Talk:2014 South Napa earthquake/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 06:27, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

GA criteria

1a, good prose: yes.

1b, compliance with MOS and layout guidelines: mostly, but the lead could use some expansion to adequately summarize the article.

2a, reference formatting: needs significant revision.

2b, all material properly cited: mostly but there are a couple of minor lapses.

2c, no original research: yes.

2d, plagiarism: there are major problems with copied text that need more thorough checking and rewriting.

3a, covers all aspects of the topic: no, and I think major expansion is needed to cover the aftermath of the quake.

3b, no unnecessary detail: mostly, with a couple of minor exceptions. Unless you count the proliferation of very similar sources (news stories from around the date of the event) when fewer sources would do as well; that part seems unnecessary to me.

4, neutral: yes.

5, stable: yes.

6a, images are properly licensed: yes.

6b, images are relevant and well-captioned: mostly, but I think one caption could be improved.

Lead

The one-paragraph lead seems a bit short for an article of this length, although it's within the guidelines of WP:LEADLENGTH given the relatively short (7k characters) length of the overall article.

Everything in the lead is properly expanded elsewhere. The only part of the article that doesn't seem adequately summarized in the lead is the extensive "damage" subsection, which gets only half a sentence as summary.

The infobox is properly populated, sourced, and well illustrated. I'm surprised the infobox template doesn't have a parameter for the fault that caused the quake, but it doesn't. However, the footnotes in the infobox are separated from the text they source by spaces, violating MOS:PUNCTFOOT.

Tectonic setting

Nothing in here is specifically about the quake, but that's ok as it's important background material, mostly not treated in unnecessary detail (but see my point about slip rates below).

"runs nearly the length of California": really? The 250 miles between Point Arena and Crescent City don't count towards that length? In any case the single source used for this section doesn't say much about the San Andreas system outside of Napa, so the first sentence of this section needs another source.

The phrase "transfers slip" is copied from the source; it's not a long enough copy to be problematic from the copied text point of view, but it makes me worry that the source hasn't been fully digested in the editing process. Is there some way of explaining in a less-technical phrase what this means?

The two different slip rates looked on a quick reading to be contradicting each other, until I realized that one was for the whole shear zone and the other was for the specific fault. The article does already state this, but maybe it could be made more clear?

I think it would be appropriate to give the actual sources for the slip rate studies, to give credit to those authors rather than implying as you do that the rates were originally given in the source you cite. What I usually do for references like this is to copy them from the other source you're already using, but then (to indicate that the reference is a copied one rather than one I'm directly using to write the artcle) adding "As cited by [the reference you copied it from]" at the end.

Out of context, it's not obvious what those slip rates might mean. How does that translate into frequency of quakes of this magnitude? Or, put another way, what does including this number tell the reader about this quake?

The source mentions that the fault runs along the western edge of the Napa Valley. This seems worth mentioning in our article as well.

Earthquake

"15,000 people experienced severe shaking, 106,000 people felt very strong shaking, 176,000 felt strong shaking and 738,000 felt moderate shaking" is copied verbatim, without quote marks, from its source. This level of copying is close to an insta-fail, and would be one if part of a larger pattern.

"lasted 10 to 20 seconds, depending on" is also too long a phrase to be copied from its source.

Reference [9] (Rossmann) comes up blank for me, and archive.org is no help. It looks reliable enough anyway, but maybe the same fact can be given a more accessible replacement reference?

Damage

"has been red-tagged" the present perfect tense indicates that it is still red-tagged. Is this true? If not, "was red-tagged" may be a better choice.

"hundreds of storefront windows shattered" and "On Mare Island, water mains": two more phrases copied from their source.

"500 had been yellow-tagged": the source says "about 500", so this number should not be reported as exact.

"the economic costs to Napa County may go as high": this is reported as a projection of future costs, but what was future then is past now. Do we have a better number in retrospect? And if not, could we at least change the tense?

"downgraded to between $80 and $100 million": I don't know how to interpret this number, because it is a subset of the total damage and we didn't see what number that subset's estimate was downgraded from.

"At least six of the injuries were classified as critical": the source for this sentence contradicts this, giving the number as three.

"49 people were injured, including two who were hospitalized": closely paraphrased from the source.

Who died, and where were they injured?

Injuries

In the image, what does "CISN ShakeMap" mean? Is it necessary to open the image to find out what the colors indicate? And why is this image part of the "Injuries" section?

Earthquake warning

Brocher et al repeat the 10-second-warning-time estimate, and are subsequent to the source you give for the 5-second warning. So it might be more accurate to state that estimates of the warning time ranged from 5 to 10 seconds, rather than trying to choose one yourself as the more accurate estimate.

"commanded the bay doors to open": what is the source for this claim?

Missing topics

The main thing that seems missing to me from the article is any discussion of the long-term effects of the quake on the region. A quick search of a single local newspaper found several articles discussing this, that might be worth using as sources to expand the article: [1] [2] [3] [4].

In the physical effects of the earthquake, surface rupturing is not mentioned. Reference [6] (Brocher et al) give a map showing that this happened extensively on the west side of the valley (away from Highway 29 and the population centers).

Reference [6] also mentions how far away the earthquake was felt (Reno, McKinleyville, and Bakersfield); again, this seems like relevant and interesting information to include.

The declaration of a disaster by Obama should be included in the article, not relegated to a title in an external link.

References

[3] Stevens does not seem to be formatted in Citation Style 1, matching the other references (the date is in the wrong place). Using the {{cite news}} template would help. [4] Levs and [6] Brocher are formatted in Citation Style 2, not CS1. And [4] Levs and [7] Levs, despite both being from CNN, are not formatted consistently (compare the formatting of "CNN"). The same thing happens with [3] and [8] from the LA Times. I gave up checking on consistent formatting at this point, since it needs major cleanup.

There are a lot of separate news reports from within a few days of the event, used to source different details of the event. Many of these details appear in multiple sources. Would it be possible to consolidate by finding a smaller set of sources that together cover the same details?

[20] KGO-TV report fails WP:V. Who can check now what was broadcast at some time on some not-even-stated day?

All of the sources look appropriately reliable.

External links

Including even more at-the-time news coverage, not used as references, seems pointless to me.

Summary

Unfortunately, I think the copied text and major missing topics make this a quick fail. It can be nominated and reviewed again once those issues are fixed.

—David Eppstein (talk) 07:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: thanks for the outstanding review and action items. cc Dawnseeker2000, Stepheng3, Napa56, Cullen328, Rolf h nelson: can you all help? --DarTar (talk) 04:56, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I can continue to improve it here and there. The main thing with this GA nom is that it was probably done too soon after the event. Some of the the small improvements that I can continue to make are based on new papers. Dawnseeker2000 16:40, 9 January 2016 (UTC)