Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Space debris/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 not promoted by Karanacs 20:31, 10 July 2011 [1].

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Space debris

Space debris (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured article candidates/Space debris/archive1
• Featured article candidates/Space debris/archive2

Nominator(s): Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article for a couple of reasons:

1. I think this is the only article available to casual readers that is both complete and wide ranging
2. this is a serious issue for continued space activity, and receives a fairly considerable amount of press coverage
3. it is already the #1 search result in major search engines

The article has been stable for some time, I've done minor cleanup to remove CITEs and such. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Oppose at this time - I appreciate the work that's been done on this article, but I don't feel it currently meets the featured article criteria. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:45, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

• "This work had demonstrated that the chance of being hit by a larger meteor, large enough to destroy a spacecraft, was extremely remote. However, it also demonstrated that a spacecraft would be hit by micrometeorites, about the size of dust grains, almost constantly." - source?

Fixed.

• "Early attempts to protect spacecraft against these micrometeorites generally employed a brute-force approach, which used an outer wall that was thick enough to protect the spacecraft from these sorts of impacts. This was generally far thicker than what was needed for the spacecraft's mechanical structure." - source?

Fixed.

• "Based on the measured sizes of known asteroids, Kessler was able to demonstrate that this time scale was in the order of billions of years" - source?

Fixed.

• "Some of these were deliberately caused as a part of 1960's anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) testing, while others were the result of rocket boosters that had "blown up" in orbit as leftover fuel expanded into a gas and ruptured their tanks. Since these objects were only being tracked in a haphazard way, a NORAD employee, John Gabbard, took it upon himself to keep a separate database of as many of these objects as he could. Studying the results of these explosions, Gabbard developed a new technique for predicting the orbital paths of their products. "Gabbard diagrams" (or plots) are widely used today. Along with Preston Landry, these studies were used to dramatically improve the modelling of orbital evolution and decay." - source? Look for other unsourced statements

Fixed.

• Use a consistent spelling for terms which differ between American and British English - see WP:ENGVAR

Examples? I only use US, I suppose someone else has edited it. This sounds easy to fix.

• Don't use contractions outside of quotes

I'm not really sure what this means. Can you give me an example or two so I can track these down.

• Ranges should use dashes, not hyphens. Check for other manual of style issues.

Fixed.

• Don't include entries in See also already linked in article text

Fixed.

• Reference formatting needs to be much more consistent

I don't see the problem here. All of the references that I see use a consistent format.

• Date for FN 6? ISBN for FN 33? Retrieval date for FN 36? Check for missing information in references

Fixed, fixed and fixed. Are these actually required for FAQ?

• This link appears to be broken. See here for a list of potentially problematic links. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:45, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Fixed.

What's a bit worrying is that not one of these came up in the PR. Is there some other model of workflow that would bring the article to the quality needed for FAC without this sort of thing happening? Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose—Unfortunately, I have to agree. This article appears unable to satisfy the FA criteria, beginning with a lead that does not satisfy WP:LEAD, and an article body that needs a significant level of editing. I got bogged down with the number of problems in the Micrometeorites section alone. There are too many concerns for me enumerate. I'm very sorry. Regards, RJH (talk) 23:03, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I've made a number of copy edits to the first part of the article, but I suspect it will require some more work. RJH (talk)

This isn't really helpful. How am I to use these comments to improve the article? For instance, what's wrong with the lead? !Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Image Review A few date fields are blank, a few pages have the information they need, but not in templates. I'll go into more detail when everything else gets fixed and this is renominated, but there are no apparent free use issues, so its just cleanup on the image front. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

What? Who closed this and why? Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

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