Talk:Seattle Fault/Archive 1

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Seattle Fault/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

I'll be reviewing this article. Sasata (talk) 17:20, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

The article does not currently meet GA criteria. Its needs proper layout, and more citations. Consider resubmitting once these areas have been addressed. Sasata (talk) 17:53, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

• The article does not have a lead section, nor any section headers.

Lead sentence pulled out for a lead. But I wonder if sections are really needed for such a short article. See discussion below. (Indented annotations here are mine, added at various times as issues addressed. J. Johnson (talk) 20:50, 4 March 2009 (UTC))

• The placement of figures is awkward and compresses the text to the left hand side

I would appreciate some guidance as to how the placment could be improved.

• More helpful wikilinks suggested: Interstate 90, Alki Point, Fauntleroy, Lake Sammamish, tsunami. Basically anything that can help the reader understand the background context, without overlinking.

Have added some wiki-links. The location details are really intended for local residents, who are probably the main audience here, and are familiar with these locations.

• "...and Alki Point (right side of picture)" which picture?

Added text to caption.

• No space is required between punctuation and citation number, nor between consecutive citations.

Reformated references to remove extra spaces.

• "A.D. 900-930" use an endash for number ranges.

Fixed.

• "... local native legends [link]" instead of having an undescribed outbound link here, put it in the references with proper descriptors. Same deal later, ..."see the movie)"

"See the movie" edited by Brianhe. But see question in next section.

• Should a'yahos not be capitalized?

Don't believe so, as it is not in the source.

• "Surface scarps due to faulting..." what's a scarp?

Wiki-linked.

• "The Seattle Fault is believed to date from the late Eocene(~40 million years ago), and to overlie "a major structural boundary between Eocene marine basaltic basement rocks (Crescent Formation) to the west and a diverse suit of pre-Tertiary [much older] basement rocks to the east." Would prefer rewording the quote info and removing quotes.

I have retained the quote, as I think it is a good, tight description. But I did add some text to explain it a bit.

• "Three strands have been identified, based on aeromagnetic data,..." What is aeromagnetic data? More clarification required.

Wiki-linked.

• "The central section of the fault zone - where it crosses the apparent location of the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament - shows marked variation..." demarcation of parenthetical thought requires mdashes, not hyphens.

Replaced hyphens with spaced ndashes (an alternative to mdashes).

• The article needs more inline citations, especially when given contentious information (eg. "Recent work indicates that the Seattle Fault can generate two types of earthquakes; both pose "considerable hazard" to the Seattle metropolitan region."; "The Seattle fault is believed to be capable of generating an earthquake of at least 7.0 on the Richter scale.") or specific numbers (The fault appears to be a rupture in a slab of rock about 8 to 10 km deep, with the southern portion being thrusted over, and forcing down, the northern portion.). It is better to overcite than undercite: if there's only a general citation at the end of a paragraph, there's the danger that a future editor will add info, or shuffle it around in such a way that it gets moved any from the source information. I recommend citing everything you're not sure about, and then if it looks unwieldy at the end, you can reorganize to combine sentences to remove citations. Personally, I have no qualms about putting a citation after everything :)

Moved some citations around, added some more.

• "See the USGS/PacificNW web page for information on other local active faults, hazards and preparedness, and lots of good links." This is mentioned in the external links, no need to put this here.

A simple, unadorned listing of external links seems too passive. I could annotate the external links, but am inclined to have the final sentence do a transition to the external links. I rather think the external links would be better placed right after the article, but [Wikipedia:Layout] suggests otherwise.

Thanks for the review, I appreciate your taking the effort. These look like good points, and I will consider how to address them. A couple of comments and questions. First, when I click on the "wiki:LEAD" and "wiki:Layout" links above I end up at c2.com - is that right??

Oops sorry about that, have fixed the links. Sasata (talk) 23:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I believe "a'yahos" is intended to be uncapitalized. That is what I observe in my source material.

