Talk:Douglas MacArthur/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: María (habla conmigo) 17:41, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Hello, I'll be reviewing this article for Good Article-status. While military history isn't a major concentration of mine on Wikipedia, I feel I have a strong enough knowledge of MacArthur and his accomplishments to take on this major task; as a side note, I volunteered at the memorial in Norfolk, VA for several years as a teenager, and I still have the t-shirt to prove it! :) This is a formidable page, to say the least, so it may take me several days to complete my comments. Thank you for your patience, and if you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact me via my talk page. María (habla conmigo) 17:41, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

That's fabulous! It's always best to have someone from outside the MILHIST Task Force review an article like this, which will after all be widely read. (They get to have their say at the A-class review stage in any case.) Welcome! Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:48, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Hello again. After reading the article in its entirety, I've found very little to fault or question; typically I list comment upon comment, complete with nitpicky grammar suggestions, during a GA review. However, this article is actually very excellent, and far above and beyond the majority of GAs that one typically sees. Here is how it stands against the criteria:

1. Well-written: Yes.
2. Factually accurate and verifiable: Yes.
3. Broad in its coverage: Yes.
4. Neutral: Yes.
5. Stable: Yes.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by images: Yes.

In short, this is an obvious pass. I do, however, have a few technical comments:

• I hate to state the obvious, but this article is long. Very, very long. At 160 kb, it will almost certainly run into issues at FAC, where a few "trim this and that per WP:SUMMARY" comments can be expected. While the article is overall excellent, and certainly well written, be on the look-out for material that can be abbreviated.
• On the other hand...! Compared to the rest of the article, "Honors and awards" is decidedly skimpy. I suggest expanding the subsections, if only a little, to better summarize MacArthur's legacy. "Places named after MacArthur", for example, contains only three short sentences; a few examples of the more important places listed in the main article would help greatly
  • It was split off into its own article. Will add some. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• While I know WP:CITET lists it under the "book" column, I don't like seeing {{Citation}} used for books. The punctuation is all wrong and does not follow any widely accepted academic formatting, which makes me -- a librarian -- quite crabby. IMHO, {{cite book}} is much better, and I believe you can use Harvard with it.
  • That's problem. People wanted to be able to click on the book and have it move to the bibliography. That's why the {{citation}} form was chosen. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• As impressive as the book sources currently are, the formatting for website sources are not consistent throughout. Some, like ref 81 ("'Brooklands/Rainbow Hill', retrieved March 2, 2010") do not list the publishing website, and while a majority of these web sources use ", retrieved [date]", several appear as such: "Retrieved March 1, 2010". Just make sure that everything is consistent and that all necessary information is included.
  • A few {{cite web}} tags snuck in. I have corrected the article to use {{citation}} consistently. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• Speaking of, External Links do not require access/retrieval dates. The bare URL for the MacArthur Memorial is also unnecessary.
  • Fixed that. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• Watch out for logical quotations; this means that if the comma/period do not belong in the original quotation, it should not be inside the quotation marks. I like to do a search of the article for ." and make sure that the quoted words include, or do not include, the punctuation. These, for example, may need to be checked: "entirely appropriate and justifiable." -- "Beau Brummell of the AEF." -- "all damn poppycock." -- etc.
  • Will do. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• On my screen, the Wikiquote box squishes up the section [edit] links and doesn't match up with the "Quotes" subsection, which I guess is what was intended?
  • I think so. One of the other editors moved it there deliberately. Because my screen is 2560 x 1600 pixels, I have trouble figuring out what it looks like for people with other monitors. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Again, this is an excellent article, and I feel like a useless reviewer as a result! However minor, I hope the above suggestions help. Best of luck with the A-class review, and whatever may come after. If you have any questions about this review, or would like further input, please let me know. María (habla conmigo) 23:18, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

• I was blown away that such a distinguished editor would review the article. Hope we can collaborate on one someday. Hawkeye7 (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

• Aw, thank you, but everything you've read about me are lies, all lies. Seriously though, the only thing I can see holding this article back is that it may be entirely too comprehensive. Such a long and eventful life must be terribly difficult to summarize in just one article, but I believe it can be done in a way that won't make people's eyes bleed. As for collaborating, I'd love to! If you have a budding interest in military-related literature or something, let me know. :) María (habla conmigo) 13:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

For argument's sake, I'll state that perhaps everything said in this article is true. The problem is that there are too many things that were left unsaid that show that MacArthur was a first-class phony who had two sets of standards: one for himself and his cronies, and one for other people. To get a better picture of the above, books such as The Ghost Mountain Boys (the truth about the New Guinea campaign), The Coldest War (how he used press conferences to take credit for Ridgeway's actions), Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War (to see why FDR let DM get away with screw-ups he relieved others for), and Embracing Defeat (how the Japanese used DM and not the other way around), among others. Honors were fine for him, but not for others. He tried to derail Wainwright's MoH, among others. All you need to do is sit down and listen to veterans of the South Pacific campaign to learn how much they hated DM. This guy had his good points, but he was far from perfect. And the article does not let us know that. After saying that, I refuse to get involved further as I am willing to admit I probably can't take a rational approach to MacArthur's career. As a kid, I thought he was God personified, but there is far too much evidence that he was blind to his faults, used others (including his troops) and rewrote history as it suited him. I'll never forgive him for ignoring (and whitewashing) the Japanese biowarfare experiments that killed over 500,000 Chinese and used living American and Australian POWs for medical experiments, including dissection. Thomas R. Fasulo (talk) 00:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)