Talk:New Jersey Route 171/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Imzadi1979 (talk · contribs) 01:42, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

DABs and ELs are good. Nominator is not a major contributor to the article, which concerns me.

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):
Prose quality needs improvement, and the lead needs expansion. See below.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
The references need improvements in terms of formatting and consistency. One needs to be replaced completely. See below.
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
The article is fine on this criterion.
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
Maybe too stable. The nominator's contributions to the article before nomination includes adding the bullets to the "See also" section after the templates used there have changed. I would expect to see more recent editing to prepare the article for the nomination, especially given the quality issues I found.
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Licenses and captions are fine for the media present in the article.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:

Lead

Why doesn't this article introduce abbreviation conventions for highway designations? The infobox and junction list table have "US 1" and "US 130", yet the prose uses "U.S. Route 1" and "U.S. Route 130". After the first US Highway is mentioned by full name, the article should have the abbreviation in parentheses. From then on, the article should use the abbreviations only. This is just good writing so that non-American readers will understand the connection between "U.S Route 1" and "US 1". The same should be done for county routes.
The lead should summarize the history better.

Route description

"The route, which continues as a right-of-way for U.S. Route 130, ..." what?
There should be some variety in terminology in the article; "The route..." "The route..." "The route..." gets old. Please copy edit for variety. You can use words like "highway", "roadway", "road", etc.
"... with County Route 606 (Milltown Road)." could be "with County Route 606 (CR 606, Milltown Road)." to introduce the abbreviation convention as I discussed in the lead.

History

The caption has a year range that should have an en dash (–) instead of a hyphen (-).
"when New Jersey Route 25 was designated..." unlike the other links to state highways, the state name wasn't piped out of this link. Please do so for consistency with the rest of the article.
"The alignment of U.S. Route 130 remained along the alignment of Route 171" has an issue. "alignment ... alignment..." again, variety in prose please.

Major intersections

The notes are not full sentences, and like captions, should not have terminal punctuation.
Why is a cardinal direction given for US 1, but not US 130, when US 130 has a terminus at this intersection, and therefore only has one direction away from the intersection with Route 171.

References

The formatting of the citations is inconsistent, and in some cases, incorrect.
Online sources need access dates.
All sources should have authors (if known), publication dates, publishers, titles and page or section numbers. Maps ideally should have cartography information and should also indicate that the source is a map.
It's a good practice to indicate that a source is a PDF.
Individual webpages are not a work unto themselves, so their titles should be in quotation marks, not italics.
Here's the biggest problem: footnote 7 is a self-published source, which fails the exceptions in policy, and can't be used as a citation in a Good Article. This has to be addressed before the article can be passed.

I'm going to fail the article. While there isn't that much work, I would encourage the nominator to work with the major contributors to the article to resolve the issues. The biggest issue is replacing a source that doesn't meet policy and GA criteria requirements for an article to be passed. Since the nominator is not a major contributor, I don't know if he has access to the sorts of research material needed to resolve that issue in a timely fashion. Please correct the deficiencies, work with major contributors and renominate at a later date. Imzadi 1979 → 02:31, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]