1907 Tiflis bank robbery edit
| Toolbox |
|---|
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I am hoping to get this up to a Featured Article and I wanted to run it through peer review first in case there were any glaring mistakes.
Thanks, Remember 13:36, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: This is very well-done and quite interesting. I enjoyed reading it. I have a fair number of suggestions, all minor, for further improvement, but I don't see any big problems.
- I think the lead image would look better at 300px.
- Done.
Lead
- "the injuring of fifty others according to official archive documents" - I'd add a comma after "others" to set the tag off from the rest of the sentence.
- Done.
Background
- "This resolution passed with a vast majority of 65% against 6% (others abstained or did not vote)... " - MOS:PERCENT recommends "percent" or "per cent" rather than the symbol in simple cases like this, with a no-break code between the parts; i.e., 65 percent.
- Done.
Preparation
- "later in his life he reportedly cut out a man's heart from his chest... " - Tighten by one word by deleting "out"?
- Done.
- "organization called "the Outfit" - It appears as "The Outfit" in the infobox. I don't know which is correct, big T or little T, but they should be the same.
- Done.
Stalin's role in the robbery
- Shorten the head to "Stalin's role"?
- Done.
Security response and investigation
- "The police launched an investigation of the crime, and a special detective unit was brought in to lead the investigations." To avoid repetition of "investigation", maybe "The police assigned a special detective unit to investigate the crime."
- I revised it so it doesn't have two investigations.
- "Additionally, it was unknown which group was responsible for the robbery with numerous rumors that put the responsibility... " - "With" doesn't make a very good conjunction, and "responsible" is repeated twice in the sentence. Suggestion: "Additionally, they did not know which group was responsible for the robbery. Rumors blamed Polish socialists, Armenians, anarchists, Socialist-Revolutionaries, or even the Russian State itself."
- Revised.
- In his book "Stalin – An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence" - Italics rather than quotation marks for the book title?
- Revised.
- "According to Roman Brackman's The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, several days after the robbery the Okhrana agent Mukhtarov questioned Stalin about the robbery in a secret apartment." - Since you give all of the details about Brackman earlier in the article, I think you could just use "Brackman" here; i.e., "According to Brackman, several days... ". Also, to avoid repeating "robbery" twice in the sentence, maybe this would be better: "According to Brackman, several days after the robbery the Okhrana agent Mukhtarov questioned Stalin in a secret apartment."
- Revised.
- I'd merge the one-sentence orphan paragraph at the end of this section with the paragraph above it.
- Revised.
Moving the money
- The money from the robbery was originally hidden in Tiflis, kept at the house of Stalin's friends, Mikha and Maro Bochoridze.[29] There the money was sewn into a mattress so that it could be moved and stored easily without arousing suspicion.[33] After the money was sewn into the mattress, the mattress was moved first to another safe house and later onto the Director's couch at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory." - Too many repetitions of "money" and "mattress"?
- Revised.
Captures and trials of Kamo
- "from Lenin to a prominent Bolshevik, Dr. Yakov Zhitomirsky, asking the doctor... " - The Manual of Style suggests using a brief description rather than an academic title. Thus, "Dr." should be omitted from this sentence, and nothing needs to be added in its place since it is already there in the form of "asking the doctor for medical assistance" unless you want to use the even more specific "physician" in place of "doctor".
- Revised.
- "In August 1911, after feigning insanity for more than three years, Kamo escaped from the psychiatric ward of a prison in Tiflis by sawing through his window bars and climbing down a homemade rope.[42][47][43]" - Rearrange the inline citations to appear in ascending order, i.e., [42][43][47].
- Revised.
- "Kamo was caught before the robbery took place and was put on trial in Tiflis for his exploits" - Would it be helpful to add the year here?
- Revised.
References
- Citations 36, 43, and 62 should use p. instead of pp.
- Revised.
- Citation 48 should use pp. instead of p.
- Revised.
- Citations 25, 57, and 59 should use Wikipedia house style by rendering the article titles in title case rather than all-caps, per MOS:ALLCAPS.
- Revised.
Bibliography
- If possible, the book entries should include place of publication. If you don't have this information in your notes, it can usually be found via World Cat.
- Revised when possible.
- Krupskaya should precede Kun.
