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

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 22 April 2020 [1].

Morpeth, Northumberland[edit]

Nominator(s): Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 15:53, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a historic market town in Northumberland. I brought it up to good article status around a year ago and recently requested a peer review (which had no participation). The town is a crossing point over the River Wansbeck, has a castle (and had several now destroyed ones) and is the location of Emily Davison's grave. The town in the past was prone to flooding and there was a notable flood in 2008 (2008 Morpeth flood), but flood defences were built in 2017 to mitigate this. This is my first FAC. All comments, suggestions, thoughts etc. are welcome. Thanks for reviewing! Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 15:53, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose from Noswall59

I'm sorry to have oppose this Dreamy Jazz – I see that this is your first attempt at FA and it can be a daunting process, especially when you've put a lot of work into an article (as you have here). However, there are a number of structural and research issues with this article which mean that I am not sure it meets our criteria for research quality or comprehensiveness (1b and 1c). I will enumerate the reasons below

  • History
    • Comprehensiveness: The history seems to be rather "potted" from the medieval period onward; there is no mention of the town's economy except for the market; there is almost nothing on the 19th and 20th centuries. What about industry, housing and planning – it looks like there have been considerable housing developments around the town over the last century: when did this happen? Why? It's important to remember that recent history is still history.
    • Sourcing: There is an over-dependence on newspaper sources for historical facts, e.g. (but not limited to) footnotes 8, 9 and 12. You should only really be citing works of historical scholarship, reliable history books, articles in scholarly/antiquarian journals, PhD theses, etc. These will often not be available online, so you may have to visit libraries.
    • Sourcing advice: I have never visited or studied Morpeth before, but I was surprised to see so few books cited in this article. A search in the British Library's catalogue revealed a large number of sources which you could use to expand this article:
      • Alan Davison and Brian Harle, Morpeth, Northumberland: A Social History (Morpeth: Friends of Carlisle Park, 2018)
      • John Hodgson, A History of Morpeth (1832)
      • James Fergusson, Morpeth Mechanics' Institute: Its History from 1825 to 1875 (Morpeth: D. F. Wilson, c. 1875)
      • Ralph Crawford, History of Morpeth Gas Light Company (Newcastle upon Tyne: Andrew Reid & Co., 1933)
      • T. H. Rowland, Bygone Morpeth (Chichester: Phillimore, 1989)
      • Janet Brown (ed.), Morpeth's Market: A Study of the Market and Fair from the Earliest Days until the Present Time (Morpeth: Morpeth Antiquarian Society, 1999)
      • Roland Bibby, The Medieval Guilds of Morpeth (Morpeth: Morpeth Antiquarian Society, 1998)
      • Peter R. Carling, Morpeth and the Railways (Morpeth: Morpeth Antiquarian Society, 2013)
      • R. M. Hodnett, Politics and the Northumberland miners: Liberals and Labour in Morpeth and Wansbeck, 1890-1922 (Cleveland: University of Teesside, c. 1994)
      • Bridget Gubbins, De Merlay Dynasty: The Family Who Ruled Morpeth 1085-1265 (Morpeth: Greater Morpeth Development Trust, 2018)
      • Craig Armstrong, Morpeth in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2016)
      • Roger Hawkins also produced a series of short pamphlets called Morpathia, some of which are in the local library; these included histories of the common lands of Morpeth and the founding of the public library.
      • A number of these books have been produced by the Morpeth Antiquarian Society, so you might want to see if they have anything else of use.
This list is not exhaustive and I have no idea how reliable/useful these sources are, but I would expect most of them to be used or at least mentioned in a further reading section. Have you consulted them?
  • Other advice:
    • You should have sections on the town's economy and demography; you may wish to include a section on public services, and subsections in religion on demographics past and present and ecclesiastical (parish) history.
    • You may want to consider prosifying the lists under landmarks and notable people.
    • You could add very brief notes about the history of Morpeth's educational establishments other than the grammar school. Historical directories can be useful (many old ones are scanned here); you might need to do some further research for later primary schools, especially in local newspapers; contacting the local archives or checking the British Newspaper Archive may help.
    • Overall, I haven't been assessing on prose standard; you may want to enlist the help of a copyeditor at the Guild of Copyeditors (WP:GOCE) to take a fine comb over the article after you've finished working on it; Peer Review (WP:PR) can be helpful too, though it depends on the willingness of others to review your work (but then, so does FAC). There are several unofficial user-written guides to writing the crisp prose that FAC demands; for instance User:Tony1/How to improve your writing and User:Tony1/Redundancy exercises: removing fluff from your writing; Giano's A fool's guide to writing a featured article is getting on a bit, but still has some good advice. As I say, they may not apply to you, but I found these sorts of guides really useful.
    • Finally, while it's not perfect (and probably too long), I expanded Sleaford some time ago and you might want to check it out. I never took it to FA because I was never convinced it was up to scratch, but it's probably not far off.

In short, I think it will take quite a bit of extra work to bring Morpeth up to scratch, which might be difficult under the lockdown. However, my intention is not to discourage you and I am confident that this could be made much more comprehensive with the right changes. Look for as many reliable sources as you can find about the town; make its history into a comprehensive summary which brings the reader down to the present day; then cover as many aspects of the town's current state as you can—economy, population, government, transport, culture, architecture and built environment, schooling. If you do pursue it, good luck! Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 10:22, 22 April 2020 (UTC).[reply]

Noswall59 thanks for these comments. I'll try to address these the best I can in the lockdown. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 10:57, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@FAC coordinators: based on the comment above I have a lot of work to do with this article before it is up to standard. I'm not sure what the process is for closing FACs when the nominator wants the review closed, but if it is allowed, could this be archived. If this is kept open I will try to address issues, but with the lockdown in place (for the foreseeable future), I won't be able to properly deal with them, so objections probably won't be addressed for a while. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 11:13, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Dreamy Jazz, thanks for that, I think withdrawing is probably the right thing given what you've said, and pinging the coords is exactly how you go about it -- I'll take care of things from here. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 11:50, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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