Talk:Grand Trunk Railway/Draft

With all due respect, this article is not ready for approval.

Russell Jones asked me to take a look at this article which he just nominated for approval and I have done so. With all due respect, I do not think this article is ready for approval.

This article was written in early 2007, and since then, a very few revisions/additions were made in early 2008. I have no quarrel with the content of the article. However, during the 2 years since it was created, it has not been formatted to be consistent with how CZ articles are meant to be formatted:

1. It contains a "See also" section (which is a Wikipedia-ism). The contents of that section should be moved to the "Related Articles" subpage.
2. It contains an "External links" section (another Wikipedia-ism). The contents of that section should be moved to the "External Articles" subpage.
3. The only contents of the current "Related Articles" subpage are articles collected by a robot. Those robot-harvested articles (plus the articles from 1. above and plus others) need to be sorted into the required format of "Parent topics" (such as History), "Subtopics" (such as Railway history and Canada, history) and "Other related topics".
4. It strikes me that some of the sources listed in the "Bibliography" subpage (especially the one listed as a Primary Source) should be used in the main article page as in-text references in the <ref></ref> format. The article currently does not have even one in-text reference.
5. The current article consists of one large section. I would like to see it split into an introduction (lede) and at least 2 more sections.

I realize that all of the above listed items are rather trivial, but they do need to be fixed. I could very easily fix items 1., 2., and 3. above and I am quite willing to do so if Joe Quick (our Approvals manager), Hayford Pierce and/or Matt Innis would say that my doing so would not disqualify me from adding my name to the approval nomination. After all, fixing 1., 2., and 3.would be simple formatting copy edits.

As for 4. and 5. above, I think those should be done by someone who is more of a historian than I am. Milton Beychok 22:10, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

It does not in any way disqualify you from participating in the approval process, Milt. It would disqualify you from being the only editor to oversee approval if you were to make content changes, but Russell has not made content changes so he could approve it himself without you. I consider the single-editor method of approval to cover cases like this where there is a single un-involved editor and an author-editor.

Of course, if someone else wants to take care of Milt's concerns, that's great too! --Joe (Approvals Manager) 22:29, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Joe, and I will go ahead and fix the first 3 items above. Milton Beychok 22:46, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments, Milt. I took this about as far as I could content-wise (see below, too). It was RJ's project and it looked pretty complete to me, so I thought, let's fly this up the flag pole and see what others think... Thanks for pointing out the formatting issues. I can do. And, Joe, I did think about going solo on the approval, but I've been called out before for doing that after making revisions. Russell D. Jones 00:07, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I am less troubled than Milton by the lack of in-text references here, since that is fairly common in historical writing. As I read over the article, nothing in particular really stood out as demanding substantiation and there are no direct quotes requiring accreditation, so I would recommend we leave it as is for the first approval. Russell has done a nice job polishing this one up and I am going to join him in recommending it for approval. It would be nice if we had someone from engineering to take on the issues there, but we don't seem to have anyone at this point. Perhaps the discussion on this page will be enough to red-flag the matter for future revisions; that doesn't seem to me to be a sufficient reason not to approve it at this point. It is a modest entry that colors within the lines. If there were engineering issues that leapt off the page (like crossing Lake Michigan lengthwise!) it might be a different story, so if anyone with an engineering background sees anything like that, speak up. Otherwise, it looks to me to be good to go.

Content question

This article appears to deal completely with the business aspects of creating and running the railroad. Were there any engineering challenges to be solved in its implementation or operation? Transportation-related articles have been assigned to Engineering because there usually are some technical issues. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:39, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I really don't know that much about GT, GTW, or GTP, to answer this question. There was the Pacific extension, but by the time GT did that the transcontinentals had worked out the problems of traversing the Rockies. Russell D. Jones 00:07, 5 August 2009 (UTC)