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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 05:27, 17 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

21G.219 Assignment: Critiquing an Article

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I picked the article of Battle of Yiling, which refers to a battle between two warlords that happened in 208 A.D. in China.

The article, as far as I am concerned, can be improved in the following aspects.

The lead section

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The lead section does not provide an easy-to-read overview of this article. The author seems to presume that readers know well of all historic events related to this topic, as a series of terms are listed in the section without even a simple explanation. This can be confusing to readers without a background. I suggest the terms and names be briefly introduced and hyperlinked when they appear for the first time. Reconstruction of sentences may be necessary.

The structure and components

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I propose that the section "Order of Battle" should come before the description of battle progress, so that readers without a background can know to which side the generals belonged.

Similarly to the lead section, I suggest more background introduction about the places, events and people mentioned in sections "Background" and "The battle", such as the identity of Zhou Yu, the relationships among characters. Moreover, I suggest the battle progress be described in a more explicitly chronological way, with more cohesive devices.

Neutrality

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The section "Aftermath" goes with only one sentence, which seems like a very subjective judgment. It hurts the neutrality of the article. It should be better to quote some views from historians, or list some facts (with citations) to support that judgment. Moreover, this section is too short, compared to its importance.

Citations and Notes

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The citations and notes of this article are not good.

There are no indices for the citations, and no superscripted numbers in the main text. Any quoted information, such as the order of battle, and the timeline of the sequential battle, should be cited explicitly. Moreover, the format of some entries in the citation is problematic — the years of publication are not included.

The notes, quoted from Chen Shou's Records of Three Kingdoms, are written in Chinese. I suggest translations for these quotations, as the article is for English reading.


Ychzhang17 (talk) 20:20, 9 March 2017 (UTC)Reply