Wikipedia:Peer review/Northwest Airlines Flight 253/archive1

Northwest Airlines Flight 253

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I started this article a few months ago, and haven't really touched it for several weeks now. I think that it certainly has the potential to become a GA or FA, but I want detailed information on what to improve, particularly minor details (that are important during an FAC, for example). I know it's a lot to go through, but even giving a solid review of just one section would help a lot! Thank you,  fetchcomms☛ 02:26, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: I'll be back with more comments later, but I thought I'd list three for starters.

• The alt text tool in the tool box at the top of this review page shows that most of the images need alt text. You probably won't need alt text for GAN, but you will for FAC. WP:ALT has explanations and examples, and you can see other examples under discussion at WP:FAC.

• The link checker tool finds 15 citations with dead urls.

• I'd suggest reviewing the citations carefully. I see several that lack access dates, a few that have newspaper names that need italics, and some like citations 42 and 58 that are broken. Finetooth (talk) 04:01, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

More Finetooth comments: This is most interesting, seems comprehensive, stable, neutral, well-illustrated, and professionally written. It has surprisingly few low-level errors, which made it much easier to read and comment on than many articles that come my way. I think you are close to GA, and I agree that FA is possible, though the alt text and dead urls and several other things need fixing. Since the article is in some way a breaking news story, the dead urls and frequent updates are apt to be a continuing problem until the story has become old news. Here is my second set of suggestions:

• I find puzzling the doubts and allegations about the passport. If Abdulmutallab boarded the plane with his passport, it would have been found on the plane or his person after his arrest. If no passport was on him or the plane, he must have boarded without one or deliberately parted with it between the time he showed it to the boarding agent and the time he boarded the plane. Didn't the McClatchy reporter or any of the others investigating this matter ask about this? If they did, I think this should be included in the article.

Lead

• You might add "United States" to the information in the first sentence. Since the new sentence might be a bit too complicated, you might consider altering it along lines like this: "Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was an international passenger flight that was the target of a failed al-Qaeda bombing attempt on December 25, 2009. Originating at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands, its destination was Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in the U.S. state of Michigan."

Getting on Flight 253

• I'd remove the wikinews link from this section. It's already covered in the "External links" section, which I think is the right place for it.

Bombing attempt

• "Flight 253, a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330-300 twinjet with 279 passengers, 8 flight attendants, and 3 pilots aboard, left Amsterdam around 8:45 am local time."[1][10][5][11] - Serial refs like these should be arranged in ascending order; i.e. [1][5][10][11]. Ditto for similar instances here and there in the article.

Analysis of explosives

• "The suspect apparently carried the PETN onto the plane in a six-inch-long... ". - Metric conversion? I used {{convert}} to do the first of the unconverted ones I encountered.

Umar Abdulmutallab

• For better flow, I'd suggest merging the two one-sentence paragraphs that occur in the middle of this section. The first one begins, "On June 12, 2008, Abdulmutallab applied for... ". Ditto for any other one-sentence orphan paragraphs in the article.
• "On November 11, British intelligence officials sent the U.S. a cable indicating that a man named "Umar Farouk" had spoken to al-Awlaki, pledging to support jihad... ". - I think this is the first mention of al-Awlaki in the main text. If so, it would be good to include a brief description of him here rather than in the next section.

United States

• The Manual of Style recommends using blockquotes only for quotations of four lines or more. The intelligence officer quote is only three lines long on my laptop screen, while the Hoekstra quote is only two lines long.

Effect on travel

• "However, on January 3, 2010, Stuart Clarke, a photoreporter from the British newspaper Daily Express claimed to have smuggled on a jet from Schiphol Airport, bound for Heathrow Airport just five days after the Christmas Day terror attack, a syringe containing fluid, and which could have contained a liquid bomb detonator like that used on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, in spite of the extra measures that were said to have been put in place to forestall a follow-up attack." - This sentence has a few too many clauses. I'd suggest re-casting as two separate sentences.

U.S. political fallout

• "... the Senate hearings will begin on January 21." - Needs updating. A general problem with articles based largely on breaking news is that they require frequent updating. This can be fun but begins to feel like high-performance juggling if you have several articles like this in circulation. (This is not an objection to news-pegged articles, just an observation.)

Account of pre-boarding event

• "Kurt Haskell, a U.S. passenger on Flight 253, said he saw two individuals approach the boarding agent." - It might be helpful here to add "in Amsterdam". This is a long article, and people are used to the idea that planes often take off and land more than once. This one didn't, but a reminder of that wouldn't be out of place.

Images

• The description of File:Awlaki 1008.JPG says, "Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen October 2008, taken by Muhammad ud-Deen", but the metadata at the bottom of the licensing page says that the photo was taken in June 2007. It's good to clear up discrepancies like this if possible.

References

• I'm not sure why some of the references have been tagged with "verification needed", but that will have to be sorted out.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 00:21, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very, very much for the detailed, in-depth review. I hope to be able to make the suggested changes over the next few days!  fetchcomms☛ 01:01, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I've fixed most of the minor wording, etc. stuff; now it's on to checking all the refs. About the al-Awlaki image, I would say that the metadata is the incorrect one--it relies on the camera's internal calendar, which would probably be out of sync if, say, a battery was removed or something. (I know that my own camera's date is off, but I always remove the batteries to preserve them, and don't use it often enough to change the dates each time i turn it on again.) At least, I hope the photographer knew when he took the image!  fetchcomms☛ 23:25, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

About the passport, I can't seem to find much on it—seems like either nobody bothered to find out, the information was withheld, nobody knows, or something of that sort.  fetchcomms☛ 03:08, 3 March 2010 (UTC)