Wikipedia:Peer review/Interstate 30/archive1

Interstate 30

Looking to see what I have to do to this article so it becomes a Featured Article.

Thanks, JC7V (talk) 02:27, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

OK, I'm going to print it out and take a look at it over the holiday ... Daniel Case (talk) 20:14, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

OK, sorry this took so long, but, you know, holidays.

I would first like to note that, unlike my usual experience, there was not a lot of actual copy editing necessary after I printed it out and read through it with a red pen. Grammar, spelling and usage were pretty good. My compliments to the writer(s) responsible.

Most of what I did write was more to the point of things that need to be addressed at a deeper level than a mere copy edit. The overriding issue here is that I highly commend the improvement of this article to the more active involvement of the U.S. Roads project. Some of the active editors there have, it seems, made some edits here but on the whole this article does not seem to have gotten much serious USRD attention. It's a shame, because there's a nice set of standards for road articles that, applied here, would constitute major improvement. So, if you would like to get it to FA status (and I strongly recommend going for GA first) you should go over to the U.S. roads talk page and ask for help. You'll get it.

Now, for specifics ...

The intro

It's too short. Hasn't been expanded in over five years, even as the article has. At the very least it needs a graf (or two) summarizing the history as described further down. And I think that first graf of the route description section would be better utilized in the intro, once it's properly sourced.

Route description

When I read "route description" as the hed for a section, and it usually is the first section of a road article, I expect to start reading about where the road starts and what it's like there. Instead, here we get a couple of superlatives about the interstate itself.

As I said above this could and should be in the intro. The fact that it's the shortest two-digit-ending-in-zero interstate is to me a significant aspect of its notability (although you could say that interstates 50 and 60 are both undefeatably shorter, as they themselves are 0 miles long ). We should find a way to source that. When I've wanted to make the point about things like this that are a) indisputably true but b) difficult to reliably source online since the only places where this gets pointed out are roadfan sites that do not meet our criteria, I have instead relied on a long note, usually pointing out and citing the reliably sourced mileage of the next shortest/longest contender. See how I did it in the lede graf of New York State Route 22, an FA for years which ran on the Main Page last August.

In the Texas section, the narrative flow is interrupted by two sentences explaining the relationship between the road and the Dallas Cowboys' stadia, ostensibly so we understand why it was named after Tom Landry. That belongs in the history section. Likewise, the mention of future plans for the road through downtown Dallas belongs in a "future" section, not here.

There is also a reference to the "Mixmaster" exit at I-35E that should be explained a bit for the millions of readers who don't live in the DFW Metroplex.

And after this understandable discussion of the Metroplex section of I-30, busy and important, we get maybe half a graf about the other nearly 200 miles or so through Texas, and then one overlong graf about Arkansas which similarly spends much of its time on the Little Rock area.

So what's everything else besides Texarkana? Chopped liver?

As I reader I might want to get a sense of what I-30 is like out in the in-between. First, the description doesn't even mention the way the highway, having run more or less due east-west through the Metroplex, starts veering east-northeast at Exit 52B, then a bit more after US 80 splits off, holding that course on up to Greenville, where it returns to the due east heading. Then, at Sulphur Springs it goes a bit further north to go east again, only to turn east-northeast again just short of Mount Pleasant until it gets to New Boston, where it then heads east to Texarkana.

In Arkansas there is less of this, since its general course is almost northeast to Little Rock, but we could mention that it does turn more to the north-northeast past Arkadelphia to Caddo Springs.

And along the way we might want to give readers a sense of what the terrain around the road is like. As I began looking at Google Maps to write the above, I found out that just east of the Metroplex there's this bridge across a fork of Lake Ray Hubbard, then a mile-long causeway across the main body of the lake as we get into Rockwall. Really! I would never have known about this from the article, and I shouldn't have to go to Google to find out.

As I-30 treks out across East Texas I can see (again from Google, and Street View) that the land off the road is mostly open and cleared farmland, very gently rolling (BTW, a fun exercise would be to figure where the highest point on the road is) but generally level, with the exception of the wooded areas around White Oak Creek and the Sulphur River in Morris County, in the section with the longest distances between exits on the Texas section of the interstate. There are also some pretty long bridges here over what seems to be wet in the satellite view but is dry in Street View, and the Sulphur is crossed in its wooded section (riparian buffer? Perhaps protected by law?) by a bridge that seems to be about 1,500 or so feet long ... again, I had to find out about this through Google.

In Arkansas, by contrast, the road seems to pass through more woodland, and closely parallel the Ouachita River from Arkadelphia to where it finally crosses it around Rockport. This would be worth noting.

An expanded section would be helped, of course, by getting some more picture to go with it. There aren't many pictures on Commons we could use (this one would be nice for the state line, though) but that doesn't mean we can't make more free images or find some on Flickr.

Lastly, when we mention I-49—I realize it currently just sort of ends anticlimactically north of Texarkana, but it would only be right to mention (since the sentences on Little Rock are fastidious about this) that southbound I-49 from Texarkana takes traffic to Shreveport and southern Louisiana.'

History

The first graf feels left over from when it might well have been the only graf in the section, and as such now it's out of order. The section should begin with the second graf.

The last graf begins with the awkwardly worded sentence telling us that the road "was proposed to be extended". This leaves us asking two questions: By who? The federal government? The Arkansas DOT? It could be one of those two, probably the latter, but the article doesn't tell us (And when it does, it's time to get rid of the passive voice that gives rise to that awkwardness).

And when? It seems from the context two sentences later that this was sometime earlier this decade, but this should be stated more clearly and right off the bat.

I would also find it interesting to read if building all those bridges, and the causeway across the lake, in Texas, posed any significant engineering challenges, if something along those lines can be found.

References

Looking over them, there's a fair amount that are sort of on the old side ... some going back to 2008, many from the earlier years of this decade, and only a few recent. It'd be prudent to go through all the old ones reference by reference, make sure they're still live, add an archive.org link if they aren't (and actually, do that even for the ones that are still live) and also make sure they do say what they are used to support.

That is my review. If you have any questions about it, please let me know. Daniel Case (talk) 06:06, 5 January 2019 (UTC)