Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Frank Buckles/archive1

Dank

(moved from project page)

Very glad to have another copy editor working on Milhist FAC articles, AYW, and you're doing a great job. One thing: watch the second commas, you've removed a few. User:Dank/MIL#second commas tells you where to find discussion in the top 3 US style guides, and Comma#Parenthetical phrases is helpful, too. - Dank (push to talk) 15:06, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks Dank. There's a split of authority about whether to put a second comma after the year (when a date is in month-day-year format before the end of a sentence). See here for example. But I'll do it your way, at least for this article. :-)Anythingyouwant (talk) 15:18, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it's not just the top 3 US style guides, it's all of the top 10 or so where I've specificallly noticed. I'll find more cites for you, I've been meaning to do that. In my mind, they trump Laurenaa13 at Answers.com. Don't get me started on commas, they get my blood pressure going ... oh f..., too late.
We ask writers who go through our A-class review to at least be thinking about the points in the WP:Checklist, just so that we don't get overwhelmed with the clean-up ... but in fact, I and others don't mind fixing prose mistakes ... if we did, then that would just mean we're making poor use of our spare time ... and the A-class writers have been pretty wonderful about letting us fiddle around. But there's a difference between fixing a mistake once that I have no reason to expect the writer to know about, and inserting second commas 50 times (it's literally gotten that high) in the same article, when it's just as easy for the writer to do it right as do it wrong, and it's on a very short list of things we ask them to check.
The really annoying thing is that I can't fault anyone (including language mavens) for what I regard as punctuation mistakes, because they're right at the top of the list of the kind of information that our brains toss aside and misperceive when we're reading.
There are significant national variations, and I'd love to get cites to more style guides.
The only way to maintain a supportive atmosphere for the writers is to get tough on reviewers who also copyedit, even to the point of asking for a little more negotiation and standardization than I personally would ever ask of a writer. If some copyeditors keep removing the commas that others are inserting, we at least wear out copyeditors and confuse writers, and when the battles explode, we lose writers. Of course, there's nothing close to a magic solution to all our grammar problems ... all I can say is that, remarkably, we have very few discussions that blow up in our A-class and FAC Milhist articles. Possibly, that's because some of us are too quick to squash dissent, but I'm sure that doesn't apply to me. Now where did I put that riding crop ... - Dank (push to talk) 15:58, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't know what kind of grudge you have against Laurenaa13. :-). Anyway, I'll do it your way, no worries. I hate the metric system, but European-style dates (d-m-y) are looking better and better!Anythingyouwant (talk) 16:17, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bingo ... we make use of the fact that militaries generally prefer that format to avoid this particular discussion, generally. - Dank (push to talk) 16:28, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On the withdrawal of the nomination

Neutralhomer and Anythingyouwant, While I can understand your disappointment with this nomination not being successful, I don't think that your comments on the reviewers are at all fair. I, and I'm sure the others, want to pass articles which are nominated for FA status, but the criteria are exacting (I've taken the lead on 13 FACs, and they're always tough). It's obvious that a lot of work has gone into this article and I think that it makes good use of the available sources. However, the key problem is that the available sources don't appear to be sufficient to support an FA-level article as they're largely dependent on the contradictory memories of very old men and women and were written by journalists who appear to have little background knowledge of the era. As I noted in my review, I think that these references let you down here. A single article, book chapter, etc, which reported the results of serious research into Buckles' life (covering for example, his war service based on his service records and the records of his unit, his career based on the records of his employers and critical analysis of interviews with Buckles and people who knew him, etc) would be much more useful than all the currently available references put together. It's a safe bet that such a reference will appear, and I hope that you draw on it to develop the article. Nick-D (talk) 07:43, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the reviewers did a great job, and some did the opposite. I wouldn't really put you in either category. You're correct that further published sources may eventually enable improvement of this article. On the other hand, I don't see any real basis for your statement that sources now used in the article are "largely dependent on the contradictory memories of very old men and women and were written by journalists who appear to have little background knowledge of the era." There were no contradictory memories about anything described in this Wikipedia article, and you also haven't identified any cited journalist who was ignorant about the eras covered in this article. In other words, your quoted objection sounds erudite and potentially valid, except that there are apparently no supporting facts to back it up. But at least you didn't go to the extreme lengths that some of the other reviewers did to scuttle the nomination. Some of your comments were very helpful.Anythingyouwant (talk) 08:08, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]