Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Amchitka

Amchitka

This article describes an island that played a role in World War II's Aleutian Islands Campaign, as well as being an important (and controversial) underground nuclear test site.

I've taken the stub and worked to create a decent article. I would appreciate any feedback, so that it can be improved further. Jakew 17:45, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Kirill Lokshin

Very nice! A few general suggestions:

The lead should be a two- or three-paragraph summary of the entire article; also, the bulleted list there should be given in prose form.
{{details}} might be used in the "World War II" section to link to the campaign in question.
Single-sentence paragraphs should be avoided. Even among the longer paragraphs, many are very short, so some coalescing of the prose into larger blocks might be advisable.

In general, any further expansion would be good, but I suspect that there simply isn't enough material to bulk this up to any noticeable degree. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, as even quite short articles have made it through WP:FAC when they were well-written. Kirill Lokshin 04:20, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the above comments. I have:

Rewritten the lead section
Included the 'details' link (There is actually more detail in the Amchitka article - I wonder if {{main}} might be more suitable?)
Combined some short paragraphs, except for a small number of cases where these help the narrative flow.
Added information on remediation to the infobox
Added a table giving detailed stats on the blasts
Added some additional information (and a handful of additional refs) to the article.

I think you're basically right about the article length: there simply isn't enough source material to be able to add much more detail. Actually, that isn't strictly true - there is quite a bit of source material, but much of it is incredibly obscure and frankly boring detail that is unlikely to be of interest to the reader.

I would appreciate further feedback based upon the above changes. Jakew 12:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I read the article and believe it reads very well, giving comprehensive encyclopedic information, appropriately wikified for further study. It is a credit to Wikipedia. Thanks for your excellent contribution! N2e 16:37, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent work on the improvements. Only one minor issue: the dates in the table need to be wikified so that people's date preference settings work correctly. Also, are the times local or GMT?

As far as obscure details go, I don't think including them (within reason) would be an issue for an article of this length, but it's something of a personal preference, so whether you do this is entirely up to you. (One possible approach would be to add annotations of interesting but obscure points in the footnotes to avoid breaking up the flow too much.) Kirill Lokshin 02:43, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]