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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battle of Warsaw (1831)/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 09:49, 5 November 2014 (UTC) [1].[reply]

Battle of Warsaw (1831) edit

Nominator(s): //Halibutt 10:39, 18 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the largest and the most important battle of the November Uprising, or the Polish-Russian War of 1830-1831. I expanded the article from a mere three-sentence long sub-stub in August 2013. The article has not been peer reviewed as such, but it received lots of love during the GA nomination in September 2013. Since then it's been pretty much stable. Interestingly, as the history of Poland is not yet covered in-depth in English language books, this article is probably the only English language monograph of the battle out there. Most English sources mention it by name only, or in a brief passing note. //Halibutt 10:39, 18 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. - Dank (push to talk)

  • Welcome back to FAC, Halibutt. The writing is generally well-organized and lively. I read quickly down to Opposing forces and fixed some things, but my suggestion is that someone proficient should read through the whole thing looking for obvious language problems. Some examples:
  • "who has been deposed of Polish throne": who had been deposed from the Polish throne
  • "sympathy towards ... the Polish question": "Support for ... Polish independence" would be better.
  • "considered it but an experiment": old-fashioned "but"
  • "Warsaw would hold out at least several weeks of siege": "hold out at least several weeks" is fine; "hold out at least several weeks of siege" is not. "hold out for" or "hold out at least several weeks under a siege" would work. - Dank (push to talk) 15:34, 18 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for taking the time to read through the article. I included most of your remarks in my recent edit, except for the sympathy thing. The problem was that the news of the battle did not incite any real *support* for the cause of Polish independence. It incited sympathy, plenty of nice gestures towards the people promoting the Polish question, but not really any support. Any ideas as to how to better put that down? //Halibutt 07:27, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
What kinds of gestures? Being specific is generally the way to handle these kinds of problems. - Dank (push to talk) 11:21, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Unwatching ... I pointed to some problems and gave an assessment, and that's all I've got time for. - Dank (push to talk) 12:41, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Partial image check edit

Think that's everything reviewed. Lots of issues, I'm afraid. Adam Cuerden (talk) 02:30, 19 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Adam Cuerden: Thanks for taking the time to look at all of the images.

      • File:General Staff of Polish Army during November Uprising.JPG - good spotting! I corrected the description. In any way, the author died in 1899, so we're safe here.
      • File:Wojna polsko rosyjska 1830-1831 plan umocnień Warszawy.jpg - I believe the description is 100% correct: it's a 19th century plan *published* in a 1930 work. I updated the link to on-line library where the 1930 book can be viewed (it's in Public Domain), but other than that I'm not sure what else could be improved here. As to the Polish pre-war copyright, the tag indeed says photography, but the law mentions "works" most of the time. Chapter III, Article 21 says explicitly: The copyright expires 50 years after publishing the work, or making it public for the first time. The same term is applied to anonymous and pseudonymous works, unless their creator disclosed his authorship. The copyright to photographs, or works created in a way similar to photography, expires in 10 years from the creation; copyright on cinematographic works - in 20 years from their creation; to mechanical reproductions of musical pieces - in 20 years. So, regardless whether we look at the 1830s original or the 1930 reproduction, it's PD. Plain and simple. Anyway, as the source is a collection of maps and pictures of various formats, there's no "page number" as such, I added the sketch number. Not sure what else could be done to improve the image description.
      • File:Plan Nicholsona.jpg I couldn't find the full name or dates for the engraver, but I did find the author. I added a creator template (and created a stub on him as well). And you're right, if the engraver was active in 1830, then there's little chance he lived past 1914. Especially that we're bound by the 1830 publication date, not by the birth date of the engraver.
      • File:Ramparts of Warsaw 1831.jpg - see my comment above. It *is* a photograph (or rather it falls into the "works created in a way similar to photography" category as a photographic reproduction of a 2D document). But the copyright dates back to the documents creation in 1830, not to the 1930 publication (and even if, it's still well past expiry date). Oh, and the link works for me. Could you please explain what is it that you see when you click it?
      • File:5th,_6th,_7th_Infantry_Regiment_of_Polish_Army_of_November_Uprising.JPG - I located the source. It took ages, but it's there. And I even located the source the anonymous author of the litograph used for his work :)
      • File:Russian_assault_on_Wola_redoubt_1831.JPG - removing for now until I find the page number and all the necessary details.
      • File:Sowinski.jpg - could you explain how is this relevant here? According to Commons:URAA-restored copyrights, the URAA "restored copyrights in the U.S. on foreign works if that work was still copyrighted in the foreign source country on the URAA date". Which means it *would* restore the copyright to the painting in the US if it was still copyrighter in Poland. Also, I corrected the date to 1922.[2]
      • File:Life-Guards Volhynian Regiment in 1830 - original.jpg - I uploaded the original, I didn't know it had the colours changed, thanks for pointing that out. Not sure if it's really that important, but I'll switch to the original in the article just in case. //Halibutt 11:04, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Squeamish Ossifrage edit

