Wikipedia:Peer review/International Street (Canada's Wonderland)/archive1

International Street (Canada's Wonderland)

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Section of a theme park. New article, and I've pretty much exhausted every published source on the area. Thanks, Zanimum (talk) 03:02, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Comments by Dom497

First of all, its great to see someone actual willing to create a page like this to further improve the coverage of Canada's Wonderland on Wikipedia. Anyway, I think that the article has everything it needs. The only thing I would suggest to add is what has changed from the time it was first built to today. Just one example is that (in one of the pictures on the article) there is no safety fence around the pool. Today there is in fact a safety fence around the entire pool.--Dom497 (talk) 16:21, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliments. I was a little hesitant to actually summarize the changes, simply for fear of running into WP:SYNTH. I don't know how far one can go with obvious now and then comparisons, without running smack head first into this. As for the safety fence, literally from day-to-day during the drowning coverage, the Star article seemed to contradict themselves. I'm leaning somewhat to them considering the "rocks" as barricades originally, in the story that contradicts the rest. Are you familiar with the park enough to know that indeed there weren't fences? (FYI: All the Star article are available through Pages of the Past, accessible through your local library card in most GTA municipalities.) -- Zanimum (talk) 23:26, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, if you look at one of the photos on the article there is no fence. Today, (obviously) there are fences... that are about a foot or two high.--Dom497 (talk) 22:37, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Comments from Jappalang

The following are a sample of the issues that bothered me; they are not exhaustive.

Features

• "... they are greeted by a large Canadian flag flowerbed."

  A flowerbed "cannot" greet people; it does not have sentience. Avoid anthromorphisizing them.

  Restructured the sentence.

• "... during the autumn.)"

  Where is the opening parentheses?

  That's remnant of when there was only a sentence fragment for that point.

• "The bed uses approximately 11,000 begonias, ..."

  The bed does not "use"; it would be more appropriate to say that the begonias are planted in the bed.

  Changed.

• "... its 504 504 red, white, and turquoise lights."

  What is with "504 504"?

  Typo.

• "They [the stones] make walking cooler and more attractive than asphalt, ..."

  This sentence has several issues: there is ambiguity and confusion with the first part (so it makes walking a "cool" activity that every would want to emulate? So one only feels they are "cool" because they are walking on the stones? What about standing?) and the second part is rendered as "They make walking ... more attractive than asphalt"...

  They didn't mean cool as in "dude, this is cool", but cool in the temperature sense. I've been poking around, and apparently this is thanks to solar reflectance: I've linked cool to Albedo, the relevant Wikipedia article. The second part simply deals with the fact a continuous surface of concrete blacktop isn't pretty looking, compared to shaped stones.

• "Upon entry, crowds during first year would all tend to go to the right side of International Street."

  There is a question of "first year" of what? Furthermore, what is the context/intent behind this sentence? What significance does this have?

  Reworded. It refers to the first season that the park was open. Like most of the Disney theme parks, Wonderland is designed in a spoke pattern, to shape traffic flow around a central point. Thing is, I can't find any articles further discussing this concept. I saw one once, but I don't remember where or in what form it was. The lop-sided traffic issue reflects some sort of flaw in the traffic distribution of the park. (Now, it's mostly to the left, to the major roller coasters, but there's no source to talk about that either.)

• A self-drawn map of International Street, coupled with descriptive text of the buildings' locations on the street would be of help to the readers.

  Can it only have features mentioned in the article labelled? For example, I can reference the location of the Maple Room, an exclusive event location right near front gate, that is mentioned on the CW website, but no website says "Maple Room is on International Street". Or even the outdoor eating areas.

• "... but the Toronto Star deemed the machine-stretched dough was "perhaps too cookie-like," but noted ample cheese and spicy sauce. The grape sherbet included both grape juice and real Italian wine."

  I really question the significance of this information to International Street.

Buildings

• "The Toronto Star recounted a "forlorn looking person" stopping a security guard outside a set of washroom, asking 'Am I a Damas or Caballeros?'"

  Unsourced and what does this have to do with Buildings?

  I can find the source at some point, but it'll take hunting, as the newspaper search is bad for that era. It's to talk about the extent of the theming, that it was done to the point where foreign languages were used, and the public got confused.

• The current horizontal dual image layout is bad (see the whitespace) in my opinion. Stack the images vertically instead.

Shows

• ... and only equipt with 6 metres (20 feet) of rope, ..."

  What is "equipt"?

  Wiktionary is calling equipt "archaic", so I'm changing it.

Images

• File:International Street (amusement park entrance way) logo.png: The use of this non-free image in this article violates WP:NFCC #8. There is no critical commentary in the article about this logo that requires its illustration to understand it.

I think the article fails in its coverage somewhat. My idea of what an article about International Street would have is as follow:

• History (how the section came about, how much it cost, who was involved in its proposal and construction, etc.)
• Features (maps, buildings, shows: notable ones that have ceased to exist and that are active)
• Business (what are its trades/stores? Turnover? Significance to the park)
• Reception (how do visitors feel about it? What is the park's attitude to it? Any international recognition?)

Right now, the article has a somewhat jumbled/scattered Features, with little history and no reception at all. The language needs to be brushed up but that would be better done after some restructuring and location of new material are done. Jappalang (talk) 16:42, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Very little of this sort of information is available. Other than a few documents (all of which are scarce beyond belief, one publication only found in Ottawa and no where else anymore, one publication only found at a university in Toronto and no where else anymore...) I've completely extinguished my sources. Newspapers generally ignored International Street after the first three years, and guidebooks are generally inaccurate.

I can cite maps for stores, but only some have been digitized and posted online. I personally own pamphlets from the first year and some recent seasons, nothing else. But even if I could find the 20-some seasons in the middle, the GA reviewer who previously looked at this dismissed such primary sources. Primary resources are the beginning and the end of sources for shows, as well.

As for the park's attitude, the current owners dislike theming, and don't find it cost effective. But there's only article that talk about that view in relation to the entire Cedar Fair chain, not specific to Wonderland, let alone International Street. If I were to cite articles about their general view, that would likely run amok with WP:SYNTH. Since this was one of the first areas in the park, there's no numbers specific to that section only about cost. As for its inception, the Kings Island/Kings Dominion reference at the top is the only thing I can get. For construction companies, I can find sources about the entire park, but not section-by-section. -- Zanimum (talk) 01:16, 21 September 2011 (UTC)