Wikipedia:Peer review/Katyn massacre/archive1

Katyń massacre

I spend several past days on veryifying facts and adding inline citations. The last section may neeed some expantion, but overall I think this is a FAC level article on a quite controversial subject. Your comments, as always, appreciated.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 23:43, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Quite the lengthy and interesting article. I enjoyed it and most of your facts seem accurate as far as I know personally. Things that could use some work:

• Sentence structure is a little choppy and places and just needs a little work to make it flow easier.
• Your facts come on very fast and in a huge group. Perhaps a little more explanation and a little less numbers would make the article sound better? --Andrew4010 02:23, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
  • As I am not a native English speaker, my prose usually needs some polishing (pun not intended) - but this is not something I can do. Which sections would benefit from more prose? I don't want to remove numbers, unless they are duplicated elsewhere, though.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:15, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Haven't read it through but what about the "The Killings" heading. Is the K there supposed to be capitalized, as some sort of proper noun? Mrtea (talk) 06:42, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, good point, I have renamed it to "Execution" - it fits with other section titles (Preparations, Discovery) plus I think it sounds better and has two meanings, both correct int his section context.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:44, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Using primary sources when writing historical encylopedic articles as an amateur is not advisable. They are often difficult to interpret, can easily lead to POV-conflicts and Wikipedia's objective is not to nurture investigative journalism, produce bleeding edge history writing or to uncover The Truth. Try to rely on what the current consensus is among scholars rather than attempting to write history. Leave that to professional historians.
The footnote system is also very hard to penetrate and, as is the rage right now, very bloated. Please remove the ref-links that don't lead to a source of their own. If a previous footnote has established the use of a source, there's no need to refer to it again. Don't double-reference a sentence (42/43, 57/58, 59/70/71, etc) and try to cut down on the amount of references as well. I don't believe for a second that the article can be covered with just a handful of comprehensive books on the subject.
Peter ^Isotalo 23:12, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why we should not provide links for primary souces, if they are mentioned in other referenced materials. Most of the primary sources are reproduced on sites with secondary level of analysis and such anyway.

While footnoes are extensive, I think they at least provide easy way to reference all controversial facts. If you know how to improve them, go ahead - but I spent hours simply on turning inline hyperlinks into inline footnotes, and I think I had enough of footnote conversions this for a few month.

I am not sure how to understand your last sentence. Do you suggest 'less references is better?' I'd think the contrary is true. I think that this article has one of the best footnote/reference section in Wikipedia (ATM, our standards are constantly improving).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 21:23, 18 January 2006 (UTC)