Wikipedia:Peer review/Sheridan, Oregon/archive1

Sheridan, Oregon

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to move this to GA status. Although I was not a major contributor to this, it appears to be very comprehensive and a good read. Need another set of eyes to ensure that the overall style and flow are up to standard.

Thanks, Neonblak ^talk - 19:23, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a generally well-done article. It's broad in coverage, nicely illustrated, nicely laid out, and generally well-sourced (with a few relatively minor exceptions). It needs more copyediting to polish the prose, but I think that otherwise it's ready for GAN. It has FA possibilities too, and with that in mind I have some suggestions for possible expansion.

Lead

• "This highway, along with Oregon Route 18 Business that connects west to neighboring Willamina, both run east–west through Sheridan along with the river, with Sheridan Bridge the only bridge crossing the river in town." - Faulty grammar. Suggestion: "This highway and Oregon Route 18 Business run east–west through Sheridan and nearby Willamina parallel to the river. Sheridan Bridge is the only river crossing within Sheridan."

• FCI, Sheridan should be spelled out as Federal Correctional Institution, Sheridan on first use.

History

• Who lived here and what happened in this region before 1850?

• "Absolem B. Faulconer laid out the plat for what became the city of Sheridan in the mid-1860s and recorded with the county on December 13, 1866." - Strange unparallel sentence structure. Maybe the second part should be split off as "The county recorded the plat on December 13, 1866".

• "On April 4, 1866, Sheridan received a post office... " - This is hard to picture. Perhaps something like "The Sheridan post office was established on April 4, 1866... "?

• Link "narrow gauge" to Narrow gauge railway?

• "The city was incorporated in 1880, and was a timber and farming community at a location southwest of Portland and northwest of Salem." - Tighten to "The city, a timber and farming community southwest of Portland and northwest of Salem, was incorporated in 1880"?

• "who was posted to Yamhill County and Fort Yamhill in the latter half of the 1850s to watch the Native Americans" - Would "guard" be more accurate than "watch"?

• Link hops?

• "St. Francis Xavier's opened in 1931 using a new building and several of the farm buildings, with additional buildings added over the next several decades" - "With" doesn't make a good conjunction. Suggestion: "Opening in a new building and several existing farm buildings in 1931, St. Francis Xavier's added more buildings over the next several decades."

• "The current steel bridge across the South Yamhill River was built as part of the Works Progress Administration and opened in 1939" - Needs a rewrite. A bridge is not part of an administration.

• "By 1940, agriculture was still a major industry, with the timber industry also growing in importance to the local economy." - Another ungrammatical "with" plus "-ing" construction.

• "The Jesuits sold off their training school in 1974... " - Tighten by deleting "off"?

• I'll stop at this point with the line-by-line commentary. Suffice to say that the article needs copyediting to identify small glitches and fix them.

Geography

• "According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.9 square miles (4.9 km2), of which 1.9 square miles (4.9 km2) is land and 0.1 square miles (0.3 km2) (2.6%) is water." - This claim is impossible. If it's all land, then none is water. The bots need help here.

Transportation

• The first paragraph of this section needs a source. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every set of statistics, every direct quotation, every unusual claim, and every paragraph. If one source supports a whole paragraph, the inline citation should go at the very end of the paragraph. Maps can be reliable sources for claims like the ones in this particular paragraph.

Government

• "Val Adamson is the mayor... " - I think I would qualify this by giving a date or dates. Something like "Elected in X, Val Adamson is the mayor; his term runs through Y."

Demographics

• I'd recommend rounding some of the numbers in this section.

• The standard demographics sections of U.S. city articles can lead to confusion during reviews. For example, it's not clear to everyone in the world how a U.S. "family" differs from a U.S. "household". One solution to this problem is to add a note quoting the Census Bureau's definitions, as in Glossary F. Here's my stab at it: "The Census Bureau distinguishes between "family" and "household". It says, "A family includes a householder and one or more people living in the same household who are related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption... [However,] [n]ot all households contain families since a household may consist of a group of unrelated people or one person living alone." This question might not arise in a GA review but might at FAC.

• Another kind of problem arises from using the {{GR}} template, which inserts a date in yyyy-mm-dd format in the reference section. When that format is out-of-sync with the other citation formatting, a fix involves creating a {{cite web}} (or similar) citation linked to the exact page in American Factfinder. In this case, that would be Sheridan city, Oregon. Once created, this citation can usually be added to the end of each paragraph in the demographics section; thus each paragraph meets WP:V. Sorry if this seems unbearably nit-picky.

References

• Nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com (citation 43) may not be reliable per WP:RS. Better would be the Oregon National Register List published by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

• Citation 4 needs a publisher and date of publication.

• Citation 25 needs an url and a date of most recent access.

• Citation 8 seems to need a place of publication. Is Oregon-Jesuit a publisher?

• What makes High-Schools.com (citation 40) a reliable source?

• Citation 49 needs a date of publication.

Other

• To improve this to FA level, you might consider adding something about county, state, and Congressional representatives to the "Government" section.

• It would probably also help to add something to the "Geography" section about geology and the origin of the good agricultural land.

• Should there be something more about timber in the article? The lead mentions it, and it is mentioned again in the "History" section, but the thought is not developed.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:44, 22 December 2010 (UTC)