Wikipedia:Peer review/Tropical Storm Debra (1978)/archive1

Tropical Storm Debra (1978)

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to improve it to "good article" status. I plan on adding Google News sources later.

Thanks, Hurricanefan25 (talk) 21:51, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this storm article. I always like reading about storms, especially ones not coming my way. Here are some suggestions for further improvement.

Lead

• August 26 is repeated three times in the opening paragraph. Did all three things happen on that date? The "Meteorological history" section says the storm formed on August 25. The confusion here may be related to the vagueness of the first part of the "Meteorological history" section. Please see Juliancolton's note, "First paragraph of MH" on the article's talk page.

• "Debra" is repeated six times in the second paragraph. That's too many. A bit of variety would help.

Meteorological history

• "400 nautical miles south of New Orleans" - Should this be expressed in miles and kilometers also?

• "the low-level vorticy center" - What is a "vorticy center"? Should that be "center of vorticity" with perhaps a brief explanation of wind motion in a cold low?

Preparations and impact

• "In neighboring Louisiana... " - The word "neighboring" seems out of place since the preceding sentences discuss the situation in Louisiana.

• "6 inches (15 cm) of rain was... " - Sentences in Wikipedia articles should start with words rather than digits.

• "all rains had receded from the streets" - Should this say "rainwater" or "rain-induced flooding" rather than "rains"?

• "was recorded in Freshwater Bayou Lock.[2][1][18]" - Any place you have a string of refs like this, the numbers should appear in ascending order; i.e., [1][2][18]. I see several of these strings in the article that are out of order.

• "Across the state, more than 6 in (150 mm) was reported,[1][2][19] including more than 6 in (150 mm) of rainfall was recorded at Lake Charles." - Doesn't make sense as written.

• "A 15 feet (4.6 m) wave killed a person at a rig 80 miles (130 km) offshore Cameron, Louisiana.[9][12][11][16][17]" - Does this claim really require five supporting citations?

References

• In citation 1, that should be "Lawrence, Miles B." rather than "B. Lawrence, Miles".

  Done.

• In citations like 7 that include strings in all caps, the Wikipedia convention is to use house style rather than all caps even if the source uses all caps; i.e., "Tropical Storm Debra Local Statement Number 6". Ditto for the other citations with all-cap strings.

• Citation 23 has a set of nested quotation marks. The way to handle these is to add an nbsp code wherever the two sets of marks collide; i.e., " 'Debra' makes devastating exit". You can look at note this in edit mode to see the six characters of the nbsp string. WP:NBSP explains the no-break code and some of its other uses.

Other

• The dab checker at the top of this review page finds one link, "Chevron", that goes to a disambiguation page instead of its intended target.

• The article has too many images at the moment for a good layout. The two images in the "Meteorological history" section make a text sandwich with the infobox. If the article gets longer, it may eventually accommodate all of the images. Meanwhile, I'd suggest keeping the storm track image but moving it down to avoid the text sandwich, and I'd remove File:Tropical Storm Debra (1978).JPG, at least temporarily.

• Image captions consisting solely of a sentence fragment do not take a terminal period.

• In an article that's this short, I don't think it's helpful to link terms more than once in the lead plus (at most) once in the main text. I would not link the names of states, for example, more than once in the whole article. Ditto for terms like "landfall", which are pretty much self-explanatory; linking once might be OK, but I wouldn't link "landfall" more than once in the whole article. Technical terms like "mbar" need to be linked, but they should not be linked multiple times in the same section. "Mbar" is linked three times in the "Meteorological history" section, as are some other terms.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 19:36, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Hurricanefan25 ^{tropical cyclone} 21:20, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

• I randomly clicked on one item, and it was reference 23. Reference 23 isn't what it is stated to be. Make sure all your references match what you say they are, or this article will not pass GA easily. Thegreatdr (talk) 21:51, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I've corrected pretty much all of them. Hurricanefan25 ^{tropical cyclone} 20:43, 18 July 2011 (UTC)