Talk:40-foot radio telescope

40-foot radio telescope has been listed as one of the Natural sciences 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 18, 2022. (Reviewed version).

A fact from 40-foot radio telescope appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 January 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the 40-foot radio telescope (pictured) at Green Bank Observatory was the first automated telescope?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2022/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/40 Foot Telescope.

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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 SL93 (talk) 23:40, 25 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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The 40 Foot Telescope

... that the 40 Foot Telescope (pictured) at Green Bank Observatory was the first fully automated telescope? Source: https://greenbankobservatory.org/science/telescopes/40-ft/Source: "World's First Automated Radio Telescope". National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Retrieved 25 December 2021.

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Parks (board game) (reused from Template:Did you know nominations/Kosmos 1408, which was ineligible as it ended up at WP:ITN)

Created by Mike Peel (talk). Self-nominated at 19:11, 17 December 2021 (UTC).[reply]

Nominated within three days of creation, and is about 2700 bytes, satisfying date and length criteria. The statement "...has since been in continuous use..." is not supported by the ref, which states it was "recommissioned in 1987" and mentions its various uses. (Aside: I'd prefer the use of anniversary for inanimate objects instead of birthday, but that's not a requirement for DYK.) Is there a reason 3C 405 was omitted from the list of sources in the science section? Although most of the sources are related to the subject in some way, there are third-party refs establishing notability. The image is included in the article, is on Commons, was originally published at View of Green Bank’s 40-foot telescope from the front, and is licenced as CC-BY-3.0 according to the site's media use policy. It looks fine at the scale required for DYK. Hook is suitably short and has a citation in the article. (However, ref 5 states "As far as we know, it was the first completely automated telescope.") QPQ completed. (I usually avoid reviewing articles using as QPQ a review for one of my articles, but I did not notice until I completed my review that this was the case.) Reusing the QPQ from a nomination that was invalidated or withdrawn is fine. Mindmatrix 21:31, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Mindmatrix: Thanks for the review! [1] states "It has been in continuous use since 1987." (in bold, just above the text). I've changed 'birthday' to 'anniversary'. Thanks for spotting that I'd missed 3C 405! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:51, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - I scanned the text on that page three times and didn't think to look beside the image. (And it's in bold, too!) I've given this a tick, reiterating for the promoter that ref 5 states "as far as we know" in case it affects promotion. (To me, this appears to be a "just in case" disclaimer.) Mindmatrix 20:22, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    - @Mindmatrix: Thanks! I did some additional checks about whether this was actually the first automated telescope, way back in 1962. The earliest elsewhere that I could find was 1965 with an optical telescope, and there's also Mark II (radio telescope) that was the first to be controlled with a digital computer (I had a DYK many years ago on this). There's also [2], which seems to very optical-centric and puts the start dates after the 40 foot. So I think that statement is OK - and if it's not, I'd love to hear about (and then write about) an earlier example! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:57, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I added a secondary source to the hook above, and also put the source in the article. It's The National Radio Astronomy Observatory web site, which says the Green Bank Observatory telescope is, "World’s First Automated Radio Telescope" Hope this helps. — Maile (talk) 22:58, 25 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Article name

Hi @Mike Peel: just wanted to check on the name of this article, as it doesn't seem quite correct to me. We've titled it as "40 Foot Telescope", in title case, implying that this is a proper name. But as far as I can tell from many of the article's own sources, including [3][4][5][6], that name is not usually capitalised in that way. As such, I'm not sure that differentiating it from the other 40-foot telescope using capitalisation is really valid. I'd like to move this article to something like 40-foot telescope (Green Bank Observatory) or similar, but wanted to get your input first, particularly as it is due to run at DYK in a couple of days. Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 14:53, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Amakuru: Happy for it to be renamed. Perhaps 40-foot radio telescope might work, and be shorter than including the full observatory name? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:59, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Mike Peel: excellent suggestion, and

Done. Thanks — Amakuru (talk) 16:09, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:40-foot radio telescope/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: GhostRiver (talk · contribs) 23:07, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I'll be taking a look at this article for the January 2022 GAN backlog drive. If you haven't already signed up, please feel free to join in! Although QPQ is not required, if you're feeling generous, I also have a list of GA nominations of my own right here.

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

Infobox and lede

was constructed in 1961, and started observing a selection of variable radio sources in 1961 some way to rephrase so it doesn't repeat the same year?

Specifications

Good

History

"The 40 foot" → "The 40-foot" for internal consistency
In the sentence starting It was delivered in December 1961, I'd clarify that it was delivered to the Green Bank Observatory (with a WL) so that information isn't buried further on
I wouldn't put quotes around "Secondary Science Teachers Institute", as I'm not sure why an organization would have quotes around it

Science

Good

References

References [4] and [14] need an access date

General comments

Image is properly licensed and relevant
No stability concerns in the revision history
Earwig score looks good

Putting on hold to allow nominator to address comments. Please feel free to ping me with questions, and let me know when you're finished! — Ghost River 16:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@GhostRiver: Thanks for the review! I've addressed those points with this edit - how does that look? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:06, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Article looks good now, happy to pass! — Ghost River 00:06, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]