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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Brill railway station/archive1

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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 Karanacs 19:37, 25 May 2010 [1].

Brill railway station edit

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

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Nominator(s):  – iridescent 17:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trains that travelled slower than walking pace, a London Underground station that was neither in London nor underground, and the return of the Man With The Second Longest Proper Name On Wikipedia; another chapter of the "if you build it, nobody will come" saga of well-intentioned incompetence in rural Buckinghamshire that was the Brill Tramway.

I'm aware that the map in the article stretches WP:MOSIMAGE to breaking point (currently displaying at 541px high, when the MOS recommends a maximum 500px height), but I think this is a legitimate invocation of IAR. Even at extreme monitor sizes, it doesn't actually disrupt any text or cause the following image to cascade. Any narrower, and the significant point—the railway line running the length of the map—will be lost against the background; using {{tall image}} to give it a scrollbar will look unsightly (and render the article unprintable) for no real gain; flipping it 90° and having it horizontal across the screen will make the detailed text and labelling which is visible on it when zoomed-in unreadable. As the key point of interest as regards this particular station was its geographic isolation at the end of a snaking branch line 40+ miles from the rest of the London Underground network, I do feel that the map substantially adds to the article and thus am very reluctant to remove it. – iridescent 17:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment—no dab links or external links. Ucucha 18:02, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

File:Brill_station.jpg, where did this picture originate, I'm guessing it wasn't first published in 2005 Fasach Nua (talk) 14:48, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Guess what you want, but to the best of my knowledge, it's not been published other than in Simpson's 2005 book—it doesn't appear in any other work on the line that I've seen. As with all this series, the copyright status is ambiguous; London Transport was (and is) 100% government-owned but has never been formally nationalised, and to the best of my knowledge there's never been a definitive ruling as to whether Crown Copyright (which would make this picture PD due to age) applies. Given the short period (1933–35) in which the station existed in its tube station configuration, there are very few photographs of it. – iridescent 09:34, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Mostly well-written (I made some changes) and though I don't know anything about the subject, I believe the article covers the station comprehensively. Just two small points:
    • "Cheaply built and ungraded and using poor quality locomotives, services on the line were very slow,"—dangling modifier
    • "owing to the town's hilltop setting the station was 3⁄4 of a mile (1.2 km) from Brill itself"—this fact appears twice in the body of the article
  • Ucucha 17:23, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • If you can think of a way to reword that "cheaply built…" sentence, do feel free. It's a tricky one to write as it needs to be precise; it had an ownership structure in which one company owned the line but another leased the right to run services. (It's an absolutely standard practice in Britain, and the business model still in use today, in which train companies buy "franchises" to run services on a particular line for a set period.) It means the usual formulation ("the line's services…") won't be accurate, hence that clunky wording.
    • I know that "3/4 of a mile" appears three times (once in the lead and twice in the body) but can't see an obvious way around it unless someone can think of one. It needs to be in the early section on planning the route as it's such an important factor in the route; it also really needs to be in the section on passenger traffic to explain why passenger numbers were so low. The second occurrence could be replaced with a vague "some distance" or "about 20 minutes walk" to avoid repetition if you think it's a problem. – iridescent 19:52, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Further to that last – have reworded in a way which removes one of the "3/4"s without (hopefully) being confusing or losing anything. – iridescent 20:05, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • Thanks, that looks good. I rewrote the sentence in a way that hopefully preserves the meaning while being grammatically correct. Ucucha 20:57, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I couldn't see anything other than Ucucha's points, so supporting on the understanding they will be fixed Jimfbleak - talk to me? 18:33, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sources: all sources look OK, no issues here. Brianboulton (talk) 00:16, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: People like myself with the Protanopia form of colour blindness, see red as being significantly darker, and have a lot of difficulty distinguishing red from black when on a pale background. I strongly suggest that you change the red bar on the map of the underground limits with a different colour - perhaps blue - that would be more widely visible. Bluap (talk) 02:52, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

✓ Done, although I'm not sure it's actually an issue in this case, as it's obvious from context which bar is which and the diagram would work just as well in black-and-white. – iridescent 08:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments. Just a few, nothing too serious:
Lead
  • We're told twice in the lead that the station was one of the two north-western termini of the London Underground.
    • No—we have it becoming a northwestern terminus of the Metropolitan Railway in 1899, and then a northwestern terminus of the London Underground after the LU absorbed the MR in 1933. I think that's significant enough that it warrants mentioning for both occasions. – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The line was closed on 30 November 1935, and all buildings and infrastructure at Brill associated with the line were sold at auction and subsequently demolished." That implies that there might have been buildings and infrastructrure elsewhere than at Brill, that weren't auctioned.
Wotton tramway
  • "The first stage of the line, known as the Wotton Tramway, was a 4-mile (6.4 km) line ...". Can we do something about the "line ... line" thing?
    • Reworded. As you may know, there are six of these in total; given that this initial history section is essentially saying the same thing on each article, I'm trying to phrase things differently on each one that they won't (hopefully) appear too repetitive to someone reading the whole series, but still contain enough information that someone reading just one of the articles will understand the background context of why it was built and how. – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Extension to Brill
  • "Lobbying from the nearby town of Brill for the introduction of passenger services on the line led to an extension from Wotton to a new terminus at the foot of Brill Hill, north of the hilltop town of Brill itself, in March 1872 and the introduction of two mixed trains each day in each direction, at which time the line was renamed the Brill Tramway." That's an admirable attempt on the world's longest sentence record.
Goods facilities
  • Starts off by telling us again what we were told just a few sentences higher up, that Brill wasn't used by many passengers.
    • Agree, but I think in this case it's warranted. The "Passengers" section says it wasn't used by many passengers; the "Goods" section explains why they kept the station open despite so few passengers using it. – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "In addition, a storehouse at the station held beer supplied by the breweries of Brackley and Aylesbury, while bricks and tiles from the brick and tile factories of Brill were used in the construction of Waddesdon Manor, near the eastern end of the Brill Tramway, between 1874 and 1889." I lost the plot a bit with this. At the same time as the station stored beer, the bricks and tiles were being used to build Waddesdon Manor? Was it the beer that was stored between 1874 and 1889?
    • Split the beer and the bricks. – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Goods facilities
  • "in 1895 his heir William Temple-Gore-Langton, 4th Earl Temple of Stowe, expanded the brickworks into the Brill Brick & Tile Works ...". He didn't expand it into the Brick & Tile Works, as it didn't exist. "Expanded it to become ..."?