Really just looking at the references and reference formatting here for now:

  • What order are these bibliography entries in? It looks almost, but not quite, alphabetized.
  • Your ISBN numbers are not consistently formatted. ISBN 13 with hyphenation is preferred.
  • For books lacking ISBNs, some sort of identifier would be helpful, especially to help English-speaking readers locate this material more easily; OCLC is pretty much always my choice but other options may exist (I see you do actually have an OCLC for Strzeżek).
  • "various authors" is not a standard way of presenting a long author list (there are several, and I'll not prescribe formatting choices).
  • Retrieval dates are not all in the same date format.
  • The Rostocki reference looks like a journal entry? Do you have a page range? Or, if I'm wrong, publisher information? Really, I think this entry's just incomplete.
  • Some but not all of the titles have English translations provided. Any particular reason why that's been done for those, but just those?

I haven't evaluated the prose at all, but I also share the concerns about image sourcing and documentation. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 19:52, 19 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, good to see you back at FAC, Squeamish. - Dank (push to talk) 20:19, 19 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, a year has passed and now I see clearly why I stick to {{Sfn}} these days... It's cleaner and simpler. We'll stick to the system we have here already though, converting it might take ages and wouldn't really add much value, would it. As to specific issues:
    • I sorted the refs by author, all should be nice now.
    • ISBN 13 with hyphenation is preferred, but hard to come by these days. Not even the National Library of Poland uses proper hyphenated ISBN 13. I'll try to add as many OCLC numbers as possible.
    • I use "various authors" only in really hopeless cases, where there are a couple dozen authors and listing the most important and "et.al." is not possible. We have two great examples here: "Powstanie Listopadowe" (Józef Lachowski, ed.) has... 45 authors listed. Same for "Mała encyklopedia wojskowa" ("Small military encyclopaedia"): the list of authors is several pages long and listing all of them would neither do this article any good nor make finding the right book any easier. I would really appreciate any suggestions here.
    • Modified all retrieval dates as per your suggestion
    • Indeed, Rostocki was incomplete. I initially wanted to use only the excerpt published in a scientific journal, but the full book is good as well.
    • Yeah, probably some got translated because it was around midnight when I was adding them while others were not because it was after 3AM :) Now seriously, the problem is that I used {{cite encyclopedia}} for some refs instead of {{cite book}}. And the earlier does not support translating the name of the publication for some reason. I converted some of the encyclopedia to Cite_book format and provided the trans_title parametre.
I hope all the issues you raised are fixed now. //Halibutt 20:49, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Still some oddness about sort order. Sometimes you seem to sort by editor, sometimes not. "Jednoróg", alphabetized by editor; Balzac et le monde slave. not. It's not just the ones with no specific author that are sometimes sorted by editor either. Przewodnik po polach bitew wojny polsko-rosyjskiej 1830-1931 r. is also done that way.
  • Regarding ISBNs, [3] is one of my most-frequently used bookmarks.
  • You generally only need one identifier number per source, choosing the "best" of them. So, for books with an ISBN, you don't need to also include LCCNs and OLs. Otherwise, nice work getting identifiers for most of these. Just missing Powstanie Listopadowe now, I believe, and I'll see if I can't help with that.
  • It is OCLC 739084724 for the downloadable archive material (which will need a format entry in the reference), or 35594683 for the original book. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:54, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let me see what I can do for the "various authors" problem.
  • For the Mała Encyklopedia Wojskowa, check to see if the specific article you are citing has its own author byline (some encyclopedias do, some don't). If this one does, that's the only author you need; if it doesn't, you are fine to just cite the editor.
  • I'm pretty confident that you can exclusively attribute Powstanie Listopadowe to its editor, also. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:54, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Translation consistency looks better at least on a cursory glance.
  • Need to check when you link things in the references. I see Rzeczpospolita is linked in Nieuważny, but not at its first appearance in Kraj. I always hate raising this issue, because it's such a pain to manage; this problem (and there might be others, I didn't check closely) are probably an artifact of alphabetization.
  • Is rusempire.ru a reliable source? Its copyright is to Российская Империя (Russian Empire). That's clearly not a government copyright (as there hasn't been a Russian Empire since 1917), so I assume it's a private company operating under that name. Now, I most certainly am not fluent in Russian, but I can't find anything like an About page or editorial policy.
Responding somewhat. Let me see what I can do about lending a hand with a couple of these source-format issues, since they're being tricky. Still have some concerns, however. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:34, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Squeamish Ossifrage: Thanks a lot for your help. As to specific issues:

