User talk:Mcdonar

Next Generation Air Transportation System

System Wide Information Management

Next Generation Data Communications

Next Generation Network Enabled Weather

National Airspace System Voice Switch

Performance-based Navigation

Performance Based Navigation

Required Navigation Performance

Area navigation

Your work on Next Generation Air Transportation System articles

Hi there Richard. Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions and particularly for your work on the series of articles relating to the Next Generation Air Transportation System.It looks like you've been doing a good job of improving these and making them more encyclopedic as per the suggestions on the talk page. However, I've just got a couple of points to discuss following my first look at them.

Firstly, if we are taking text verbatim from a US government source, in this case the FAA fact sheet, we should add in a note at the bottom to say that. There is a category of suitable templates at Category:United States government attribution templates and in particular, the one that applies here is {{FAA.Gov}}. User:Moonriddengirl has kindly added this template to the Next Generation Air Transportation System article down at the bottom. Would you mind adding it to other related pages where it applies please? The point of adding this is to address any issues one might have with Wikipedia:Plagiarism: public domain sources are great but we do want to acknowledge that someone else put in the time to write it. Adding in the template does just that.

Templates added -- Richard McDonald Woods 16:13, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Secondly, using the Fact Sheet as a source has led to a certain bias emerging within the articles. An encyclopedia entry should remain neutral and present only facts we can verify in reliable sources. The FAA are clearly supportive of the NGATS but Wikipedia should not inherit this position by default. If possible, the next step to improving the articles would be to find some independent coverage (perhaps articles in prominent newspapers such as the New York Times) of this system and incorporate some other viewpoints. Using Google News or similar might be a good first move.
Finally, before I noticed the Public Domain attribution issue I reworded the lede of the Next Generation Air Transportation System article and left a note on the talk page. If you take a look at this you might consider it worthwhile to reword the other article ledes along the same lines to make the first thing people read more encyclopedic. Essentially a good guide is to ensure the first sentence or two answers the questions what is the article about, and why is the article subject notable.

Sorry for the somewhat lengthy comment! Your contributions are really appreciated and with a bit of tweaking will help increase the encyclopedic coverage of an important-sounding technology. If you have any further comments or queries simply leave them here and I'll respond back, or feel free to contact me via my talk page. Thanks. Nick Ottery (talk) 13:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]