Ok, good enough for me. Sasata (talk) 23:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Questions: Is a separate lead section, and additional sections, required on a short article such as this? Also, I thought I had a sufficiency of citations (and then some); could the problem be more that the citations need to be placed closer to the points they support? J. Johnson (talk) 22:34, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed an article as short as this one, but I'm just judging by the GA criteria, which says it must comply with the standard layout. A three sentence summary of the article would be fine for the lead. Creating sections will help you with picture placement. Also, you might consider citing some information from the sources on the external links list directly in the article, as minimizing the length of the external links section is encouraged (and it would pump up the length a bit). See here for more details. Placing in-line citations closer to the facts would help, but more citations would be better for the reasons I explained above. I haven't tried using multiple citations (to the same source) using the Harvard style (i.e. parenthetical referencing); but I'm sure you can find the gory details here and thereabouts. Good luck! Sasata (talk) 23:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I will look at revising the first paragraph to do a better lead-in. But I am reluctant to break such a short article into separate sections that would amount to short paragraphs. (And I do believe that for the scientific significance, and even the popular significance, of this topic this an appropriate length.) It seems to me that having sections is more of the "appropriate structure" requirement of more substantial featured articles, not "merely" good articles. Yes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by J. Johnson (talk • contribs) 18:23, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Unofficial re-review by Sasata

At the request of the original nominator, I've having a look at the article again after changes have been made.

• Referencing is now much better than before. I've condensed a couple of repeating citations.

• I still believe the article needs to follow standard Wikiformat, including a lead, and division of text into sections, with appropriate headers. The argument that the article is not long enough to warrant separate sections highlights one of the article's deficiencies—it doesn't give sufficient coverage to the information out there. A search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Academic Database pulls up 76 research articles (dating from 1991-2009), but only a tiny fraction of these are cited in the article. Here are some research studies that I would expect to be cited in this article:

Thorson RM. (1993). "Postglacial offset along the Seattle fault". Science 260(5109): 825–826.

Discusses data that confirms Holocene movement along the fault.

Karlin RE, Abella SEB. (1996). "A history of Pacific Northwest earthquakes recorded in Holocene sediments from Lake Washington". Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth 101(B3): 6137–6150.

Gives a geohistorical perspective on the fault and discussion of the secondary effects that may have been caused by the fault.

Dewberry SR, Crosson RS. (1996). "The M(D) 5.0 earthquake of 29 January 1995 in the Puget lowland of western Washington: An event on the Seattle fault?" Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 86(4): 1167–1172.

Analyses a 5.0 magnitude earthquake 25 km south of Seattle that is most certainly germaine to this article.

Thorson RM. (1996). "Earthquake recurrence and glacial loading in western Washington". Geological Society of America Bulletin 108(9): 1182–1191.

Effects of glaciation/deglaciation on earthquake recurrence and its effects on current paleoseismic approaches to determine recurrence frequency.

I could go on (and on), but I think you get the point. There's a lot of research out there that hasn't been touched on in this article, and for that reason, it doesn't meet criteria 3(a) ("it addresses the main aspects of the topic"). I think if you were to address some of this research, the size of the article would swell up and section divisions would suggest themselves naturally. And with section headers and beefed-up text, image placement is much easier.

Interesting point. I am going to continue this in a new section ("Scope?").J. Johnson (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

• I'm not a fan of the outgoing links. For example, when I click on the outbound link (... local native legends) I expect to be led to a page which discusses specifically the a'yahos legend, but instead end up on a general site about Indian legends and earthquakes. Perhaps the a'yahos legend is somewhere in one of those links, but I shouldn't be expected to hunt around for it myself. If there is a specific page which discusses a'yahos, then link to it directly, and use a web citation template. If not, then this outbound link should be in the external links section (or perhaps left out completely). Similar arguments apply to the outbound link for Lidar-based mapping that appears later. I shouldn't have to go to an external site to find a definition that helps me understand the wiki article.

I hope this helps you on your quest to get this article to GA status. Good luck! Sasata (talk) 04:13, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Two questions.

I have two questions I would like some comment on. First, and probably a general style issue, I sometimes italicise strings of words that form names (e.g., West Seattle Fault). But I see that the italicisation I applied to South Whidbey Island Fault (bottom of article) has been removed, which leaves an inconsistency. So what is the preferred style for setting off a name?

I don't think instances like this have to be italicized at all. A random sampling of some of the relevant research papers shows that none of them do this, and it's probably best to copy the experts :) Sasata (talk) 04:21, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I think it can be useful to italicise, and I see that the Chicago Manual of Style (I have the 13th ed.) is permissive. (I don't have it at hand, but possibly section 6.10.) But what I was particularly wondering about is if Wikipedia has any preferred style here. Perhaps it's not that important (as long as one is consistent), but it's one of those nagging details I'd like to sort out. J. Johnson (talk) 18:50, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Second, regarding the "see the movie", with the url: I see it has been reduced to a footnote. Which would be fine if it was a source cited in support of a statement or assertion (here, that there will be damage), which is generally consulted only if one is interested in the source. But here the intention was to direct people to the movie (to show the areal extent of severe shaking), as an augmentation of the material. Somewhat like a "see also" item, but to have put it into the "see also" or "external link" sections would have separated it from the material where it is directly applicable. Would anyone have any ideas how that could be better handled? J. Johnson (talk) 21:23, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I would put it as an external link, with a note explaining what the link is, eg:

• United States Geological Survey Simulation of M6.5 Earthquake on Seattle Fault

I think you made a good point in the section above, so I will see if I can fix this up along the line suggested. Thank you for your time and effort. J. Johnson (talk) 18:50, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Scope?

