Talk:Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: JPxG (talk · contribs) 00:35, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	No spelling or grammar errors I could find. Gives a clear and accurate summary of what's known; avoids veering off into editorialization or florid prose, while varying sentence structure enough to avoid becoming tedious.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	The sections are all arranged in a way that makes sense to me, and complies with MoS. Many have argued that this critically-claimed article doesn't have any weasel words or peacock terms. The closest thing to a list is the well-written prose section about the individual islands, of which there are five. It's good.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	Every claim in the article is cited.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	The major sources used in the article are USGS materials, peer-reviewed publications and the Biloxi Sun Herald, all of which seem quite reliable on the subject to me.
	2c. it contains no original research.	There is nothing goofy that I see here; the statements in the article are pretty much what the sources say.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	Earwig's tool gives me nothing, when searching the online sources as well as when searching the broader Internet. There's no nonfree images.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	Looks like a pretty complete treatment of the overall topic; the islands themselves, their composition features, the geophysical circumstances of their formation, the history of mankind's interaction with them, and summaries of each individual island (all of which have their own articles).
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	I can't think of anything here that doesn't clearly belong in the article, and I can't think of anything not here that clearly belongs.
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	There does not seem to be any agenda whatsoever in this article; it is a completely objective recounting of geophysical facts.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	There has been no back-and-forth in the whole history of the article; in fact, it has seven revisions and the most recent of them was from October 2020.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	All images are public domain.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	Yes.
	7. Overall assessment.	This is my first GA review, so I will be asking someone else to go through and double-check what I've written here. It's a good article, though. I like islands, and I like these islands! Thanks for writing it.

Hey, thanks for the review, JPxG! I don't want this to get forgotten, so I'm just bumping this a little. Looking forward to hearing any concluding thoughts! -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 14:53, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: Bumping again. Anything else you'd like to see before closing the review? -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 16:08, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

This is my first GA review, so I will be asking someone else to go through and double-check what I've written here.

• I'll sign off on this. Review looks well-conducted to me. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 01:16, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Excellent, I'll close the review! jp×g 01:17, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Eddie891 (talk) 00:38, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that the Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands have rapidly shrunken and drifted westward since first being mapped in the 1800s? Source: " The Mississippi-Alabama (MS-AL) barrier islands are undergoing rapid land loss and translocation ... the centroids of most of the islands are migrating westward" ([1] p.1)
  • ALT1:... that the Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands are shrinking at accelerating rates, mainly because of a deficit in their sediment budget caused by dredging? Source: "The principal causes of barrier island land loss are frequent intense storms, a relative rise in sea level, and a deficit in the sediment budget. The only factor that has a historical trend that coincides with the progressive increase in rates of land loss is the progressive reduction in sand supply associated with nearly simultaneous deepening of channels dredged across the outer bars of the three tidal inlets maintained for deep-draft shipping." ([2] p.1)

• Reviewed: KOKL

Improved to Good Article status by Bryanrutherford0 (talk). Self-nominated at 18:19, 8 March 2021 (UTC).

Interesting GA story of decline, on fine sources, offline sources accepted AGF, no copyvio obvious. Both hooks are interesting and approved. I prefer the original with the westward drift over the sediment budget. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:32, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Coordinate precision

@Abductive: Respectfully, blanket use of D°M′S″ is definitely not best practice, as explained at WP:OPCOORD. At the latitude of these islands, one arcsecond east or west is only about 27 meters, while the island chain is 113 km long. This means, that, according to the guidelines in MoS, a suitable level of precision for the longitude (one that "give[s] precisions approximately one-tenth the size of the object") would be the nearest tenth degree, which is why I used that precision. Since the chain is much narrower north-and-south, I've added another decimal place to the latitude figure to accommodate your concern, which puts the pin right around the centroid of the chain. It still isn't hitting an island, and that's just fine; since we're giving the location of a discontinuous object, there's no reason to suppose the the best coordinates for describing the position of the island chain as a whole would happen to fall within any particular one of the islands. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 20:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

• The first rule of using coordinates is to point to the object. If you look at what I did there, you'll see that I made the coords 30.225, -88.6, which is still within the WP:OPCOORD guidelines, expressed as DMS. Abductive (reasoning) 20:30, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

So, in fact, you've now put the coordinates to the nearest thousandth of a degree for both latitude and longitude, which, as OPCOORD points out, is less than 100 meters east-to-west at this latitude, which is far, far less than one tenth of the 113-km length of the island chain! Where is the confusion here? The precision that is closest to one tenth of the east-west extent of the object is one tenth degree, and to say that your change is in keeping with the guidelines in flatly untrue. And I'll point out again, there's no need for you to try so very, very hard to make the coordinates point at part of Horn Island, since this article is not about Horn Island; it's about the island chain, and all of the coordinate values that have been here so far have successfully pointed to the chain. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 00:38, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

These are islands and the coordinates should point to land, not water, under the WP:Principle of least astonishment. This overrides any blind following of the OPCOORD not-really-an-official-guideline, which has also never had a strong consensus. As for Horn Island, I took the average of the furthest east point on Dauphin Island and the furthest west point of Cat Island, and it just so happens to be -88.61. Suppose there was a crescent-shaped lake—would it be appropriate to point to the land that is the geographical "center" of the lake? No, we would try to point to water as far from all shores as possible. Abductive (reasoning) 05:50, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

As the article points out, the island chain that is this article's topic is a continuous sand bar that runs the full length of the sound, with some portions above water and some below, and the portions that are above water move and change shape over time; any and all of these coordinates point at the object that the article is written about. If you insist on thinking of the object as only the above-water portions, then you'll really impress me if you can find a way to put in one set of coordinates that somehow points to all five islands simultaneously! The subaerial portion of the sand bar is a discontinuous object, and it's silly to insist on pointing to only one piece of it; a casual search through the encyclopedia shows the same principle used in, for example, the coordinates in Chain O'Lakes, which (as a discontinuous lake system) is a more apt analogy than your hypothetical crescent lake. But, anyway, that has nothing to do with my main point here, which (as the section heading indicates) is that the longitude precision you're wanting to employ is unnecessarily and misleadingly high. You can still force the coordinates to point at Horn Island and also allow the longitude to be a suitably rounded 88.6°W. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 12:56, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

I have gone back to 88.600 as you suggest. Abductive (reasoning) 14:18, 22 March 2021 (UTC)