Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Swedish heraldry/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 not promoted by Ucucha 00:37, 23 February 2012 [1].

Swedish heraldry

Featured article candidates/Swedish heraldry/archive1

Nominator(s): Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 05:05, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because I feel that this article meets the FA criteria. I think it is well-written, thorough, well-researched, non-controversial and well-referenced, with good use of images. This article is more graphically intensive than a lot of others, but it is an article about heraldry, which is a graphically intensive topic. If there is anything I can do to help further improve the article, please feel free to leave me a message here or on my talk page. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 05:05, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Source review

Flags of the World may not be acceptable as a reliable source: see Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 87#Flags of the World and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 22#Flags of the World website for previous (contradictory) discussions.
Ref 20: author name Jan Oskar Engene and date 13 June 1996 missing.
Ref 27: author name Željko Heimer missing.
Citations are inconsistently formatted. For example, if you're keeping the Flags of the World citations, then they should be formatted in the same way; refs 27 and 28 are not formatted the same way as refs 16 and 20. They should have authors, dates, publishers, etc.; the bare links (e.g. Refs 71, 72 and 73) should use cite templates as well, if you're keeping the cite templates elsewhere in the article.
Ref 12: accessdate, publisher missing.
Ref 30: date missing. I shall assume the self-published Bergman is reliable as he gives his sources, but see WP:SPS.
Heraldry of the World (refs. 42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 52, 55, 56), OK I see sources are given again, but with so many links to user-generated websites, I think you're going to have difficulty persuading people that the article uses "high-quality [my emphasis] reliable sources", which is part of FA criterion 1c. You've cited Ny Svensk Vapenbok, for example, in the References section (ref. 59), and that is the source most often cited at the user-generated websites, e.g. Granqvist (Flags of the World, ref 16) uses it. So why not use it directly rather than take citations second-hand?
Ref 53 is a dead link.
Ref 57: publisher is "oxelund.se" but other municipal sites are given as "Om Goteburg" or "Stenungsunds Kommun": formatting should be consistent.
Ref 63: accessdate missing.
Ref 64 publisher is given as "Svenskakyrkan.se" but below it refs 66 and 67 say "Svenska kyrkan": again should be consistent.
What makes Wadbring (ref. 79) a reliable source?
I think the barelinks to commons should be formatted the same way as the other commons links (as interwiki link templates) or remove them and rely on one interwiki link ("Coats of arms of Sweden") right at the end in the external links section.

Re:#6: As I recall, I think someone else added a bit of info on a royal decree granting ducal rights to all landskaps, and I think I found Bergman's paper by web searching the date in question with keywords and added it as a source for the claim, then backed it up with a passage from Nordisk Familjebok (a book published 1921) with a link directly to the appropriate page in a digitized copy (see the next ref listed). I suppose we could cut Bergman loose at this point, if the ref is no good. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 15:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re:#7: I'd love to go directly to Ny Svensk Vapenbok if only I could get my hands on a copy! I have not even been able to get it through ILL since moving to Okinawa. I don't want to make assumptions based on second-hand sources, per WP:SYNTH, but I have a copy of the book on order now, and I expect to have it in hand in a month or less. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 15:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re:#7: I would not consider that web site to be a very reliable source for content, but if it makes any difference, the link was from a footnote, where an image of a seal was linked (in some context) to illustrate the ambiguity of Bo Jonsson's heraldic influence in Södermanland (disagreement over the extent of such influence is the topic of the footnote). I pulled the ref tags out of the footnotes just now to put things back into context. If they need to go, I guess the article could do without the footnote. Please take another look and let me know what you think. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 15:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Spot checks

Refs 16, 20, 27, 28 (Flags of the World): OK.
Ref 42 (Härryda kommun): I appreciate I don't speak Swedish but the website certainly didn't look to be about the exchange of a logo with a coat of arms. I presume it's a dead link?
Ref 48 (Arboga): I don't see the date 1974 mentioned at the source, though I do see 1969.
Ref 51 (Stockholm): I don't see St Olav mentioned at the source, though I do see St Erik and the date of official grant.
Ref 66 (Church of Sweden): OK
Ref 67 (Church of Sweden): Error message, looks like another dead link

