances of too much detail on the areas that the road is passing. Do we need to know who owns a particular sculpture which lacks its own article? Why is the Seney National Wildlife Refuge singled out for a subsection, which then only mentions the road itself in passing?

The Seney Wildlife Refuge and the Seney Stretch in general are major landmarks in the middle of the Upper Peninsula along the highway. I tried to summarize from the SNWR article as best as I could to include information on it without putting in too much information. As for Lakenenland, it's a recent development/park that's quite unique. I admit the unique character of the place needs a photo to show it better, but too often in GAs and other reviews editors have commented that route descriptions only give a turn-by-turn description of the highway without any information on the local scenery. My aim was to try to satisfy this often-repeated desire. Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seney stretch: "though others claim it's 50 miles (80 km), only because it seems longer."[17] - relevance?

Well, without putting in OR here... I've traveled this highway hundreds of times. There's a sense of dread I experience when coming up to one of the ends of the Stretch since the next 25 miles are the perfect example of where cruise control for speed and steering could be useful. There are many blogs and other personal accounts of just how boring this section of highway is. That quotation is the best I've found from a reliable source to help illustrate this concept. Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

History: Very dense, without much explanation as to why these changes were made or of their importance. Why was the M-28 formed? Why was it extended? Why was Gogebic CR 519 turned back to the county? etc.

Unfortunately most of those changes aren't well documented outside of MDOT archives. I honestly can't expect too many of the available documents to state why a change was made, since most of them, if I request them under the Freedom of Information Act and pay for the researcher to find them, are likely to be the raw changes of jurisdiction over various road sections (like CR 519 being transferred to and from the state). Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Future: Lots of very short paragraphs. Consolidate or expand them.

I'll take a look through this and see what I can do. Imzadi1979 (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Overall: There's a lot of data in this article, for which the author(s) are to be commended. It does fall down somewhat on readability though. You may wish to contact someone more experienced in copy editing to try to prosify some of the denser sections. GeeJo ^(t)⁄_(c) • 18:18, 20 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I did place a request at the League of Copy Editors after the ACR closed, but nothing's come of that yet.