Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Ulm Campaign

Ulm Campaign edit

Time for another FA from our wonderful project. I created this article yesterday and, as always, would like all opinions on what can be done to improve it. Thank you!UberCryxic 21:27, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Kirill Lokshin edit

Bleh, I just didn't get a chance to review this yet, having spent all day writing my own article; no deep principle at work here! ;-)

Overall, the article is very nicely written, up to your usual standards. There are a few point on which some work may still be advisable, though:

There is some use of fairly informal language (e.g. "bagged an Austrian army") that should probably be replaced with something more staid.
All month/day combinations need to be wikified so that date preferences work; this includes dates in section headers. In particular, usage like "October 5th" should be avoided in favor of "October 5".
"The campaign" should be "Campaign", as a leading article is omitted from section names unless absolutely necessary. The same principle applies to any other section titles that begin with "The..."
When a block quote is given (e.g. in the "Aftermath" section), it's much neater to include the corresponding footnote directly after the quoted text, rather than leaving it trailing off after the block formatting.
There's a lot of redundant categories. Strictly speaking, this needs only four: 1805, Battles of France, Battles of Austria, and Napoleonic Wars (or a subcat of that, if there's one for the Third Coalition.
The formatting of the short-form citations is inconsistent; some are given as "Author, Title, page", while others are only "Author, page". Personally, I prefer the first form; but either is fine as long as it's consistent throughout the article.
The captions for the strategic situation maps could probably be a bit longer and more descriptive.
A thought: any chance of getting some more non-map images? Portraits of the chief commanders, for example, should be relatively easy to come by.

I would say that, given the requisite formatting fixes and copyediting, this should be ready for FAC shortly. Kirill Lokshin 02:49, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've made every change except the citation thing. The reason why I do it that way is to save myself time. After the first instance of [Author, title, page] I figure the reader will be aware that if I keep citing from the same author it doesn't matter if I write just [Author, page]. I don't think this is a problem as I've seen it done in several scholarly works.UberCryxic 03:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Which would be fine, except the titles seem to pop up (pretty much at random) after the first instance as well. For example, "The Campaigns of Napoleon" is repeated no less than four times. (Or did you mean that they're given in full at the beginning of each set of citations from that work, similar to how "Ibid." works? That seems unnecessarily complicated, especially if the text gets rearranged, changing the order of the footnotes.)

There's also the fairly strange fn. 34, which uses a full name ("David Chandler") but no title. Kirill Lokshin 03:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More pedantry: there's also plenty more dates that need to be linked. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 03:24, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

When there is a new author that I cite from, then yes I go back to [Author, title, page] even if it has appeared before. I don't think it's complicated and it's a standard I've used on other FAs as well. If the text get rearranged, then I rearrange the citations appropriately. Footnote 34 was a mistake; I've corrected that now. I normally don't link dates unless they're in the infobox or they're very important, and in the latter case it's very iffy for me. What dates in particular were you thinking should be linked?UberCryxic 03:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Any date that includes both a month and a day needs to be linked so that readers' date format preferences work properly. In other words, "September 5" should be "September 5". Kirill Lokshin 03:43, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Done.UberCryxic 04:11, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]