Template:Did you know nominations/Preferred walking speed

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify it. 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 Allen3 ^talk 19:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Preferred walking speed

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... that the preferred walking speed of people is correlated with per capita GDP and with purchasing power parity?

Created/expanded by Richgellis (talk). Nominated by Martijn Hoekstra (talk) at 22:58, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Interesting article, and it's long enough and new enough for DYK. Sources are all offline, so I'll have to AGF on the verification of the hook fact, as well as on the "plagiarism" reviews. However, I have some minor quibbles/concerns. Regarding the hook fact, the hook may imply that this is an individual's preferred walking speed, but it's clear from the reference to "per capita GDP" that this is a measure of the preferred walking speed of a population. Indeed, the cited reference is entitled "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," indicating that this is a comparison of the preferred walking speeds of national populations. If I am correct (am I?), the article and the hook need to be revised to make this explicit Here's my suggesting for alternative hook wording:

ALT1 ... that the preferred walking speed of a nation's people is correlated with the national per capita GDP and purchasing power parity?

Candidly, I find the hook more interesting when it refers to a whole country.

Also, I think the caption of the first figure in the article ("Histogram of the walking speed for 100 walking pedestrians") should identify the source of the data displayed in the graph. --Orlady (talk) 03:49, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

As there has been no response from the nominator, I should say that I think ALT1 is better. Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:02, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

My review is not solid enough to go forward with the DYK hook. My suggested hook is based on my inference (essentially my best guess) of what a source that I have not seen probably actually says. That's not a verified hook. Moreover, that "histogram of walking speed" needs a reference citation. It's the equivalent in content of a paragraph of the article, and there's no clue where the information is from. --Orlady (talk) 00:23, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

If it were nuked? Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:16, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Also, as an alt2:

... that depressed people tend to have a lower preferred walking speed? Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:26, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

OK, I've found an online version of the reference for the original hook and ALT 1 (don't know if the online posting is a copyright violation, so I'm reluctant to link it in the article) and verified the hook fact, reworded as follows (article edited accordingly):

ALT3 ... that people's preferred walking speed is correlated with their country's per capita GDP and purchasing power parity?

On the other hand, the "depressed people" hook is not actually supported by the article or the source. The article refers to people with major depression, which has a very different meaning than the vague "depressed people." The reference cited turns out to have been a study of exactly 16 people, which probably has much to do with why the article uses the wording "may have." More significantly, having looked at an online abstract for the cited study, I think the sentence in the Wikipedia article ("In the other direction, individuals suffering from major depression may ascribe lower value to their own time and correspondingly prefer to walk significantly more slowly than healthy controls") is original research. The abstract included no hint at any such conclusion, and in fact states "The results may indicate possible deficiencies in the motor control system in depression." I deleted that sentence from the article, as original research. --Orlady (talk) 17:07, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Maybe a source can be found for that graph, which is a major element of the article. I'm working on it. --Orlady (talk) 17:07, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Pulling this out of the prep area due to need for a source for the average speed information that is a key element of the whole article. (I can't find any such...) I've emailed the article creator. --Orlady (talk) 17:56, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The histogram/observations are made by me and my friend of unsuspecting american pedestrians in Colorado. In that sense it constitutes "original research" although this idea has certainly been examined many times (We create one 10 times every year in a college lab I run. It takes about an hour). I will look into finding some sort of published one, although I'm still unsure about how posting pictures works. The kind i'm most tempted to use are those from scientific articles, although am unsure if this is ok, and therefore did not include any. What is the policy on images from say, journal of experimental biology, or so? 146.115.134.64 (talk) 19:12, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Shucks. Unless you or your professor publish the walking-speed data somewhere, we can't use your histogram.

Wikipedia can't publish images from a journal article unless there is evidence that the image in the journal article has a free license. (This might be the case if the image were produced by the US government, but otherwise it's unlikely.) However, a histogram that you created based on a published data set would be acceptable -- it's the "art" that has to be original (and freely licensed).

What particularly bothered me was that the lead section has a number of explicit statements about human walking speed ("In the absence of significant external factors, humans tend to walk at approximately 1.4 m/s (3.1 mph). Although humans are capable of walking at speeds from nearly 0 m/s to upwards of 2.5 m/s (5.6 mph), humans typically choose to use only a small range within these speeds. Individuals find exceptionally fast or slow speeds uncomfortable. The preferred walking speed of healthy humans is normally distributed with a standard deviation of 0.1 m/s (0.22 mph).") that are not supported by reference citations there or elsewhere in the article (unless they are supported by that paper on horse locomotion, which I did not try to look up), although much of this information is supported and illustrated by that histogram. I did find some consistent evidence in Browning et al. 2006. However, I had the impression that those sentences in the lead are a repetition of textbook-type information; if I had the textbook, I would cite it. What sources can be cited to support these statements?

If you can generate a new histogram from somebody's published data, that would be great. However, the key need is for support for the basic statements about human walking speeds. --Orlady (talk) 19:32, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

I've removed that histogram and I added a couple of citations to the lead section to support some of the factual statements made there, so I have a better feeling that the content is supported in at least a broad fashion. I'd like this item to go to the main page, in part to attract attention from readers who might be able to help further improve the article. --Orlady (talk) 16:01, 4 January 2012 (UTC)