Wikipedia:Featured article review/Battle of Smolensk (1943)/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed by Raul654 00:09, 15 March 2010 [1].

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Battle of Smolensk (1943)

Review commentary

Featured article candidates/Battle of Smolensk (1943)

Featured article review/Battle of Smolensk (1943)/archive1

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The article lacks references in many places. Secondly, it needs to be checked for possible pro-USSR bias. The "liberate/liberation" is used everywhere to describe the Soviet victory, and maybe the sources are systematically responsible for this. More than half the citations are from a Mr Istomin who wrote the official USSR military's version of events of WWII "Operations of Soviet Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War: 1941-1945" and others are from the USSR's military Journal from the height of the Cold War. Given this, I would question whether these sources could possibly be RS, or whether they should just be classified as a primary source. YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 03:50, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Image review

• File:Soviet civilians in a ruined Smolensk.jpg: status unknown; license deprecated; no source
• File:Map of dnieper battle grand.jpg: though I appreciate that this is the work of the US Military (it matches their style), it would be preferable to give the original source
• File:A destroyed german bunker.jpg: the source seems to have been published in 2004, and so the copyright tag "published before 1951" may not apply.
• File:Smolensk streets after liberation.jpg: no source. DrKiernan (talk) 14:21, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• Comment. Please add alt text to images; see WP:ALT. Eubulides (talk) 20:20, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Delist

Lots of uncited paragraphs, nothing on force ratios. I'm not too worried about the Soviets sources being RS or primary sources, as they simply don't meet the definition of the latter and are likely biased in terms of NPOV. But cross-checked against Western sources like Glantz's Forgotten Battles, Ziemke, Erickson, etc. they should be usable.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 01:32, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

• Comments' I agree with YellowMoney's comments in the nomination. In addition, I'd add:
  • The number of red links is excessive - it would appear that this article was edited by Mrg3105 (talk · contribs)
  • While most of Wikipedia's coverage of the Eastern Front is overly reliant on German sources and gives too much weight to the German side of the story, this article has the opposite problem and there's very little on the German experiences in the battle Nick-D (talk) 06:56, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Delist

• Comments

• Sources/NPOV: the article has serious point of view issues. Yes, most of WP's coverage of the Eastern Front relies on German sources, this one relies too much on Russian sources. There are no evident German sources in this. There should be a campaign box, and the titles of the battles probably should not be "Liberation" of whatever, but Battle of whatever. I don't have as much problem with the redlinks, but possibly they are "red" because they are not linked to the proper article; this would take some time to fix.
• Prose: it isn't particularly well written, certainly not to the standard the FA has become, although it may have been sufficient then.
• Citations have ibid, which is a no-no for current standards

Do we have a project task force that can tackle this whole eastern front thing? Auntieruth55 (talk) 17:19, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Featured article criterion of concern are POV, citations, images YellowMonkey (Southern Stars photo poll) 06:08, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

• Delist per nominating statement YellowMonkey (Southern Stars photo poll) 06:08, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delist per the nominating statement and my above comments Nick-D (talk) 08:06, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Note to closer Auntieruth and Sturmvogel commented normally during the FAR phase and then explicitly added a delist tag after teh FARC segmentation, although it is still in the upper half YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars photo poll) 00:04, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delist per all of the above. The list is the lead is also really...glaring and annoying. Dana boomer (talk) 01:52, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delist Some good content, but no longer among the best that Wikipedia has to offer. Wow, our standards have gone up. Dhatfield (talk) 02:26, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delist I also see completeness issues in addition to the other issues identified above.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 22:43, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.