Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Troop engagements of the American Civil War, 1861/archive1

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
  • Not promoted. This has been open significantly longer than the standard 28 days and reviewer comments from several weeks ago remain unaddressed. I suggest working on these articles some more, paying particular attention to concerns raised by reviewers here, and perhaps asking reviewers to revisit the articles or seeking a peer review] before re-nomianting. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:10, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Troop engagements of the American Civil War, 1861[edit]

Nominator(s): Wild Wolf (talk)


I am seeking to pass this article for AL class. It is a listing of American Civil War engagements for the year 1861. Wild Wolf (talk) 17:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments: G'day, I don't know a lot about the topic, so I can't really comment on content, sorry. I have the following suggestions for improvement:
    • please consider adding alt text to the images [1];
    • the Featured article tools reports one dab link - "Battle of Mesilla". If possible, this should be repointed: [2];
    • "an additional four states seceded and joined the Confederacy, which also started raising troops." This sentence doesn't quite work as the "which" is separated from the clause that it is modifying. Perhaps try, "an additional four states seceded and started raising troops for the Confederacy."
    • in the lead, "but the following day, while Anderson was firing" (who's Anderson?)
    • in the lead, "July 17th" --> "July 17" per WP:DATESNO;
    • in the lead, "August 10th" --> "August 10" as above;
    • in the lead, "Army of the Potomac" is probably overlinked;
    • this sentence is awkward and probably would be best if split: "The first, the Western Virginia Campaign which started in May, Union forces commanded by Major General George B. McClellan invaded western Virginia and drove the Confederate forces from the area following a series of small skirmishes";
    • "Outrage in Congress over his death lead to the" --> "Outrage in Congress over his death led to the";
    • "File:Battle of Wilsons Creek.png": the source on this should probably be updated to somewhere that isn't Wikipedia;
    • inconsistent presentation of numbers, for instance compare: "Missouri State Guard 6" with "Confederate six" etc.;
    • I suggest removing and changing the second level header "Troop engagements in 1861" as it is essentially just repeating the name of the list/article. It could probably just be renamed "Engagements" if you wanted to keep it;
    • endashes for page rages;
    • be consistent with how you display multiple pages. For instance compare "Foote, pp. 48–55" with "Davis, p. 33–34."
    • the web citations should have author, publisher and accessdate information if available;
    • capitalisation: " Naval Historical center" --> " Naval Historical Center";
    • is there an ISBN or OCLC number that could be added for the Davis work?
    • can you add places of publication for Brooksher, Gottfried, Kennedy, Moore?
    • title case for Moore. For instance "Ancedotes, poety, and incididents of the War: North and South 1860-1865" --> "Ancedotes, Poety, and Incididents of the War: North and South 1860-1865". AustralianRupert (talk) 10:48, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Most of my comments have been addressed, except the issue raised with the image. One other issue that I see is in relation to the citations to the "Civil War Reference" website. Why are they presented with the same title? They appear to be referencing different pages of the same work, so they should be given titles that differentiate them for the reader. Also, can you please respond here about what you are doing to address the issues listed below? Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 07:05, 19 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • I wasn't really sure if each page at the Civil War Reference website had a seperate title. I have brought up about changing the layout to tables at the MILHIST talk page to get second opinions. Wild Wolf (talk) 22:10, 10 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • Formatwise, do you have a link to a similar A/FA article that uses this format for summarizing battles? Or maybe one of your sources uses this method? The parent article uses a sortable table which would be a lot more user friendly, and contains a lot more information.
  • I think troop engagement is wrong and you'll need to rename these articles to use a more general term since a troop is a subdivision of cavalry (among other things...). Ground or Land seem more appropriate. Kirk (talk) 18:30, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose I think that it's a bit of a shame that all five articles in this series were nominated simultaneously: given that they're quite similar, it would have been best to have nominated a single article as a test case. While these articles have a lot to recommend them, I think that more work is needed to reach A class list status:

  • I'm not a fan of how the information in this list has been presented - as Kirk suggests, a sortable table would work well, and allow readers to sort according to location, casualties, etc
  • I'm also concerned about the very exact casualty figures given for each battle - I'm pretty sure that there are a range of estimates for most of the major engagements. For instance, the article on the Battle of Ball's Bluff notes that there are differing figures for the Union casualties in that engagement, but here only a single figure is given.
  • As a minor comment, the chronology in the second paragraph of the lead is confusing - McClellan takes over the Army of the Potomac, but then we jump back in time. Nick-D (talk) 00:57, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, leaning Oppose - Agree with Nick that it may have been better to nominate one of these articles as a test case, then nominate the rest when the issues from the first have been hammered out. However, what's done is done. I also think the article would work better as a sortable table. As it stands now, if I wanted to, say, look at all of the battles that took place in West Virginia, I'd have to scroll through the entire list, rather than just sorting by state. Also, where possible I think it would be beneficial to have who won the engagement. I realize that in some cases there was no decisive winner, but in other cases there was, and it's not always evident just by looking at the casualty figures. Overall, though, you're doing some really good work in an overall rather neglected area. Dana boomer (talk) 15:35, 14 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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