Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Timeline of drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was not promoted by User:The Rambling Man 09:16, 26 July 2008 [1].

---

Timeline of drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution

I believe that this list fits all of the following criteria: WP:WIAFL --—Preceding unsigned comment added by NuclearWarfare (talk • contribs)

• Comment Add a wikitable class to the table. It looks very non-standard compared to other tables right now. Gary King (talk) 21:04, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

• Comments
  • Make the table a wikitable as Gary suggests.
  • Widen the date column so the dates don't wrap around.
  • Don't have bold links in the lead.
  • There are hardly any references in the table, none in the lead.
  • WP:COLOR says using only colour to show a particular property is insufficient - you need to add something like an asterisk or a dagger as well as the colour.
  • Not sure why there's a Notes column - there are hardly any notes and those which exist can probably be merged into the main column.
  • Votes should be separated with an en-dash, not hyphen.
  • Same with page ranges in your references.
  • The date column does not sort. And there's little point in allowing the other column(s) to be sortable as they're free text and sorting is not useful.
• The Rambling Man (talk) 09:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments

• Can you widen the first column so the dates don't split? I have to widen my window a huge amount to get them onto one line. The Notes column is a sea of unused white.
• I've removed the autoformatting: it's no longer encouraged by MOSNUM, and I can assure you that no one minds US date formatting—especially when discussing the US Consitution. Tony (talk) 13:52, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments

Done Seeing the title "Timeline of the United States Constitution," I expected this article to include amendments to the Constitution (i.e., the content of List of amendments to the United States Constitution). Where I live (in the United States), ratified amendments become part of the Constitution, although they are still identified as amendments. I believe that the title needs to more accurately reflect the scope (for example, "Timeline of drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution"). (An alternative would be to add the history of the amendments to this article, but I don't think you want to do that.)

• This article needs to display the template Template:US Constitution article series.
• The lead sentence seems backwards to me (and it may be unnecessarily wordy). I suggest changing "From the 1786 Annapolis Convention, which recommended the calling of a Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, to the end of the last state ratifying convention in 1790, the process of drafting and ratifying the United States Constitution took nearly four years" to "The process of drafting and ratifying the United States Constitution took nearly four years, from the Annapolis Convention in 1786, which recommended calling a Constitutional Convention, to the final state ratifying convention in 1790."

--Orlady (talk) 18:05, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I've reverted some of the changes described above: (1) I made the table sortable because the event column can be sorted to isolate certain types of events (ratification, state conventions, elections of delegates, etc.). (2) I've replaced autoformatting because there are so few dates in the prose that there is little chance high value links will be drowned out by these links, so we might as well take advantage of the localization feature. On the point of references, I don't plan to add any further citations as I think anything not already cited is trivially verifiable, however anyone else is welcome to do more along these lines. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:50, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

• The "Notes" column could be much narrower to pay for more space in a couple of others. En dashes for ranges in the table, please (see MOS). Tony (talk) 16:10, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

For fear of repeating my comments,

• • Widen the date column so the dates don't wrap around.
  • Don't have bold links in the lead.
  • There are hardly any references in the table, none in the lead.
  • WP:COLOR says using only colour to show a particular property is insufficient - you need to add something like an asterisk or a dagger as well as the colour.
  • Not sure why there's a Notes column - there are hardly any notes and those which exist can probably be merged into the main column.
  • Votes should be separated with an en-dash, not hyphen.
  • Same with page ranges in your references.
  • The date column does not sort. And there's little point in allowing the other column(s) to be sortable as they're free text and sorting is not useful.
• None of these comments have been addressed. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:36, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Anyone who knows how to make a column wider is welcome to address your first point; the rest I have either responded to above or do not feel would add value for readers, though others who disagree are obviously welcome to work on them. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:10, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
    • Sorry but if you can't even be bothered to make the list comply with the WP:MOS then I suggest you withdraw this nomination because it will fail. The Rambling Man (talk) 06:16, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
      • The column width issue probably could be fixed simply by merging the material in the "notes" field into the main column (then delete the "notes" column), as The Rambling Man has suggested.
        I cannot support this as a featured list in its current form. Not only are there several WP:MOS issues, but I see the failure to provide navigation to other Constitution-related articles (which could be easily provided by adding Template:US Constitution article series) as a significant barrier to Featured status. If you don't want to fix the article, withdraw the nomination. --Orlady (talk) 15:52, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.