Talk:Boston

Peer Review #1

The Lead Section: Yes, the lead section is very well written. It includes most everything that I would want to know about Boston without having to completely dive into the article itself.

Structure: I like the history section and it obviously makes sense for this to be chronological. I think the sports section could probably be a bit bigger. Sports are a huge passion for Boston and the surrounding area and could be drilled down into a time period or different sections.

Balance: This Wikipedia article is very well-written. As one of the oldest and biggest cities in the US, Boston obviously has a lot of information to share. The article itself compares similarly to that of "New York City" and "Miami".

Neutral: The article is neutral in tone for the most part. The phrase "one of the best" comes up when describing the Boston Marathon and could be easily replaced with "one of the most famous" or "well-known"

Reliable sources: There are approximately 300 (!) sources used for this article. Most claims are in fact sourced. one thing I would be wary of is the fact that 2 Boston teams are currently competing in postseason play. This could make this page a target for fan-related memes and viral edits following a loss.

Replacement of image in Climate section

I replaced the image File:Boston Winter Snowfall Counts Distribution.png in the Climate section with an official NOAA image of snowfall counts in Boston (copyright-free because NOAA is an official agency of the US government). This is because the data was synthesized from several sources, namely a website showing yearly snowfall data, without the average and standard deviation listed on the site. Additionally, it does not graph the actual snowfall counts in the time period it spans, but instead graphs it as a bell curve assuming that snowfall in Boston is normally distributed with mean 43.4 inches and standard deviation 22 inches. The normal distribution is not an appropriate model for snowfall, and even then, fitting a distribution to the empirical amounts of snowfall is not very useful. In addition, an article on a city should not assume a background in probability theory. Esquivalience (talk) 04:10, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

University town CfD

Categories are supposed to be defining characteristics of their subject, and I don't see how a global city like Boston or London or Paris can meet that definition. The term makes sense as an analogy to company town or mining town, where a single industry dominates. There's a discussion to delete the category at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 November 9#University towns. Maybe a rename or redefinition can save the concept. Please comment over there. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 22:15, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Improvements and comments

I made a variety of improvements to punctuation and, in particular, to the layout which was rather scattered and messy. I have a series of comments.

1. "Despite cost-of-living issues, Boston ranks high on livability ratings, ranking 36th worldwide in quality of living in 2011 in a survey of 221 major cities".

The sample is ridiculous. The world alone has more than 200 countries. That information is pointless and meaningless. It should not even be in this article.

2. The cityscape images are way too big and they should be at the bottom in a gallery section.

3a. Two thirds of the section on "culture" are dedicated to music which should have its own section.

3b. "Symphony Hall (located west of Back Bay) is home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the related Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is the largest youth orchestra in the nation, and to the Boston Pops Orchestra."

This sentence should be rewritten.

4. "On April 15, 2013, two explosions killed three people and injured hundreds at the marathon."

This sentence is unnecessary.

5. "Films have been made in Boston since as early as 1903, and it continues to be both a popular setting and a popular site for location shooting".

A few famous movies should be listed.

6. " In 2016, there are 1,461 bikes and 158 docking stations across the city".

This is old information in the present tense and it should be updated accordingly.

ICE77 (talk) 07:52, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

"City-to-state/USA difference"

These tables in the Demographics section are pretty silly - they assume the reader has zero arithmetic skills. I would drop them. 2602:306:CFEA:170:B414:10A2:8201:4E9A (talk) 18:01, 12 February 2019 (UTC)