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 Gatoclass ( talk) 09:11, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

John W. Overton

• ... that John W. Overton was killed in World War I one year after setting the world track and field records in the indoor mile and indoor 1000 yard (910 m) races in 1917? Source: John Williams Overton, Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame, 2005 inductee, tshf.net

Created/expanded by Smmurphy ( talk) and Trackinfo ( talk). Nominated by Smmurphy ( talk) at 03:52, 6 January 2018 (UTC).

• Fixed hook formatting issues. @ Smmurphy: you seem to be a veteran contributor, is there a QPQ review you have done for this nomination? Wasted Time R ( talk) 22:57, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

I now have, Template:Did you know nominations/Peter Frank Stott. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 18:57, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

• Regarding the nomination itself, article expansion began December 31 in response to AfD and DYK filing is January 6, so within seven days. Article size went from 270 B (54 words) readable prose size to 6588 B (1142 words), so 5x expansion more than met. Neutrality and sourcing good, except for one instance noted below. Checked for copyvio against the fn 3 old newspaper article shows no issue.

• Regarding the article itself, there are some stylistic issues. The newspaper names in the footnotes need to be italicized. A few excess capitalizations – e.g. "Yale World Record tying" should be "Yale world record-tying", "U.S. Citizen" should be "U.S. citizen". In "but he Amateur Athletic Union", "he" should be "the". Per the newspaper article, "hit by a shell" is more precisely "hit by a shell fragment". There is some excess whitespace before the "Navy Cross Citation" section header. Do both of these military citation texts need to be included, since the wording in them is nearly identical? A category for 1894 births should be added.

I've tried to address these, although my grammar-fu can be weak. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 18:57, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

• Regarding the "widely discussed" May 1917 race – that leaves the reader unfulfilled – the Tennessee Hall of Fame page has more detail but seems to place it in March 1917? You could certainly include the “THE GREATEST MILE RACE EVER RUN INDOORS” billing. This part needs a little more work.

You are right, while the article I was citing was from May, the race was in March. I've reorganized the 1916 and 1917 sections to make things more correct and clear. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 18:57, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

• The cite-needed flag on "The same cemetery as his namesake ..." either needs to be resolved or the statement removed.

That statement is probably true, but I couldn't find any confirmation (I added the cn tag), so I removed the statement for now. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 18:57, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

You may think you removed it, but it's still there ;-) Otherwise, the changes look good. I like the sidebox for the citation but I would remove the link inside it, since the same thing is linked in the text to the left and it's visually distracting. Also, as a side note, everyone's citation style differs, but most contributors follow the maxim in Template:Cite_news that regarding location of place of publication, you can "omit when the name of the work includes the location". So all you need is New York Times, Des Moines Tribune, etc. But you would add location for a newspaper like The Patriot Ledger. Wasted Time R ( talk) 00:25, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

@ Wasted Time R:Oh no, I did think I did it. I am more certain that I've done it now. That is a good point regarding citing newspapers. I'm pretty set in my ways with citations, but I'll think about it. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 03:06, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

@ Smmurphy: Unfortunately, your collaborator put it back in, and I see after some discussion you have ended up with "This is the same cemetery as John Overton, who shares the same first name.[25]" where fn 25 is to Findagrave. Well, a) Findagrave is generally not acceptable as a source (see WP:External links/Perennial websites#Find-a-Grave and various discussions at WP:RSN; and b) so what? if I look through any cemetery of enough size I can find two graves that almost have the same name. Either the two of you should do some more research and find out that these two people have some linkage, in which case that should be explained and sourced, or you should conclude it is a meaningless coincidence and take it out completely. Wasted Time R ( talk) 12:44, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm so sorry about this. I didn't expect the page to be unstable. I'm not sure what the eventual outcome will be, but will ping you when it is. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 15:40, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

@ Wasted Time R: Thank you for your patience. Mention of other John Overtons has been moved to a hatnote to the disambiguation page for people of that name, and the article is stable now. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 15:50, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Okay, this is good to go up now. Wasted Time R ( talk) 03:23, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

• But overall, the article is looking good and good for both of you for rescuing it from AfD. Wasted Time R ( talk) 00:11, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I submitted the article aware of some of the issues (the cn tag and the citations sections) because I liked the article and the idea of taking the article from AfD -> DYK and didn't want to run out of time to submit it. The other points you raised are very helpful. I am sure the article can still use a little polish and will re-read it again when I can over the next few days, but let me know what you think. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 18:57, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

• I have pulled this from prep as the article still contains bare urls. Gatoclass ( talk) 12:32, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

@ Gatoclass: Not sure what you mean. There are no bare url citations, just an unusual style involving citations that use newspapers.com, where the full citation for the story is given first followed by the url at newspapers.com (rather than the url being underneath the title of the story). As reviewer I decided to let this slide. Wasted Time R ( talk) 11:11, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I can understand why you might have thought that acceptable Wasted Time R, but the rule is not "no bare urls except after a formatted reference", it is simply "no bare urls". The urls should be properly integrated into the references, not listed after them. Smmurphy, please fix this. Gatoclass ( talk) 11:50, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for looking it over! I've switched the links to clippings to pipe links from article titles. I've added a link to newspapers.com to fit with Wikipedia:Newspapers.com, but I can remove them. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 12:09, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

That looks much better Smmurphy, thank you. The formatting for the Newspapers.com references isn't quite correct, but I can probably address that now, so long as you follow suit next time. I'm about to take a break so I will probably reload this into prep tomorrow. Gatoclass ( talk) 14:52, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks again, everyone. @ Gatoclass: can you be more specific how you want the page formatted, I could do it myself if needed. I'm asking because right now the page is neither linked to the nominations page [1] nor released into the queues, and I'm not sure if I should take an action or wait. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 13:30, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Apologies for the delay in getting back to this Smmurphy, I've had some distractions recently. If you want to address the formatting issue yourself, basically all that needs to be done is to capitalize the "n" in each iteration of "newspapers.com", and to add the {{Open access}} after it, per the instructions at WP:Newspapers.com. Ping me when you've done that, and I will load this back into prep as soon as I can find time to recheck the nomination. Gatoclass ( talk) 14:31, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

@ Gatoclass: Ah, I see. Thanks for the tip. I've done it now. Smmurphy^{( Talk)} 14:44, 29 January 2018 (UTC)