Template:Did you know nominations/Fast Mail (Southern Railway)

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: rejected by Flibirigit (talk) 01:25, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Fast Mail (Southern Railway)

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... that Old 97, inaugurated in 1902, was the first dedicated mail and express train in the southern United States? "Fast Run to Atlanta". The Times-Democrat. New Orleans, LA. November 3, 1902. p. 1 – via Newspapers.com.
- ALT1:... that Old 97, discontinued in 1907, was the last dedicated mail and express train in the United States to receive a subsidy from the U.S. Government? "The Last of the Special Mail Flyers". New Berne Weekly Journal. New Bern, NC. December 11, 1906. p. 2 – via Newspapers.com.

Reviewed: QPQ at Template:Did you know nominations/George Brian Sinclair
Comment: I found this article was unreferenced, and in adding references, fleshed it out.

5x expanded by Slambo (talk). Self-nominated at 14:45, 3 June 2020 (UTC).

General eligibility:

New enough:
Long enough: - Falls short of the necessary 6,670 to make it 5-fold.

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook eligibility:

Cited: - The subsidy (federal or state?) is not mentioned clearly in the article.
Interesting:
Other problems: - I suggest using "federal government" or "federal subsidy" in ALT1 to avoid confusion.

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Needs further expansion to meet the length requirement. I find ALT1 to be more interesting, though perhaps another hook about how it only operated for five years would work. Sounder Bruce 03:47, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't able to easily make a word count calculation from when I started adding to this article. As to the verifiability... The article cited quotes in the first sentence of paragraph two: "This is the last of the fast mail trains, that received a bonus for its extra service in carrying the United States mail." This newspaper article calls it a bonus, but other newspaper citations, including Journal and Tribune (March 9, 1906), Farmer and Mechanic (April 17, 1906), and The Union Republican (December 13, 1906) (all of which are cited in the relevant paragraph in the History section) call it a subsidy and together corroborate that it was the last fast mail train to receive such a subsidy.

I'll see about adding more detail and expanding it further today. Slambo (Speak) 16:33, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

My reasoning for the increase in article size qualification is the byte count as shown in the article history. The edit before my additions showed the article size at 2,148 bytes, while the article size at my last edit before today (on June 1, 2020) was 17,880 bytes. Slambo (Speak) 16:52, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Slambo, the five-fold requirement is based on prose size and can be calculated using DYKcheck. The pre-expansion version (from November 29) had 1334 prose characters, and the current version (from June 1) has 6,168. Sounder Bruce 17:54, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. The target isn't that much further, about 500 characters, so a little bit of background about fast mail trains in general would help to get it over the base count. I was looking through my personal library of books (some of which are on my LibraryThing catalog) and magazines but saw more about the service type in general or as practiced by other railroads rather than about this train specifically. Slambo (Speak) 16:21, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

I've made a start on some background text. I could add more, but tried to stick with just the most relevant information. I haven't added the script noted above yet, but my word processor (OpenOffice.org) says that the prose in the new background section is 1441 characters long. Slambo (Speak) 03:30, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Slambo: Thanks for linking to LibraryThing...never knew it existed, and glad that it's now free. I've been maintaining my own spreadsheet but it's not as presentable.

For the article: I don't think some of the background subsection is needed here in this article, as it would presumably be covered in an overview article like mail train. It can be reduced by a bit and still meet the five-fold requirement (FYI, the block quote is not included in the character count). Sounder Bruce 05:43, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

@Slambo and SounderBruce:, there have been no comments here in over three weeks. What's going on folks? Flibirigit (talk) 12:32, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I've been driving all over the state for work this month. This week, for example, I was in Milwaukee on Monday, La Crosse on Tuesday and Janesville on Thursday. I would think that the comment that we can take text out and still meet the length requirements should satisfy the 5-fold increase. The citations in the article use both "bonus" and "subsidy" apparently interchangeably, and saying federal government rather than federal subsidy in the hook makes no difference to me for that reason. Slambo (Speak) 17:35, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Slambo: I understand you have a busy travel schedule, but you have not edited this article since June 19. Since it's your nomination, it's up to you to make the changes and for the reviewer to complete the review. When do you reasonably think you can finish things up and let the reviewer know that he can finish the review? Thanks, Yoninah (talk) 18:31, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

The nominator is editing on Wikipedia, but not this article. Marking for closure as unsuccessful. Yoninah (talk) 13:03, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Closing nomination as abandoned. Flibirigit (talk) 01:25, 31 July 2020 (UTC)