Malleus Fatuorum 23:02, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    • Amended to "which became". – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Is there a consensus or previous precedent on minimum length of article at FA? This one seems a little short, coming in at just over 9kB (1500 words) of readable prose. SpinningSpark 12:37, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The FA criteria call for comprehensiveness, not a given length. There are shorter, recently passed FAs, such as Babakotia (7 kB, 1100 words). I have no reason to assume that this article is not comprehensive. Ucucha 13:26, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If you think something's missing, say what you think should be added; this isn't DYK and I'm not going to pad an article out unnecessarily to meet an arbitrary word count. This was a sleepy country halt, not a major city terminus station, not all that much actually happened there. If it passes this will (rightly) be nearer the shorter than the longer end of Wikipedia:Featured articles/By length, but nowhere near the bottom. – iridescent 14:08, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I was certainly not suggesting padding out the article nor was it a suggestion that anything is missing. This was a genuine question on whether there is any precedent on what constitutes too short, an article can be very short and still be comprehensive, but there must come a point (again, not suggesting it is the case here) when it would be better off merged with something else. SpinningSpark 09:16, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
With railway stations, there's never a "merge point"; there's a very clear consensus, across repeated discussions over the years, that every railway station warrants its own independent article. This series is partly the result of a point-proving exercise to demonstrate that even the most obscure railway station stubs can be expanded into full-length articles, following the most recent round of "why aren't they all merged?" discussions. – iridescent 11:59, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, point accepted that it would be against consensus to merge in the case of railway stations, but my basic point still stands. There is a point at which the article would not be suitable for FA, but apparently there are no guidelines, we are left to come to our own individual decisions. SpinningSpark 13:31, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This was discussed at great depth in WT:Featured article candidates/archive31 and following, and although there were proposals to add some sort of length limit, none were passed. It may be true that there is an unwritten limit (I don't think many people would be happy if I'd nominate ?Oryzomys pliocaenicus for FA, which is comprehensive), but this article isn't even very close to it, as there are several shorter FAs (see iridescent's link). Ucucha 13:42, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Per Ucucha above. If this passes, it won't be unusually short by FA standards (it's longer than Nico Ditch and Tropical Depression Ten (2005)—both relatively recent FAs—combined). – iridescent 13:48, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments –

  • On my computer, the first word of the infobox photo caption is showing up to the right of the picture, with the rest at the bottom. Assuming the intention is to have the entire caption at the bottom, there may be a formatting tweak needed somewhere.
  • Tiny bit of repetition in the lead here: "and became the Metropolitan Line of London Transport. London Transport...". Would be better if the word order was mixed a little to get the two London Transports farther apart.
    • Added "The management of" to separate them. – iridescent 10:44, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Goods facilities: "supplied by the breweries of Brackley and Aylesbury. bricks and tiles...". First word of new sentence needs capitalization.
    • Fixed.10:44, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
  • What does the symbol used in the Mitchell & Smith book cites represent? This is not so much a criticism of its use as it is curiosity, since I don't recall seeing it before. I don't review that many British-relating topics, so that might be why I'm unfamiliar with it. I assume it's a substitute for p. or pp. in the cites.
    • It's the section symbol. Middleton Press maintains what I assume they believe is an endearingly quirky tradition and number their books in the old style, with numbered sections and figures but non-numbered pages. There are advantages to this method—it means that no matter how they change the pagination of their books in future editions, the numbering will still relate to the same information (the Bible and Qu'ran use chapter-and-verse as opposed to page numbering for the same reason, as do legal works where it has to be explicit what information is referred to), but the disadvantage is that it looks weird to anyone not used to it. – iridescent 10:44, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The one general comment I will make about the article is that I find the lead long for an article of this size. For a relatively short article by FA standards, I would typically expect to see a two or three-paragraph lead. Taken by itself I think the lead is very nice, which makes it hard for me to hold it against the article in the end. The only thing I can think of doing would be to condense the last two paragraphs somewhat and then merge them, but I'm not sure how practical this would be. Giants2008 (27 and counting) 01:32, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I can't see an obvious way to condense the lead. The reason it looks disproportionate is that usually for a station/port/airport article, the lead would be of this length, but the body text would also cover the architecture and history of the buildings. In this particular case the buildings were a pair of generic wooden sheds with nothing to say about them, so the body text is one or two sections shorter than "seems right" for an article of this nature. – iridescent 10:44, 24 May 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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