  • I verified the sort order and now all positions are sorted by whatever name comes first (be it editor, author or corporate entity). That should do the trick I believe
  • ISBNs - I tried using another ISBN converter before but it crashed on most non-American books. Thanks for the link mate, I'll treasure it :)
  • Thanks for finding the "Powstanie listopadowe" oclc. As to "Mała Encyklopedia Wojskowa", I'll settle for Bordziłowski (ed.), it would be much easier.
  • Linking things within references is indeed a pain in the back, especially that some people chose not to link anything there, others link everything (authors, journals, publishers, even places). I wonder what's the best practice here. BTW, I corrected the Rzeczpospolita link you mentioned.
  • I got rid of rusempire.ru completely. It was just a quick reference to prove that the medal did indeed exist, but since we already have pics of it on commons there's no need for external pages for that. I replaced rusempire with a more reliable ref.

//Halibutt 22:13, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Inclining to Oppose Comment – this is a very long article, and is on the wrong side of the MoS guideline WP:SIZERULE. A quick look at some existing FAs on battles shows Austerlitz at 51kb, Blenheim at 65kb, Vimy Ridge at 77kb and Hastings at 60kb. This one weighs in at 114kb. Sometimes there is good reason for a very long article, but to my (layman's) eye this is not so different from other battles as to need twice as many words. The prose is fine, give or take the odd false title, but there is simply too much of it. – Tim riley talk 08:11, 23 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Tim riley: I took a look at your examples and I believe there is a significant difference between them and this article. With the exception of Hastings all were promoted long, long time ago, some as far back as 2006, when article size limit had real, practical reasons as users with dial-up connection were still a sizeable group. These days it's no longer an issue. Plus, all the articles you mentioned are relatively simple cases: either one-day engagements or simple battles, with little or no relevant political background. In the case of Warsaw 1831 it's impossible to tell the story without explaining the political negotiations that ultimately decided the outcome of the three day long battle.
Anyway, WP:SIZE is all about readable prose size, not just mere size of the file (with all the HTML code, reference templates, automatically converted units, footnotes and such). And the article is only 70 kB of readable prose in size, not 114. You got the 114 kB because the article is actually much better sourced than the ones you mentioned. :) While it's still a little above the 60kB benchmark, I believe the larger size is justifiable by the complexity of the topic. If you really believe this would make the article better, we could try to shorten the Background and Initial clashes sections. That way the article would be just under 50kB of readable prose. However, I'm not sure the readers would actually benefit from that. Let me know what you think. //Halibutt 00:32, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Having no expertise in the subject of battles, I accept Halibutt's assurance that this length is necessary, and will not press my reservations to the point of opposing FA for this article,

Comment: On the length question, the actual wordcount is 11,726 as of now (9,174 devoted to battle and aftermath). This is rather longer than usual for featured articles, although they have tended to get longer in recent years. I accept the nominator's view that this was a highly significant battle and that the political background and negotiations are important to the context; I don't think, however, that sufficient attention has been given here to economy of expression. Comprehensive does not mean exhaustive – part of the skill of writing a summary encyclopedia article is the ability to select the salient facts and to express them concisely. The writing in this article seems to be somewhat overdetailed, for example: "Prądzyński met with Paskevich at the outskirts of Wola at 3:00 on 7 September. Prądzyński asserted the Russian commander, that 'Krukowiecki and the Polish nation are willing to return to under the rule of Nicholas'. Paskevich in turn proclaimed a cease-fire and invited Krukowiecki to meet him in person at 9:00. The meeting, held in the village tavern of Wola, was far from amicable." I think that the essence of this information could be conveyed much more succinctly. This is, I stress, just one example of the overdetailing which is prevalent in the article.

