Talk:La Valencia Hotel

Suggestion for work

Doncram: Since there appears to be some available time on this Draft, I would say the following. I applaud this work on the hstoric hotels, in every case where third-party, independent sourcing (articles written by others about them) can be found, so that reliance is not on dependent, promotional web pages. I especially applaud work that has historic associations—one hotel I recall was, at one point, the largest horse breeding operation west of the Mississippi, yes? This sort of valid, source-based connection is often lost, even in quality encyclopedias such as Britannica, and so is a contribution to understanding that WP can offer.

Apart from notability, the only suggestion I have for work, here and generally, is this. Making a proposed stub look like WIkipedia at its best can only serve to smooth its transition to Published. For the little extra work it takes to move a stub from being substantively solid, to looking substantively solid, the extra work pays for itself many times over (i.e., in avoided pre-publication conflicts). Each incoming editor has their pet peeves—I for one take umbrage when a source lists an author, but we do not include it in the citation, and when books are presented as sources, but without page numbers (that is, per WP:VERIFY, anything that makes verification of content more onerous)—and the accumulation of those irritations, subjective as they are, can cause problems.

In that regard, I would suggest, (i) making sure a basis set of information always appears, e.g., in biographical, I do not proceed until date and place of birth can be sourced, and I imagine something like date built (and certain other fields in an infobox) would be a part of your basis set for buildings. Then, every time, provide those. This serves two purposes. First, it makes more uniform the initial appearance of the stub article, and reduces "what am I seeing here" irritations by incoming editors. Second, once you have a "uniformized" article or two accepted like that (which I think you already have), then if you face a capricious decision, you have something to point toward, to argue your case. ("This article Z is nearly identical in format and quality to the preceding accepted articles, X and Y, and so there is no reason it should not go forward.") This is the only substance issue I raise, and it is not a critique of your past work, it is only a suggestion to make things uniform around that basis set of content.

Then also, with regard to appearance, (ii) moving toward a scholarly paragraphed style of presentation, thinking hard about how to group citation-based statements as cohesively as possible into units more than a single sentence or two long, and thinking hard about how to segue between seemingly different subjects within short paragraphs. The more normal and developed the proposed stub content looks, from the start, the less likely that issues arise. (Today, I turned a series of bullet points with no infobox at Aleksandr Sorokin into a prose article, and added the infobox—do the diff—knowing that its appearance, as I'd found it, spelled trouble for this otherwise notable subject.)

And finally, also regarding the "look" of the stub, (iii) moving toward a full citation style, always using citation templates (that ease incoming editor's desire to help out), and then, be "non-minimalist", filling out all citations in a common uniform way—in particular, filling author, date, and date-accessed fields every time (these being fields often skipped over), and in specialised citation templates, making sure critical fields are filled ("page =" in "{{cite book…", "time =" in "{{cite AV…", etc.) And I would say doing this to the 9s does not hurt. An article presenting something like "HHA Staff" or "NPS.gov Staff" as author may seem unnecessary, but it signals to incoming authors that all useful information has been extracted from the citation, so the job is done, and not half-done. (And on an NPOV note, it also make clear that the source is third-party sourced. I just worked extensively on an imprisoned convicts article, after finding upwards of a third of the sources cited there were written by the convict or his father, the truth of which was fairly hidden by omission of author names in the citations.)

That is it—just some things to make stubs look more uniform and polished, to lower the repeating hurdles faced to get past reviewing editor pet peeves. (In this editor's experienced opinion.) 2601:246:C700:558:B5DC:4EAA:E1D:6C21 (talk) 20:59, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Had some time open up today, so I did some of these things to this article. See what you think. 2601:246:C700:558:2DE1:8C15:7BAA:B1D2 (talk) 00:12, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

The following comment was copied from draft article:

• Comment: This hotel has so many reviews and coverage in bookings websites etc. that wading through a lot to get to more substantial coverage takes effort. I have spent some effort but there is far more available. Touristy books and reviews are legitimate sources for Wikipedia, also. Briefly, there is substantial coverage and IMO this is Wikipedia-notable. --Doncram (talk) 21:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC) (principal author of [first draft of] article)

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Thanks User:2601:246:C700:558:B5DC:4EAA:E1D:6C21 for extended comments. I will have to read and absorb for a bit! And thanks User:Bkissin and User:MB for your contributions. --Doncram (talk) 00:38, 21 January 2022 (UTC)