Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bradley Winslow/archive1

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

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 24 June 2024 [1].

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Bradley Winslow

Nominator(s): Lallint 04:12, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

I have had this man, his shenanigans and his article as my hyperfixation for a couple years now and I think the article is ready to be nominated. I expanded his article from an imageless unsuspecting stub to a GA and I'm ready to at least take a shot at FA. He was a civil war colonel from my home town who did some lawyering and politics-ing on the side with some pretty cool stories to boot. Hog Farm reviewed Bradleys GAN so maybe he can help with this FAN too. Lallint 04:12, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Generalissima's comments

• The lede is a bit confusing. It summarizes his military and political career briefly, and then expands on the military portion, while leaving out his political career. I'd expand it a bit more in regards to that.
• Instead of a See Also, I'd mention his brother in the childhood/early career section.
• You have a lot of cites out of order: make sure the lower-number cites always precede higher-number ones when you list multiple in a row.
• Additionally, you duplicate a lot of cites. If you use the same cite twice in a row in the same paragraph, you just need the latter one.
• You should mention his mother's name (Elizabeth Winslow née Collins, according to p. 790 of the Geographical Gazetteer of Jefferson County, N. Y. 1684-1890
• I'd briefly mention where the Wyoming Seminary is located.

That's all for now. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 06:10, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

I've made the changes. I'm not quite sure how to fix the cite duplications part, I tried for the childhood and early career part and I'll do the rest if I did it right. In the third paragraph there are two cites of Emerson 1898, one being on page 165 which comes before and the other on page 190 which comes after, I'd assume I keep both cites rather than just the latter one because of their extremely varying page numbers, right? Lallint 05:33, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Image review

The article uses the following images: [2], [3], [4], and [5]. They are all in public domain: the first 3 because of their age and the last one because it was released into public domain by the author. All the images have captions. The first 3 images have alt texts but the alt text of the fourth image is missing. All the images are relevant to the article. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:09, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Airship

As always, these are suggestions, not demands; feel free to refuse with justification.

• By my count, 53 of the 1238 words in this article are "Winslow"—in other words, four percent of the article. A few "he"s wouldn't go amiss.
  • The excessive "Winslow"ing hasn't, as one might think, preserved clarity and concision. Take e.g. "Winslow was taught by Starbuck in Winslow's first year as a lawyer, and opened his own law firm on January 1, 1856, after a year with Starbuck." This is repetitive and difficult to parse.
• Do we really need the coordinates of his grave in the already-lengthy infobox?
• I would suggest merging the second, third, and fourth paragraphs of the lead together, as they are all rather short.
• "Winslow studied at various seminaries and colleges to become a lawyer" his intention of becoming a lawyer through studying at these places does not come through in the body, which merely lists the institutions and then notes "Winslow began to study law ... in fall of 1853."
  • Shouldn't there be a "the" before fall?
• "working in various law firms" I had a quick look at the sourcing for this in the body. The relevant sentences are "and opened his own law firm on January 1, 1856, after a year with Starbuck.[5] In spring 1856 Winslow began work with J.L. Bigelow, and the pair started a Winslow & Bigelow, a law firm.[9]" This struck me as unusual—why would you open two law firms in a period of a few months? My hunch was correct: source 5, Matthews 1898, states: "General Winslow began his long career at the bar on January 1, 1856, associating himself for that purpose with Lafayette J. Bigelow in the firm of Winslow and Bigelow". There is therefore no support in the cited source for the assertion that he opened his own, non-Bigelow-related law firm on 1/1/56.
  • There are other issues with the sentences, such as "a Winslow & Bigelow", and J.L vs. Lafayette J.

I'm sorry, but I'm already going to have to oppose on prose and sourcing. In a short article like this one, everything has to be top-notch, and this is quite far away. If you're quite sure that all issues (even those I haven't looked at) have been fixed, ping me and I'll go through again—but that will be the last time, to prevent a WP:FIXLOOP. Otherwise, feel free to withdraw and prepare some more using peer review and WP:GOCE. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:25, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Oppose by Nick-D

Oppose The only part of this article I'm competent to comment on, that on the US Civil War, is a long way from FA standards at present I'm afraid:

• As Winslow was a hostilities-only volunteer, referring to a 'Military career' seems inaccurate
• "The American Civil War broke out in 1861" - this is a very well known fact
• "and assisted General Nathaniel P. Banks during the enemy retreat in the Battle of Cedar Mountain" - in what capacity? Was he on the general's staff?
• "as well as commanding his regiment" - which regiment and when did he become the commanding officer?
• "From August 28 to 30, 1862, he fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run." - including the dates is confusing - did he only fight in part of the battle?
• "General Ulysses S. Grant wanted to attack the Confederate Army in Petersburg, Virginia, and force them to abandon Petersburg and the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. After the Battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865, Grant commanded the Union Army to attack Petersburg" - at the risk of being overly blunt, this reads like the simple English wiki and grossly over-simplifies things (e.g. Grant had been leading the campaign for months before this point and he never particularly wanted to attack Petersburg - he attacked it only because it's where the Confederate army was)
• " General Simon Goodell Griffin commanded six of his regiments to stand in a column at around 2 am, with one regiment standing in front of the other." - I don't understand what this means, and the language is also very simplistic
• "His plan was to have all of his regiments attack Battery 28, a fort between Fort Heaven and Fort Mahone,[19] and eventually one of the regiments would breach the fort." - ditto
• "The front regiments all retreated, until the 186th regiment was the last regiment remaining. The 186th New York Regiment quickly captured Battery 28" - ditto
• It's not clear why all the references here are to 100+ year old sources. There's a vast literature on the US Civil War and it should be possible to reference much of this material to more recent sources that are likely to be of better quality and reflect modern scholarship. Nick-D (talk) 02:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

HF

I didn't want to do this, but I've been thinking about this for several days, and I am going to have to oppose here. Sadly, I don't think the sourcing is up to par here. Nick-D notes that he expects there to be further sourcing, but based on my search for sources during the GA process. There's a tiny paragraph in Eicher's Civil War High Commands that is essentially just his dates of rank and a few other major dates such as date of death. I am aware of an out of print and almost impossible to get ahold of book about the Union brevet brigadier generals but I don't know what kind of content it contains and even at that it was published by an obscure printing house out of Maryland and might not even be high-quality RS for the FA criteria. The FA sourcing bar is much higher than the GA sourcing bar, and I'm going to directly state that I don't think Beals 1898 meets the higher FA standards. That source is essentially an older veteran writing about his experiences in a particular battle 30+ years before. Given the nature of combat, Beals wouldn't have had a big picture at the time of what was going on, and he doesn't have the credentials for that source to be accepted as the writings of a historian, either. The remaining sources are either primary source lists, obituaries, or 19th century local histories. These older local histories uniformly paint their subjects in the best possible lights, as do the obituaries. So esentially we're dealing with an article based entirely on 100+ year old laudatory sources. There's been nothing really written about Winslow after the fact. I'm a firm believer in the idea that some article topics inherently don't have the sourcing levels to be FAC-able, and that's one of the reasons why GA is so valuable, for those articles where the sourcing does not support FA. I can tell that a lot of work has gone into this article, but I think this sadly is one of those topics where the level of sourcing needed for FAC just doesn't exist. Hog Farm _Talk 14:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Coord note

I'm going to archive this so improvements can be conducted outside FAC. You can renominate after a 2-week hiatus. I would strongly recommend peer review and/or MilHist A-class review before that. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 15:10, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Ian Rose (talk) 15:11, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

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