Although I have only skim-read it, I did note a few odd words or expressions. "Conservatist" is surely a made-up word ("conservative"?); a "forcible march" is presumably a "forced march"; "a complete project of an act of unconditional surrender" makes no sense at all to me – perhaps it means "proposals for an unconditional surrender"? I am fairly sure a detailed read-through would bring further examples of this sort to light, but the length of the article somewhat deters me from a detailed review of the prose. I fully appreciate the diligence with which his article has been prepared, but I think you should reconsider your justification of the article's length and seek ways of trimming it. Such a step would improve both its readability and reviewability. Brianboulton (talk) 15:51, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Brianboulton: thanks for stopping by. Back in the good old days we had plenty of people willing to help with polishing the prose, listing incomprehensible parts and such. Nowadays the number of Wikipedians who actually contribute to historical articles written by others is much smaller and the backlog in all peer review projects has grown so much that the author is usually left on his own. And in this case the author (me, that is) is not a native speaker. Which means there might be many more such calque translations from Polish and I might not be able to notice them on my own.
Anyway, I corrected the issues you mentioned above. I will also try to make the prose a little more concise, though I'm not sure if the effect would actually make anyone vote on this article. Being a professional journalist I'm quite good at this, but as I said, English is not my native language and apparently I'm not proficient enough to copyedit my own articles. //Halibutt 21:06, 18 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Please take it as a compliment that in my partial reading I did not actually realise that English wasn't your first language. Apart from the occasional non-idiomatic words and phrases, the quality of the writing looks pretty good. The article does, as I have said, need copyediting and trimming. I don't have much time at present, but should this review be archived without promotion, if you contact me I'll do my best to give the article a proper copyedit. Brianboulton (talk) 21:12, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Brianboulton: thanks for the offer. I trimmed the article by over 3 kb recently, that is some 500 words of readable prose. I'm not sure what else could be trimmed/reworded/edited out. Pointing me in the general direction would be of much help. Anyway, seeing that there are no votes here, I might have to ask for your help pretty soon. :) //Halibutt 13:19, 26 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment edit

For certain terms like "Security Guard" and "National Guard" - which are presumably directly translations of original Polish terms but which seem a bit strained in English - could the Polish original name be provided in brackets? To my mind too, the images could do with being re-positioned to take aesthetics into account - but that's obviously just cosmetic... A thorough article anyway, and one I hope will encourage me to get the Belgian Revolution article of the same year in order!—Brigade Piron (talk) 14:41, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Brigade Piron: Not sure what's wrong with the National Guard as there is plenty of National Guards out there, but I took your advice anyway. The articles on those formations are on my to-do list, but so far only the Jewish City Guard has its' own article.
Problem with their names is that there are no established English proper names so we're left with direct translations. National Guard is pretty safe, as the Polish militia unit was modelled after the French National Guard (hence the name). However, the Security Guard might indeed be a tad more problematic. The Polish term is Straż Bezpieczeństwa. Polish: Straż means guard (as in border guard, advance guard, coastguard and so on) and Polish: Bezpieczeństwa means "of security". I chose to call it Security Guard but perhaps Guard of Security sounds better? I have no idea. We could go either way as I doubt the unit was ever mentioned in any English language publication.
As to pictures - is this what you meant? If not - could you please be bold and suggest something? //Halibutt 21:06, 18 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Halibu. It's not a problem for the translation. In all sorts of revolutions of the period, you have terms like "Bourgeois guard" and "Civic guard" that don't work fantastically in translation. I think the original text makes it clear that this is just a translation of a foreign proper-noun. Viz the photos, I just meant that they could be better spaced through the article so that they do not squeeze the text like the two Sowiński pictures currently do. As I said, though, it's not a massive problem! All the best for the article's promotion, —Brigade Piron (talk) 08:08, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment from John edit

I want to support this nomination, and I read the comments above about prose with interest. I even got some way into copy-editing it, but I am coming to realise that there is just too much detail. It is also slightly over-written, but it will still be too dense even after thorough copy-editing. I am not going to oppose either at this stage. There has to be a way to fix this beautiful article to meet FA criteria. Let me think about it. --John (talk) 23:32, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

All right my friend, but not too long as the review's been open quite some time -- it might be better to archive now and allow some copyediting outside the FAC process before re-nominating (perhaps stopping by at MilHist A-Class Review on the way)... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:08, 31 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Having finished my copy-edit I am inclined to agree for now. I'd love to help work on this for another shot in a few weeks. --John (talk) 02:10, 1 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, seems like MilHist A-Class review is a decent way to go. Thanks to all for their input, their comments and hard work, let's see if there's anything that could be done with the article outside of the FAC process. //Halibutt 21:12, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Tks Haibutt, I'll take this as withdrawing the FAC, and will close shortly. Good luck at MilHist ACR, and feel free to let the reviewers above know when it's there in case they'd like to stop by. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 09:48, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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