And here we are at the Alexander Aircraft Company, a start-class rated article about a defunct aeronautical engineering company from the USA in the 1920's. As this is a subject with more interest to me I spent a little longer than usual on this article, giving it a top-to-tail polish.
Starting with the lead paragraph, which consisted of a grand total of twelve words on arrival, I expanded it, if only by a bit, so at least there are now two sentences. The associated book citation was limited so this was expanded as well. Founding and Disaster subsections received a heavy dose of wiki-linking and the single reference provided across both subsections was dead, requiring a trip to The Wayback Machine to search for the given URL.
The Wayback Machine is part of The Internet Archive, which is a not-for-profit set up back in the early days of the web to archive the nascent internet, as it was recognised that the content was not anywhere near as permanent as the previous forms of information storage (books, photographs, etc). As well as archiving webpages it is an excellent resource for printed material, but also stores AV media, images and even software programs.
So the Wayback Machine came up trumps with a copy of the webpage cited and a well-written and detailed history of the sordid behaviour of the Alexander brothers towards their staff (that included turning eleven of them into Roman candles). After reading the article I felt that the descriptions and culpability of the brothers needed strengthening and gladly did so. I did catch a factual error that had been carried over from the original source; that silver nitrate was used as a dope for the canvas of the aircraft, which is not the case as it is a crystalline compound. The author was probably aiming at cellulose nitrate, which is a horribly inflammable polymer that was used as an aircraft canvas dope.
The Expansion subsection also required work. The second sentence was quite strangely presented grammatically and the referencing was equally idiosyncratic with two refences just given as titles and "(depicted by Freeman)." A Google Image search supplied the goods here as one of the titles was specific enough to tie down a web page as the source. A Tripod web page at that! Talk about way back. Tripod was a service from the early days of the internet (c. 1995) and, along with Geocities, it provided the first wave of home-user derived content. Both references needed slightly more obscure templates than usual, Cite AV media and Cite map. The former is a, probably, underused template and a link from the Tripod page to the copyright owner's site gave all the information needed to populate it. I'm afraid that the second reference was not so neat and I basically butchered the template. Hopefully someone with experience with USGS maps will come along at some point in the future and rectify my misbehaviour.
For some reason there was also a mixture of referencing methods used in the article; in-line citations with the references included within <ref></ref> tags within the body of the text; and {{r|refname}} tags that pointed to citations included within the {{reflist}} section at the end of the article. Using both methods within a single article doesn't affect display, but it's sort of not ideal stylistically. Although, in its favour, using {{r|refname}} does make reading the article source code a lot easier to read, on balance I prefer a single approach to things. So I altered the latter citations to match those of the majority of the article's citations (ie in-line).
The Legacy section was just more wiki-linking and a single bare reference requiring conversion to a Cite web one.
Finally I checked that all the external links worked and put in Wayback links for those that had died. That almost wrapped up the edits but out of interest I checked the What links here tool and found a link to the Bullet aircraft, which allowed me to erase the red link in the middle of the table of Aircraft. Also I could do the same for the Alexander Aircraft navbox (Navboxes or Navigation templates are found at the bottom or to the side of articles and contain links across Wikipedia that are associated with the subject of the article) by clicking the E in V·T·E and dropping the Bullet link into the source for the box.
The whole edit took a while, but nothing was startlingly difficult to progress. It was just a matter of plugging away at it. One nice external tool that I stumbled upon whilst looking at the revision history of the Alexander Aircraft navbox was Page statistics. The link from the top of the page is to a page of stats on the article. The Alexander Aircraft navbox template now has a grand total of two edits. More interesting was the similar page for Alexander Aircraft Company. Here we see that there have been 108 edits to the page from 43 editors and, satisfyingly, that I am now responsible for 14% of the text lying in 4th place among the editors.
Comments
Post a Comment