Template:Did you know nominations/Drury Run

The following discussion 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 Allen3 ^talk 10:37, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Drury Run

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... that on a tributary of Drury Run the acidity load would need to be reduced by 99.5% to meet the maximum allowable load requirements set by the EPA?

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Battle of the Narrow Seas

Moved to mainspace by Jakec (talk). Self nominated at 19:42, 18 February 2014 (UTC).

Article is new enough and long enough, and it's well supplied with footnotes to sources. QPQ is done. I found the hook fact for the proposed hook in the article and in the cited source, but the hook wording needs improvement. I suggest the following rewording:

ALT1: ... that the acidity load in Whiskey Run, a tributary of Drury Run, would need to be reduced by 99.5% to meet requirements set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?

However, I have some big concerns about the article. First, it would benefit from extensive copyediting -- to rationalize the organization and wording, add links to relevant Wikipedia articles and remove overlinking. However, my review found some issues too profound to address by copyediting, namely factual content in the article that doesn't make sense and/or is contradicted by the sources. I have not gone over the article with a finetooth comb; the following are examples of problems I found with the content:

The first sentence under "Water chemistry" states "The pH of Drury Run and its tributaries ranges from 5.4 to 7.0." That's not a valid interpretation of the source. The source does state (on page 3) that "Unaffected by mining", streams like these "typically range in pH from 5.4 – 7.0," but that statement doesn't apply to streams like these that are seriously impacted by mining. A quick skim through the source indicates that the tributaries have pH values as low as 3.5 (see page 11), if not lower.
The two-sentence "Geology" section begins with the statement that "Drury Run is a freestone stream." "Freestone" is not a geologic term, and the internal link to Freestone (masonry) does not explicate its meaning because the usage in this article has nothing to do with the meaning masonry. From the source, it appears that "freestone" is a term used by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission to refer to streams with little buffering capacity for acidity. It's not a term that is likely to be understood outside of the jargon of the Fish and Boat Commission, and it's erroneous to present it as a geologic term.

Those examples indicate the need for a thorough re-examination of the article content. This kind of article is very difficult to write, given the technical nature of the information and the amount of detail that needs to be summarized. Now that a first version exists, it's time to revisit the sources and make sure that the article content is faithful to them. I've not reviewed the article for copyvio or close paraphrasing; that sort of review would be premature, given the need for content review and copyediting.

Another concern I had, not directly related to this article, is the lack of a good article to link the term "acidity" to (in the article and the hook). Acidity currently redirects to Acid, which article does not cover the concept of acidity that is used in this article. (The article Alkalinity effectively describes the concept as it applies to bases. A similar article is needed for the concept of acidity.) --Orlady (talk) 02:34, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

@Orlady: I've responded to every specific problem you've mentioned. --Jakob (talk) 02:57, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

You've made a few improvements, but there's quite a bit more to be done. The article still is in serious need of copyediting to rationalize its overall organization (it's not at all obvious that the topical sequence of "Course", "Water chemistry", "Geology", "Watershed", "History" and "Biology" is a particularly logical way to present the content) and to present content clearly. Also, my two examples of problems with content are only examples -- it took me only a couple of minutes to find those problems, and I didn't look further. When I stumble upon errors like those, I have to assume that further digging would uncover other issues. That's why I indicated that you need to do a thorough re-examination of the article content. Anyway, the issues I identified in those examples still aren't fixed:

Regarding pH, you've changed "5.4 to 7.0" to "5.3 to 5.8", which is still inaccurate. There is indeed one location in Sandy Run and another location in Drury Run where reported pH ranges from 5.3 to 5.8, but that particular factoid doesn't apply to all of Drury Run and all of its tributaries, nor does this kind of factoid effectively explain the conditions in these streams. By quickly skimming in the source, I quickly discover that another site in Sandy Run has pH values between 4.6 and 5.0; Woodley Draft data range between 4.3 and 4.5; Whiskey Run sampling data range from 3.5 to 4.2; and one site in Stony Run has values between 3.6 and 5.0, while pH at another site ranges between 5.7 and 6.2.
Your new wording "Drury Run is a freestone stream, which means that its water comes from multiple sources" is a fairly close paraphrase (NB: WP:close paraphrasing is not recommended here) of the first few words in the six-sentence explanation provided in the new source you have cited, but it is not an accurate interpretation. That source and others indicate that main principle underlying the term "freestone" is that freestone streams are not limestone streams, which means that they have a low buffering capacity for acidity. Moreover, it's clear that this term belongs to the argot of fly-fishing -- it is not meaningful as water chemistry terminology, and Pennsylvania Angler & Boater is not a reliable source for technical information.

ADDED: A more scientifically credible source of information on this terminology is http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1168/index.html --Orlady (talk) 04:08, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, but the concerns I see here can't be addressed simply by changing a few words. --Orlady (talk) 04:03, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

There's no mention of freestone streams so that's a moot point now. The 5.3 to 5.8 comes from a site on the main stem, I've edited the article to reflect that. --Jakob (talk) 13:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

The changes made thus far have fixed a few things, but these were just examples of the issues with the article. I was hoping that the removal of the "freestone" sentence would be followed by a thorough review and revision of the article, but I guess that's not going to happen -- and I'm not interested in fully researching the subject and rewriting the article for you.

The article is a choppy assemblage of bits of information, most of them out of context, from various different sources. As noted above in connection with pH, some of the statements in the article are demonstrably wrong (another example being the unsourced assertion that "Drury Run is considered a high-quality coldwater fishery"), largely because bits of information with narrow relevance are incorrectly generalized as broad truths or because snippets from sources are repeated without any indication of their meaning or context (e.g., the statement that "the stream is infertile"). There are statements in the article that aren't obviously salient content that belongs in a concise encyclopedia article about this stream (specifically, the statement that the first school in the community of Renovo was built by Presbyterians and Methodists, the three sentences about bacterial levels in the stream in 1913). The existence of a dam on the creek is surely of encyclopedic interest, but it ought to be possible to say something more specific about it than that a dam was built sometime in a two-century period (referring to "A dam was built on Drury Run in the 1800s or 1900s"). The paragraph about "Community Loss Index" values might present salient information about the stream, but it's hard for the reader to determine that since there is no information about what this index signifies, and no indication of what terms like "site DRUR 3.5" refer to.

Regarding water chemistry and biology, I think it should be possible to summarize the details in the various sources by discussing the fact that the first several miles of the stream below Tamarack Swamp have good water quality and are high-quality aquatic habitat, but lower reaches are adversely affected by acid mine drainage. Please do not use my words. This source may be a helpful resource for writing a clear and concise overview of the stream and its condition, as long as regulatory designations like "High Quality Cold Water Fishery" and "attaining for aquatic life" aren't used without putting them in their regulatory context.

The existence of a single-sentence major section that is allegedly about the geology of the watershed (although its only content is the names of three coal seams) and that is inexplicably separate from the four-sentence major section entitled "Watershed" is a symptom of the organizational issues that earlier led me to say that this article needs copy-editing. Copy-editing should also attempt to address the usual kinds of wording and punctuation problems, of which this article has several. (Also try to use consistent spelling for "Whiskey Run.") --Orlady (talk) 15:27, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

@Orlady: I've copyedited much of the article, added context for the "DRUR 3.5" terminology, and removed the information about bacteria levels (which would be encylopedic if it were more recent...). I've followed the suggestions made in your second paragraph. No idea when the dam was build though; the sources don't seem to say much about that. --Jakob (talk) 16:22, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm still not thrilled with the article, but I think it's satisfactory for DYK now. Hook fact is verified. I still suggest the ALT1 wording for clarity. --Orlady (talk) 02:55, 28 February 2014 (UTC)