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

The article was removed 16:09, 15 January 2007.

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Carlsbad Caverns National Park[edit]

Review commentary[edit]

"Brilliant prose" promotion. Messages left at Geography and Protected areas. Sandy (Talk) 22:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC) Message has also been left at Bevo. Sandy (Talk) 01:45, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Much of the "Geology" and "Bats" sections, and some of the "History" section, is copied off of [1], which is copyrighted. Needless to say, the referencing is poor and the "Rooms" section is not very comprehensive. --Schzmo 16:16, 9 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Needs inline cites, and the copyvio info removed. Once left with the rest, there's a lot of work to be done in order to retain FA status. LuciferMorgan 22:23, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment How do you know this article is the copyvio violator and not the external site? Maybe both use the same PD work. --mav 00:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The only indication of copyvio is an exact copy-paste from non-PD external site and the external site is not a fork from wikipedia. I'm not an author/editor of this article, so I ran google search test. There's not exactly copy-paste material, except from [2] for the Bats section. I'm going to run several tests again later. — Indon (reply) — 01:29, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • (Edit conflict) I checked the Internet Archive of http://www.carlsbad.caverns.national-park.com/info.htm and it looks like the Bats section was written way back in 1998 (the other sections were added a few years later). Did some digging around in the history of this WP article, and it looks like the earliest version of it was a direct copy/paste job from the outside page. Unfortunately, no one ever bothered to reword some of the text :(. Yikes. Not good. Gzkn 01:32, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • (Edit conflict too) Wait a minute... I checked again the site [3], and it turns out that there are some exact sentences from this site appear in this article. And I don't think that site is a fork from Wikipedia. Yes, it's not good. — Indon (reply) — 01:33, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    Damn! I didn't read it carefully the nomination text that it has pointed the original site: http://www.carlsbad.caverns.national-park.com/info.htm. So no need to run google search, it's a copyvio. :"> — Indon (reply) — 01:38, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    And some still wonder why we insist upon citing older FAs. Sandy (Talk) 01:40, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    At the bottom of the page, there's this note: "The initial content for this article was provided by the National Park Service Carlsbad Caverns Information Page." Unfortunately, whoever wrote that erroneously thought that the Carlsbad Caverns Information Page was in any way affiliated with the NPS. Gzkn 01:48, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    OK, I searched phrases from each section and I found out that the Geology section is not copyvio, as the text from that website was copied from this NPS web page, which is in the public domain. However, I could not find anything else for the other sections, so they may still be copyvio. --Schzmo 02:38, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    Hmmm, well that's reassuring. Maybe http://www.carlsbad.caverns.national-park.com/info.htm got all of its information from the public domain...I'll do some more research... Gzkn 02:46, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    This seems to suggest that the National Park Service website actually copied its information from there too, as the former appeared much earlier than the latter. Gzkn 03:25, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    • Cough - There were many things published before the Internet came along. :) --mav

Heh, true. Perhaps the best way to resolve this is to contact the NPS or that guy who owns www.carlsbad.caverns.national-park.com and wrote it? Gzkn 03:05, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I had thought that some had not bothered reading anything until it appeared on a CRT screen: A tendency still present.

On the copyright/borrowed issue. At the least, public domain or not, the sections taken from another site must be cited. This is a separate issue than is that of the original source questions (something from the public domain can still be plagiarized--as can be something publicly reprinted with private approval of the original author).

Given the significant age of the original as well as sea-changes in our common sensitivity to, and sense of outrage about, the commercial destructive exploitation of public treasures (I'm thinking I heard something about protests against the continued in-cavern vendors and new evidence that this commercial presence was deteriorating the caves--but I have been wrong already several times today!) perhaps the best route would be to delete the offending parts and invite a "from scratch" contribution. Does this make sense to anyone? Roy 01:14, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have to ask if there is any real reason to have a "Rooms" section in this article. Granted, some of the most important rooms should be described, but in articles on buildings we don't describe every room, so why should we describe them in a cave?

I would encourage keeping the rooms distinction. This flows from the historic categorization of caverns. That is, unlike rooms of a building, the different caverns are subjected to sometimes subtle differences which over time, result in strikingly different (or similar) appearances. While the trained geologist may inwardly snicker these caverns should be featured here because of their impact on, and influence of, the public. Poets have often invoked metaphors in an attempt to do justice to the unexpected beauty or drama.

Perhaps it would be best for us to retain both of these perspectives: The academic geologic and the popular rhapsodic? This is not to suggest that geologists are not so mechanical as to be immune from a gasp at an unexpected scene, or that the public is not fully interested in the geologic details. Perhaps both of these perspectives should be honored. Perhaps through some new or renewed structural mechanism in the article's organization?

Oh, and somewhere in the wikipedia entry covering the residence of the President might in fact mention "the White House", and even "the oval office" and "Lincoln's bedroom. . ." Roy 01:14, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• • The geology sections should be broken off into an article along the lines of Geology of the Grand Canyon area.
  • The section on bats should be expanded to include other fauna (and may be even flora if there is any) in the cave.

Just a few suggestions of things I can see. *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 17:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• • • Geology of the Grand Canyon area (which I wrote) was never split off from the Grand Canyon article. It is a full article about the geology. The geology section at Grand Canyon (which I also wrote) is a several paragraph summary that should really be a wee bit longer. The geology section in this article is starting to get a bit long, but not long enough yet to warrant splitting and summarizing since the summary left here would need to be well over half the size of the full separate daughter article. Thus little point would be served by a split at this time. --mav 05:37, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Move to FARC - unimproved. Sandy (Talk) 01:26, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary[edit]

Suggested FA criteria concerns are possible copyvio (1c) and comprehensiveness (1b). Marskell 15:46, 28 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Remove, copyvio (even if it didn come for the Parks Service, cut and pastes from the PD are not FA material), referencing, tone, other comprehensiveness issues when compared with more recent US parks FAs (like Glacier National Park (US)). --Peta 02:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Remove, except for Gzkn's work on the copyvio, nobody's working on the article deficiencies, no one seems to care, no progress. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:18, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Remove—1a and 1c.
  • "Carlsbad was first designated a National Monument on 25 October 1923. Congress upgraded the monument to a national park on 14 May 1930. Carlsbad Caverns was also designated a World Heritage Site on 6 December 1995." What's "also" doing here? Do a search and destroy for this word throughout. Oh, there it is in the very next sentence, too.
  • "Visitation" is something angels do.
  • "helping to ensure no future changes will be made to the habitat"—"Future"? Isn't it already in the future tense?
  • "The story of the creation of Carlsbad Cavern begins 250 million years ago with the creation of ..." Repetition.
  • "The exposed reef became part of the Guadalupe Mountains and the underground chambers became the wonder of Carlsbad Cavern." POV? Reference?
  • "Some of the more unusual formations to occur in Carlsbad Cavern are helictites, which grow seemingly without regard to gravity, their twisting shapes governed by crystal shapes"—"to occur" is redundant; shapes x 2.

I won't read further until major copy-editing has been done. Tony 05:59, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Remove due to lack of inline citations. LuciferMorgan 21:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.