Template:Did you know nominations/History of Franz Josef Land

The following discussion 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: rejected by Allen3 ^talk 18:45, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Withdrawn by nominator

History of Franz Josef Land

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... that the first announced discovery of Franz Josef Land (situation pictured) was made by an expedition of 1872–74, which primary goal was to find the Northeast Passage?

Reviewed: Not a self-nomination

Created by Arsenikk (talk). Nominated by Oceanh (talk) at 06:22, 17 January 2014 (UTC).

Article requires copyediting for flow. Language sounds pretty clumsy in quite a few cases. Eg. "The vessel drifted to the for them unknown archipelago". The hook is not sourced inline but the source appears in the subsequent sentence. Locate a source here. I'm also concerned about the lay-out. There is a section entitled "Discovery" and as a DYK reader visiting the article I would expect to find the information about the discovery of the islands under this subheading. Yet the first announced discovery appears under early expeditions. Even if you want to maintain the second sub-heading I would recommend including the facts of the different claims to discovery in the "Discovery" section. Once the copyediting has been done I'll do a more thorough review. Also I would love to see a more condensed reference list. Most references are to different pages in the same book. I'll go in and make those changes. If another editor disagrees with that then he/she could always revert. Evidently the entire article relies heavily on one main source. I would love to be able to go in and check for copyvio issues but the source isn't available online. The article is quite lengthy so I would be fearful of AGF with close paraphrasing or copyvio. However, given the creator's significant contributions I would let this slide. EagerToddler39 (talk) 22:49, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the review. I did some copyediting of the lead section, on grammar and wording. Since I do not have access to the the main source (Barr 1995), I can not change too much. Will try to find some way to handle the inline citation of the hook. Oceanh (talk) 15:32, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Any progress here? Time for re-review, please? --PFHLai (talk) 20:37, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

- Would have appreciated a ping User talk:Oceanh after your response given it was four days later. The issue I raised with the lay-out of the article was not addressed. The hook fact is not easily located in the article considering that several discoveries were made. I reiterate that you could summarize the different claims to discovery at the beginning of the Discovery section and then create further sub-headings for each. Hook fact is still not cited inline. The article also needs to be copy-edited to remove some clumsy/unclear structures: eg. "conducted hunting", "the ice hindered the further progression", "With the basic geography of Franz Josef Land had become apparent, expeditions shifted to using the archipelago as a basis to reach the North Pole", " taking on board 121 dogs in Arkhangelsk, whence they left on 12 July". How is sailing by land possible: "organized an expedition to sail as far north by land as possible"? This statement "In May 1865 the Russian magazine Morskoy sbornik published an article by N. G. Schilling, who argued that the current and ice conditions in the Barents Sea would require a landmass between Novaya Zemlya and Svalbard", among others, is unclear. Fix the clumsy repetition of decided here "Nansen decided that the pole was not within reach and decided on 7 April to instead", "~~who~~ whom he soon recognized as Nansen". There are many other fixes required before the article can be suitable enough for the front page. EagerToddler39 (talk) 16:57, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Based on the number and severity of issues raised, this is clearly the more appropriate icon. (The ? icon is for nominations with one or two minor issues.) BlueMoonset (talk) 21:27, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for a thorough review, with good guidance to issues that need to be fixed. This is still a non-trivial task, and should preferably be done by someone with both in-depth knowledge of the English language, and access to the cited sources (and minimum one of these). Take one example. For instance, I might change the phrase "conducted hunting" to "went hunting", but find even that unsatisfactory (my dictionary associates "hunting" with "the pursuit of game on horseback with hounds", or the sport of foxhunting. Probably misleading, but how can I be more specific without access to the source? Did they hunt seals for food supply, polar bears for fur trade, walrus for ivory, or whatever?). Nomination withdrawn. Oceanh (talk) 14:12, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Withdrawn by nominator due to issues noted above. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:12, 15 February 2014 (UTC)