Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chicago, Illinois/Archive1

Chicago, Illinois

I am renominating this article because I believe that it is a sample of Wikipedia's best: flowing writing, amazing pictures, detailed information, etc. on one of the most fascinating cities in the U.S. and possibly in the world. The main objection in the old nomination was over the main picture, which now has been settled. (SeeTalk:Chicago/Archive.)User:Dralwik Hello? My current project 20:17, 14 May 2005 (UTC).

Archives: December 2004 FAC and April 2005 FAC

• Comment: Please demonstrate that the previous objections have been addressed. --mav 01:40, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• Object until the ideas put forth in Talk:Chicago, Illinois#Sections to be added/revised/considered are done. Neutrality^talk 03:18, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
  • Er, where is the consensus to do that at? If that were implemented the TOC of this article would be huge and the prose way longer than necessary. The ==level 2== sections used at the already FA Seattle, Washington are far more logical, IMO (too many subsections there though). -- mav 14:52, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
  • There are 2 other proposed revisions to the WikiProject Cities structure or format for city template (Indian city template and Proposed revised city template) at its talk page. Petersam 18:37, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
  • minor object too many skyline images, what's the use of the first skyline image? it is ugly,

and the ones from bellow are more elucidate (3 for the same thing is too much), and one at least has a garden, it seems nicer, I'ld put that in the beggining, at least the reader will not think what I think: To much concrete in this article! -Pedro 13:28, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

• 'There was already a discussion about the choice of the top picture as mentioned at the start of this nomination thread. The picture was selected democratically via a vote the discussion board for the article.

Comment: Speaking as somebody who actually lives in Chicago, with deep family roots going back for generations, I can tell you that this article has numerous factual inaccuracies, and that anybody actually from here would know that the person writing it had no understanding of this city whatsoever. To take a particularly ludicrous example - Italian beef having cheese on it? No sir, that's something more like a Philadelphia cheese steak, and you're getting this from somebody who >grew up eating the real thing<.

The article was protected from posted comments by Boothy443's tireless acts of censorship, defended by Boothy on the oh-so-postmodernist basis that all misstatements of fact are but the editor's "opinions", but the article remains pathetically bad. There's the firm, blanket statement that Chicago has the climate typical of the entire Midwest - a region stretching from Canada in the North, the Appalacian mountains in the South (well below the rain line, well into Winter), Ohio in the East and Colorado in the West. There is no climate typical of that entire region. And then the one about Chicago having four "well defined" seasons, when anybody living here knows that during most years, "springtime" weather in Chicago is a semi-random fluctuation between summer and winter, and can't help but notice the drastic shift in temperature that usually comes in the middle of that "well defined" Autumn.

We have "Chicago style pizza" being offered as an example of local food - it's nothing of the sort. The so-called "Chicago style" pizza can be found almost everywhere in the Central Plains states I and those I know have been, so it's not really specifically Chicagoan, and most pizza served here is not, and has never been deep dish. Nor is all local deep dish anything resembling what is usually called "Chicago style". Consider the version found at a certain very well known location on Rush street, with the sauce on top of the cheese, instead of vice versa. Let's see if our 'Chicago authority' can name the place - because I very seriously doubt that our little friend has ever come within 50 miles of my home town. While you're at it, consider the Pizzeria Uno version, in which such un-stereotypical ingredients as pesto show up. The point that I'm driving at here, kiddies, is that the supposedly "Chicago style" pizza, in the form people expect to find, is almost non-existent here outside of the multistate chain pizzerias which started calling the stuff "Chicago style" as a marketing ploy, not because any of us had ever heard of the stuff prior to the 1980s.

There's the so-called "Chicago Garbage Dog" - certainly, nobody I grew up with had ever heard of the thing before Vienna Beef products decided to start posting a story about the thing, in an advertising poster one can find in locations like "Five Faces" on Division, which is probably where this author heard about it from, by word of mouth. Again, mythology created to move a product, in this case Vienna Beef wieners. Most of the goodies associated with the dog with "the junk on top" as the tourists on Division street like to call it, like the sport peppers and gardiniera are things that one would have found on Tri-Taylor (aka "Little Italy"), not a neighborhood noteworthy for its hot dog consumption.

We have machine politics being spoken of in the past tense; one need only drop by the Amnesty International site and look up "police torture" to be disabused of that misunderstanding. We have the amazing statement that Chicago's "unique culture" came about due to its status as a "melting pot", in fact, it has historically been one of the most heterogenous, voluntarily segregated cities in America, and one of the least receptive to the assimilationist notion of the Melting Pot. A quick trip up Milwaukee should show even the most casual visitor just how much. I could go on and on, and I suppose that I already have. What becomes very obvious to anybody who knows this city firsthand is that the author has done nothing more than dust off the common tourist cliches, and try to pass them off as knowledge. The article is pure garbage. I'm astounded that anybody would even argue in favor of keeping it online, much less giving it an award. - "Joseph from Chicago"