Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Battle of Red Cliffs

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.

Battle of Red Cliffs

Recently promoted to WP:GA. The MILHIST Peer review didn't attract much attention... Have been working (along with others, notably User:Deadkid_dk) to improve this article, and could use some extra eyes. Hope to get it to FA quality within the next 6 or 8 weeks. Ling.Nut 16:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

• Support Generally good (although perhaps a little on the short side). Two minor quibbles, though. I'm not a huge fine of the style of referencing that you've adopted, as I find it breaks up the text and makes it difficult to read. Would you consider switching to footnotes? Also, would it be possible to have some external links, or are there none that are suitable? Carom 18:59, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Reply Thank you for your comments! :-)

1. The article may be a bit longer eventually. We are discussing adding a section (probably brief!) covering modern references to the battle.
2. I'm absolutely positive that we can scare up some worthwhile external links. Thanks for the suggestion...
3. For my part, since both WP:CITE and WP:MILHIST#CITESTYLE explicitly and unreservedly back up the use of Harvard referencing, I see no problem with its use here. See Taiwanese aborigines for a recent FAC using this style (I believe that article will be on the main page tomorrow!)

Thanks! Ling.Nut 19:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Citation style is more a personal choice than anything else, and I certainly won't insist on footnotes. Nice work so far, and good luck! Carom 19:23, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

• Support An interesting article, I enjoyed reading it. My one suggestion for improvement would be to lose the line reducing the text size in the refernce section (I don't really see a need for it on such a short page), otherwise its "A" all the way. Good Job! TomStar81 (Talk) 00:53, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Reply Thanks the kind words! :-) I changed the font size of the Refs section, as per your suggestion... Ling.Nut 01:21, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

• Support. A-class level article. Not every paragraph has a citation, but otherwise looks good. Nice work. CLA 08:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

• Support. Good coverage of the material. Three possible improvements - the phrase (roughly modern Hubei and Hunan provinces, including the strategic naval base at Jiangling) in the background section took me a couple of reads to work out what it meant - the naval base at Jiangling seems to be in modern context, being inside the bracket, but becomes clear later in the text that it's nearby the battle site. The second improvement would be to have a clear summary of the forces for each side - the estimates in the last paragraph are good but might be better tabulated to show the subcommanders. The last would be to address the following items that an "automated peer review" came up with (not necessarily all of them though - remember it's just from an automated program).

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 160 kilometres, use 160 kilometres, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 160 kilometres.^[?]
• When writing standard abbreviations, the abbreviations should not have a 's' to demark plurality (for example, change kms to km and lbs to lb).
• Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
  • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
• You may wish to convert your form of references to the cite.php footnote system that WP:WIAFA 1(c) highly recommends.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Medains 21:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments!! We'll get to work on them, except one, which is clearly erroneous. WP:WIAFA 1(c) does not highly recommend use of footnote-style for references; it recommends it for footnotes and endnotes. If we have need to add a Notes section, we will certainly use the footnote style, as recommended. Thanks! Ling.Nut 00:58, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Fine, as I said that's generated by AndyZ's javascript - I use it as a guideline to catch things that are not necessarily visible, or that I might miss on reading. Medains 10:42, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

(undent) Yes... I really do appreciate for your help, and I also want to separate the remarks that are yours from those that are auto-generated... please forgive me if I didn't make it clear that the javascript made that error, not you. :-) I'm just trying to do my part to dispel a common misconception. I really do appreciate your comments. I hope my reply didn't catch you off guard... thanks!!! Ling.Nut 12:04, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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 page.