Talk:Coon Rapids Dam

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Coon Rapids Dam has been listed as one of the Engineering and technology good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: January 16, 2025. (Reviewed version).

A fact from Coon Rapids Dam appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 July 2024 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Coon Rapids Dam on the Mississippi River is the northern terminus of the river's navigable portion?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2024/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Coon Rapids Dam.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Bruxton talk 15:35, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that the Coon Rapids Dam on the Mississippi River is the northern terminus of the river's navigable portion?

Source: Anfinson, John (2003). River of History: A Historic Resources Study of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (PDF). Retrieved 25 June 2024.

Reviewed: Snow Bowl (1985)
Comment: ~~QPQ to come.~~

Created by Darth Stabro (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 50 past nominations.

Pbritti (talk) 04:22, 26 June 2024 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

Adequate sourcing: - The sentences "One of the original steel gates is available for viewing on the Anoka County side of the dam." and "The dam connects to Elm Creek Park Reserve via the Rush Creek Regional Trail." are unsourced.
Neutral:
Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: @Darth Stabro and Pbritti: Nice work on this article. There are just a few issues that need to be fixed. Epicgenius (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Epicgenius: Thanks for the review! I think the issues have been addressed. ~ Pbritti (talk) 16:06, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good to go now. Epicgenius (talk) 16:13, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

Passed. —Kusma (talk) 21:47, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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

Nominator: Darth Stabro (talk · contribs) 02:51, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 17:34, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Content and prose review

I will comment on anything I notice, but not all of my comments will be strictly related to the GA criteria, so not everything needs to be actioned. Feel free to push back if you think I am asking too much, and please tell me when I am wrong.

Lead looks a bit short; reconstruction/renovation could all do with a sentence or two.
A map would be helpful. <mapframe> is quite nice; I don't remember where the documentation is, but see 1886 St. Croix River log jam for an example in use.

Done

northern terminus of the navigable portion of the Mississippi River could be clear and say it was the northern terminus until the St Anthony Falls locks closed in 2015?

Done

(Just out of curiosity: do you know when / whether navigating the portion of the river between St Anthony Falls and Coon Rapids was ever commercially important? From my limited personal observation the St Anthony Falls locks were mostly used by kayakers and a few recreational boats in the 2000s and it seemed a huge effort to run these locks and to drain and close them every winter, not sure that was worth it)

I'm not sure!

Facility: There is a mix of background, history and the description of the original hydroelectric facility here. Can you try to untabgle this into clearer and more well-defined sections? Especially as the current situation is described in the later section "Specifications"

Attempted

By the 1960s, hydroelectric generation on the dam was no longer profitable, and power generation was halted in 1966 do we know more details? If you take the dam as a given, hydroelectic generation should be fairly cheap, but the upkeep of the dam will be needed whether or not you try to generate power...

Per the source, coal became cheaper/more efficient than maintaining the dam. Added.

1997 reconstruction: severe effects predicted if the dam collapsed are these effects just downstream flooding or anything more surprising?

Unfortunately the source doesn't elaborate and I can't find anything more detailed.

inflatable rubber bladders what was the point of these?

attempted to clarify

Later renovation: The rubber bladders [..] proved to be ineffective in preventing the spread of Asian carp further up the river. this makes it sound as if there was an Asian carp invasion in the upper Mississippi, but according to your 2013 source the carp had only made it up to Winona, a few locks away from St Paul.

rephrased

44 megawatts per year that makes no sense. Either it is 40 megawatts, or something more complicated like 40 megawatt-hours per year: "megawatt" is a unit of energy per time meaning "megajoule per second" already.

The source says "44 megawatts of power a year" - perhaops a place for a clarifying note about the ambiguity?

Specifications: this is the post-2014 and current state of the dam? Perhaps some of this should be mentioned much earlier (near "Facility") as the effects on the upstream water have been the same since construction?

clarified

the effects of the dam diminishing after the Ferry Street bridge that means that the river is above its natural bed up to thereabouts?

On a map, the Mississippi does look slightly wider between the Coon Rapids dam and Champlin compared to upstream and downstream.

I believe so.

Recreation: could you clarify the role of the dam in recreation?

Added a bit

At Three_Rivers_Park_District#Mississippi_Gateway_Regional_Park, we have the "crossings of the Mississippi river" navbox; wouldn't that fit better into the present article?

Added

The dam seems to be open to bicycles but this is not mentioned in the article.

Added

Gallery: This section (which is only a historical gallery, not a general one) does not look good on any browser/skin I tried, for various image positioning reasons. WP:GALLERY isn't too keen on this kind of display. Could you make a gallery page on Commons instead or dissolve this section and move the most pertinent images to where they are discussed in text? Other tools like {{multiple image}} or shorter, more condensed galleries inside a section can be more helpful than a separate section.

Removed

First pass of content done! Will work on spot checks and comment on GA criteria ~~later today~~tomorrow. —Kusma (talk) 11:41, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Source spotchecks

Numbering from Special:PermanentLink/1260407881

1b: ok
2c: ok
3b: ok
5: yes, but could mention that they got local congress rep George Ross Smith to present their petition

added

9c: seems it was completed in 2001 if the article is indeed from 2002-01-01 (I don't believe any work was done on this on New Year's day in the middle of winter...)

rephrased

13, actually, apparently they bought it already in 2011, no need to repeat "ultimately" from the source?

rephrased

19: ok. Actually, "rubber tube gates" is easier for me to understand than "bladders"
26: ok (and of course, there is walleye).
30: fine.

Spot checks clear.

General comments and GA criteria

Some prose points above.
Sectioning could be improved, see above.
Lead could have a little more content from specifications and history section
Sourcing is fine.
Broadness: recreation and carp defense could perhaps be treated in a bit more detail.
Image licensing is fine.
The gallery is perhaps a bit much, see above.

A nice article, should be not too hard to get to GA status along the lines of my comments above (of course, please tell me if you object to anything, I am happy to reconsider). Will put on hold. —Kusma (talk) 17:20, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Kusma, thanks for the review! Many suggested changes made. ~Darth Stabro^{Talk • Contribs} 15:19, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Much nicer! There could still be more on recreation and carp, but I'll pass this now. —Kusma (talk) 21:47, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV ()

3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant ()

Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Potential energy production

Here is a source claiming 62,539 MWh/year (which is 7.1 MW): [1]. —Kusma (talk) 11:12, 17 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]