Wikipedia:Peer review/List of U.S. National Forests/archive1

List of U.S. National Forests

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I have completely rewritten this article so that the list includes more than just the name of the forest. I would like feedback primarily on the lead paragraphs and the description of the forests. I think both are fairly concise, and details should be left to supporting articles.

Thanks, Fredlyfish4 (talk) 15:08, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

One thing I noticed. In one of the blurbs, I noticed a comma with no space after it that I fixed. Check if any similar issues exist. Chris857 (talk) 21:19, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I just read through the article again looking these type of issues and didn't see any, but they're so small I could have missed any that still exist. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 18:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

This looks like a great list and clearly a labor of love! A few minor comments:

• Do you have any reliable secondary sources? Adding a few as references would make the list a good candidate for a featured list.
  • There is a three book series on National Forests at the library that I can get to cite before I hopefully take this to featured list candidacy. But I'm not sure of its quality or content, and there are really no other comprehensive secondary sources on National Forests that I could use. I'm sure I could piece together other individual sources for each forest.
• In the lead you convert acres to hectares but in the table you convert acres to square km. Is there a reason for this? Should it be consistently one or the other?
  • The only reason for this is that I don't notice when I do one or the other. I have changed those in the lead to km2 and left the smaller areas in each forest's description as hectares.
• The first sentence states that there are 155 forests, but the table only includes 132. Do you intend to add the remaining forests to the table, or is there some selection criteria? Perhaps the others fall into the category of "managed together"?
  • The number of forests and their management scheme is something that I'm still struggling with how to adequately explain, let alone understand myself. There are 132 forests that are known according to the USFS website as separate forests (Salmon-Challis is one forest, National Forests of Mississippi is six). There are 155 named forests (Salmon-Challis is two forests, National Forests of Mississippi is six) and some number between those two are managed together (Salmon-Challis is one forest, National Forests of Mississippi is one). If you count forests in the article separated by hyphens and GW & Jefferson NF as two forests you get 152 forests (these are "named" forests). One of the three is Choctawhatchee National Forest, which is only 743 acres, completely managed by another forest, and the only mention of it on the USFS website is that it was transferred to become Elgin Air Force Base. The others are Idaho Panhandle National Forest, which is actually sometimes still referred to as Coeur d'Alene, St. Joe, and Kanisksu National Forests. I thought about including Choctawhatchee and the three Idaho Panhandle forests as separate forests in the list, but I don't think this would be optimal. Maybe they could be listed in small text in the name column below the current name.
  • I guess another possibility would be to list each named forest separately and then in small text note the name of the forest management area.
• If I add up all the areas of the forests in the table, I get 187,431,442 acres, slightly less than the number in the text (188,240,056). Is this an error, or is there some explanation?
  • I'll check all the areas with those from the reference. If afterwards they still don't add up the difference may be due to how the Forest Service manages and counts areas, which I may not be able to explain.
    • I found two small mistakes and a couple missing areas, so the totals are now the same.
• I think that your lead is better than the entire article United States National Forest. Have you considered merging the two? (and then making List of U.S. National Forests a redirect to the table?
  • That article is one that I want to eventually rewrite and expand, while this one will just be a summary with a list, so I don't want to merge them right now. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 03:54, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Regards Illia Connell (talk) 23:57, 8 November 2012 (UTC)