I was questioning the appropriateness of separate sections for such a short article, but you (Sasata) are saying that it is the shortness that is the deficiency. Particularly, that "it doesn't give sufficient coverage to the information out there". So the core issue here seems to be what is the proper scope or coverage.

The standard of the WP:Good article criteria is that an article be "broad in its coverage", and that "it addresses the main aspects of the topic". A footnote qualifies this: 'This requirement is significantly weaker than the "comprehensiveness" required of featured articles; it allows short articles, articles that do not cover every major fact or detail....' So "short" articles are allowed, but the question of proper scope is not resolved.

I think the proper scope depends on the intended audience and purpose. And my intent here is a popular introduction. Most of those 76 or so articles on the Seattle Fault are too technical for non-experts. Not that I couldn't probably explain all of the technical stuff, if I wanted to make a major project of it. (Atwater's "The Orphan Tsunmai of 1700" is an excellent example of this. But that involved a whole cast of experts; I have no pretensions of such competency.) But such coverage would likely intimidate the great many people who just want to find out what the Seattle Fault is.

Another way of assessing proper scope is relative to the coverage of related items, such as the Farallon Plate (scientifically more significant than the Seattle Fault, but it has barely half the coverage), Laramide orogeny (ditto), or the Straight Creek Fault (does not even have a Wikipeida page); I could cite other examples. The Seattle fault threatens a large metropolitan area, and that is the principal reason there is more funding to study it, and more papers. But I don't believe that warrants substantially greater coverage than comparable topics. J. Johnson (talk) 21:25, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's just my opinion, one among thousands here. I think a lot of those research papers could be summarized adequately with roughly a sentence each, in relatively simple language, without intimidating newcomers, but giving them a better sense of what is known about the fault. Rather than trying to argue the point, how about I'll just add the info myself, and we'll see if the article can be improved. Sound reasonable? Sasata (talk) 21:56, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, you can't really judge the proper scope of this article by comparing it to barely written stub articles (or unwritten articles); this just shows that those other articles need a lot of work. Comparing to one of the several earthquake articles would a more valid comparison. Sasata (talk) 23:47, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Note that I am not saying that the article can't be expanded, I'm questioning whether it should. I think the current scope of this article is adequate for the purpose and audience intended. That a lot of work is needed else where is, I think, an argument that work should be done elsewhere. (Implicit in this is another issue, of whether development should be done more or less evenly, or concentrate on a subset of "super" articles. I am rather inclined to the former view.)

As to the other papers, sure, there could be a brief description of what they are about. (Such as I did with the five 1992 papers.) But to what point? E.g., I did cite a recent paper that discusses previous models of the fault geometry, but as I did not discuss these models (nor see any need to consider "historical" hypotheses) I did not cite the earliar articles. To even mention them would be more information then all but the most ardent students would want, and they can easily find the earliar works from the source given. J. Johnson (talk) 22:54, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Then we simply have a difference of opinion regarding the scope. Personally, I like to have more information (and I'm not even all that ardent), and from this article it doesn't really give me an accurate overview of the body of knowledge on the Seattle Fault. Perhaps your best bet is to try renominating and see if a different reviewer agrees with your perspective. Cheers, Sasata (talk) 23:10, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I think that 'scope' is kind of a higher level consideration, and I feel fairly confident on that. (Now if I was intending a review article, yes, reviewing the literature would be mandatory, no doubt about it.) And frankly, my request for a GA review wasn't so much for the status itself (though it would be nice) but for some intelligent, informed criticism on editing and such. You have done that well, for which I thank you. (oops, forgot to sign this) J. Johnson (talk) 23:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Notice of pending changes

In case anyone wants to raise a concern or suggestion: I am preparing to revamp the article. A small amount of additional material (including updates), splitting into sections, and switching to parenthetical referencing. (The last because otherwise it is unnecessarily difficult to maintain.) Hopefully this will be satisfactory to all. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:28, 11 April 2010 (UTC)