Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mont Blanc massif/archive1

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 archived by Laser brain via FACBot (talk) 14:23, 6 July 2016 [1].

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Mont Blanc massif

Nominator(s): Parkywiki (talk) 09:09, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

This article is about a very significant range of high mountains within the European Alps. Whilst numerous pages exist on discrete elements of the massif (including Mont Blanc itself), I have enhanced this one from a simple List into a full article that now gives a good, sound, informative overview of all major aspects of this important alpine region. Parkywiki (talk) 09:09, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Comments by Burklemore1

I figured I'd add some feedback after you initiated an impressive review on my FAC. I'll start with geography, then work with the lead and later sections.

• Paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 are at present without references. The third one does have a citation, but the rest of the paragraph does not. Think you may need to go through this.

Done - geographic description was derived from French online IGN maps, but I've now added refs to books and paper maps. (Schoolboy error). Thanks for offering to comment - it's you're chance to get your own back for my detailed critique of your FAC! Parkywiki (talk) 12:54, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Definitely, this is an impressive nonetheless and I'll probably not find many issues. I'm quite busy with a few articles I've been working on, including Nothomyrmecia of course, but I'll definitely find some time for this. Burklemore1 (talk) 08:40, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

OK, sorry for my absence with this FAC. Will definitely review this sometime, but I wouldn't mind seeing the issues given below all addressed first. It'd just make my reviewing process easier just in case I repeat some comments already provided. Burklemore1 (talk) 13:52, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

That makes eminent sense. I will ping you and the other reviewers who left helpful comments (which I am about halfway through addressing) once I believe these to have have been fully dealt with. Parkywiki (talk) 22:25, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Comments from jfhutson

• This is nitpicking, but you appear to be using en dashes in place of hyphens. See MOS:HYPHEN. Examples: north–eastern (MOS:COMPASS), Massif du Mont–Blanc (see the French Wikipedia version of the article), sight–seeing. --JFH (talk) 17:14, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Done - Nitpicking is good! I've now only left en dashes between date ranges, or where sentences are broken sentences.Parkywiki (talk) 14:52, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

• You're using the URL of the website hosting the document cited in footnote 4 as the website parameter. This makes it show up as the italicized "work". In this case, I'd say "International Boundary Study" is a series and "Italy – Switzerland Boundary" is the title. All that website is doing is hosting an already published document. For all your cite web templates, you should use the title of the website rather than the URL of the website if that website really is the larger "work" in which the cited page is being published.--JFH (talk) 17:47, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Oppose. I appreciate that a lot of work has gone into this article, but in my opinion it needs some fundamental reworking.

• The article's structure is confusing, particularly in the history section - we start with a chronological account and then jump into a thematic organization, including subsections that are only sort of historical in nature. We also seem to be missing pieces of the story - for example, there's mention of plane crashes as an aside under Glaciers, but no mention of these anywhere in the history. Normally we'd expect to see significant events of this type described in the history narrative.
• There's an overemphasis on tourism details throughout
• The article is generally underlinked - many people won't know what "biotite mica" or "vascular plants" are
• Tables can be hard to interpret. For example, what is your definition of "largest" in the Glaciers table? Where does the information under Observations come from? Conversely, details of climate data might be better presented in table form rather than as prose.
• The article would benefit from a run-through for MOS issues - blockquotes shouldn't have quote marks, adjectival measurements should use hyphens, 'see also' shouldn't repeat links included inline, there shouldn't be spaces between footnotes, etc.
• Images

• There are a lot of them, to the point that they're disrupting the layout and causing blank space
• Some of them seem to be more 'artistic' than encyclopedic. For example, the ibex image is visually interesting but doesn't really give us a sense of what the full animal looks like.
• File:Zentralbibliothek_Zürich_-_Vallée_de_Chamonix_Traversée_de_la_Mer_de_Glace_-_400017818.jpg: if the author is unknown, how do we know they died over 70 years ago? This is a 20th-century image so it's quite possible they did not
• France does not have freedom of panorama, so depictions of statues and buildings need to include details on the copyright status of the pictured thing as well as the photo itself

• Sourcing

• Spotchecks found a few instances of material not supported by cited sources. For example, I don't see mention of a pollution-reduction rationale in this source
• Formatting is generally inconsistent - sometimes books include publisher locations and sometimes not, Further reading is hand-formatted while References are templated, some publication names aren't italicized when they should be, etc
• Daily Mail is not usually considered an RS. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:32, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, Nikkimaria, for taking the trouble to read and leave your views on the article. I have since addressed a number of the concerns you raised, and will continue to address the remainder. Unless you would prefer me to comment on progress in a line-by-line manner, I will follow WP:FAC guidelines and return with a single commentary when the points you raised have been addressed, though I might offer an explanation now that I excluded plane crashes from the history section as I felt none were historically significance to the mountain range as a whole, but did serve to demonstrate the slow, inexorable movement of ice down the mountain in the glacier section. I could be wrong, though. Parkywiki (talk) 12:42, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Understood, but I would counter that some of the events you did include - eg. Winter Sports Week - are no more significant to the mountain range as a whole. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:15, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Progress update: I thought it might be appreciated if I reported back to advise that I have been working through each one of the helpful points highlighted above, and have nearly completed these tasks. I will report back again next week once I have completed these. Major changes in response to feedback now include: two climate data tables created, section re-structuring, correct referencing and thinning-out of images. Inevitably, for a high mountain range without permanent residents (apart from in the valley bottoms) creating a full historical narrative is not really practicable, so I have responded to concerns by adding a timeline of significant tragedies occurring across the range, which I hope helps address this. I excluded significant mountaineering accomplishments so as not to further expand the tourism / alpine climbing history any further, or straying into the domain of other articles. Meanwhile I would welcome feedback as to whether it is acceptable for me to have included so many links to non-en wiki articles? I'll happily remove them all - especially in the Flora section - as I appreciate they are generally discouraged, but felt their inclusion did support the article by linking to the best non-english pages, even if they did make the page appear overly red-linked. Parkywiki (talk) 10:43, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

I have no objection to that linking style. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:34, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Coordinator note: Substantial issues have been identified here and, while I recognize progress is occurring, this scope of work should be performed outside FAC and the article re-nominated when it's ready. Therefore, I will be archiving the nomination. --Laser brain (talk) 14:23, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. --Laser brain (talk) 14:23, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.