- Revised.
Images
- Nice images. They work well.
- Thanks.
- It might be good to add some bibliographic details to the book title on the license page of File:Litvinoff Profile.jpg.
- I don't know anything about where this image came from so I can't help out here.
- I'd consider moving File:Kamo(Ter-Petrossian).jpg to the left side of the page so that he looks into the article rather than out. I might move him down also, just a bit, to keep him from bumping into the subhead on the left.
.jpg){kind=link}
- Done.
Other
- The dab checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds one link, to Freedom Square, that goes to a disambiguation page instead of the intended target.
- Revised.
- Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)
- Ok.
I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:09, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Carcharoth's review edit
I'm a bit late to this peer review (a note was left on my talk page), but here are my thoughts:
- (1) Is there really a need to put the UTC time in the infobox. It seems irrelevant to me. Local time is sufficient, but it should be made clear that this is local time. Anyway, I'm not even sure if worldwide times had been synchronised yet.
- (2) Background: "vast majority" - I think vast should be replaced with 'large'. Vast seems an excited way of putting it. Also, saying "against" 6 percent sounds wrong to me. The usual word that would be used here is "versus". Even better would be to say that 65 percent supported and 6 percent opposed.
- (3) Preparation: here, you are moving back in time from the congress at the end of May and first day of June to April. Maybe use a phrase like "Earlier..." to alert the reader, or use the past tense to indicate that you are referring to past events within the timeframe of the narrative.
- (4) It's not clear whether those taking part in, or organising the robbery, were aware of the resolution passed at the congress in London. It is implied that they (or some of them) were, but this is never stated explicitly in the article. Was Lenin at that conference, for example? Were any of the others there?
- (5) It's not clear how crowded the square was at the time or how large the square was (though the picture helps there). It might also help to give an idea of how large a city Tiflis was at the time, and what its population was, and how large in physical size it was (the phrase "almost across the whole city" seems to suggest that the bombs could be heard over the whole city).
- (6) "managed to sneak out of the square before security forces arrived" seems inconsistent with "The police [...] were guarding every street corner in Yerevan Square".
- That is what the sources say. I think the after the bombs exploded all the security forces were in disarray.
- (7) "The deputy committed suicide soon afterwards" - this is a bit of a hanging statement (the implication is left there for the reader to make the connection). I think you need to either find a source that explicitly links the suicide to the robbery, or drop this.
- (8) "Kamo then rode to the gang's headquarters" - is this the same as the place they met at before the robbery, referred to earlier as "the organizers, including Stalin, met near Yerevan Square to finalize their plans". If so, you need to make clear this is all still within the city and not outside it.
- (9) When was Stalin – An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence published? The references gives 2009, the date of the publication of the translation. Since Trotsky died in 1940, you need to say here when Trotsky published this book. The same applies to the quote from Nicolaevsky - it is not clear from this article when either of these two are making these quoted statements. You then mention someone called Kun for the first time. It is not clear who this person Kun is, so you need to say what period he is from (I presume he is an author whose book was published in 2003, but you need to introduce him here and explain who he is, especially as you are switching from quotes from those at the time to someone speaking around a century later). The same applies to the Krupskaya quote later - the reference is dated 1970, but when was she saying this (she died in 1939)?
- (10) The link to 'Allegations of Stalin's suspected cooperation with Okhrana' doesn't really work. Better would be to work in the phrase "early life of Joseph Stalin" and link to it that way.
- (11) Was the money all notes and no coins or bullion? The description of the denominations makes that clear, but maybe it could be explicitly stated at some appropriate point?
- I think this is fine, but I will change if others disagree.
- (12) When I click on the links in the references section, they are not taking me down to the entries in the bibliography as they should be doing. Is this broken in some way?
- (13) When you refer to Berlin, possibly say it is in Germany, to orientate people as these travels take place.
- (14) Inconsistent spelling: "Bolshevik Centre" (twice), "Bolshevik Center" (once), "Bolshevist Center" (once, in title of a source), and "Bolshevist Centre" (twice).
Overall, this article was fascinating to read (especially about armed robbery in the days before mass communications and motor cars), and it is very well-written and was a pleasure to read. I hope the above comments help. Carcharoth (talk) 01:04, 21 February 2011 (UTC)