Re: Ref 42 (Härryda): The linked article states:

"2006 gav kommunfullmäktige kommunstyrelsen uppdraget att ta fram förslag till ett kommunvapen. Upprinnelsen var en motion av Pehter Hill vars motiv var att kommunen, vid det tillfället, var en av endast tre kommuner som inte hade något vapen samt att ett vapen som kunde representera kommunens samtliga delar skulle ge en bättre identitet."

In brief, Pehter Hill proposed municipal arms in 2006 because Härryda was one of only three municipalities that still had no arms, and he felt municipal arms would help present a unified identity. So no, it's not a dead link, it's still a good source. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 05:01, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Media review

All images checked. No problems found apart from one minor one. File:Murkrona.svg is extracted from the deleted File:Örebro coat of arms.svg: see Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Örebro coat of arms.svg. I do doubt whether the file is copyrightable, but there is a clearly free alternative (File:Murkronan, Nordisk familjebok.png) if it is problematic. I also checked the tinctures and designs of the first 16 coat of arms depicted in the article against reliable sources. I saw no problems there either. DrKiernan (talk) 17:04, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ref 67 was archived and can be seen at [2]. Ref 42 has been fixed (both link and date were wrong). /Lokal _Profil 12:52, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ref 48. The 1974 date is the PRV registration date (1974-01-11) which can be found at this page at prv.se. /Lokal _Profil 13:27, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, prose, 1a: the prose fails to engage the reader from the very first sentences:

Swedish heraldry encompasses the heraldic achievements in modern and historic Sweden, including royal and civic arms, noble and burgher arms, ecclesiastical heraldry, heraldic displays and Swedish heraldic descriptions. Swedish heraldic style conforms to the German-Nordic heraldic tradition, noted for its multiple helmets and crests which are treated as inseparable from the shield, its repetition of colours and charges between the shield and the crest, and its scant use of heraldic furs.[1]

Two sentences that manage never to define "heraldry" while using the word eight times. This suggests the prose throughout needs independent eyes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:53, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I notice overcapitalisation: "officer of arms", "Swedish army", "Swedish navy", it should be. And related items. These are not even English-language items, but translated, too.
The Times.
"judges and priests... while the merchants tended"—space before the ellipsis points, too.
First random plagiarism check: "Gotland, as a free republic loosely associated with the Swedish crown, had already borne a ram with a banner (Agnus Dei) as a well-known city seal by 1280." It's on quite a few websites. Can someone check whether they are copying WP, or is it the other way around? It's sourced to a translation from the Swedish; if this is legitimate, did WP translate it, or is that translation provided next to the Swedish-language version? I'd have thought quotation marks were in order. Tony (talk) 09:28, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you, Tony, for your feedback. To answer the specific question about the Gotland arms, I added that to the article. I read it here in Swedish and wrote it into the article in English (this is, after all, English WP, though most published sources on Swedish heraldry are written in Swedish). I have tried to use English sources where possible, but few English-language heraldry sources give more than cursory information on any other than British and North American heraldry, and few Swedish/Scandinavian heraldry sources are available in English. I would have thought quotation marks should be reserved for when I am directly quoting or translating the source verbatim, though here I was summing up part of what the source stated. By the way, all I see in Google hits are WP mirror sites. If you find it in that phrasing on another site that is not a mirror, I will be happy to demonstrate that they are quoting/plagiarising WP, not the other way round. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 12:01, 17 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There is lot of duplicated text here [3]. Graham Colm (talk) 09:25, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The linked page is dated 2010-10-12. Here is a diff from 2009, a full year prior, showing that our page had that text well before the "Heraldic Times" page was written. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 13:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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