Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Barton S. Alexander

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.

Barton S. Alexander

Self nom for an article created at the indirect suggestion of FayssalF, who said I should at least create stubs for all the wikilinks in the A-Class review of Fort Bayard (Washington, D.C.). That inspired me to create this article, which I originally intended to only be a stub. After getting a little carried away, it became the first biographical article that I've ever attempted, and I'd like to think that it's as worth of A-listing as any of the fort articles that are the main focus of my current campaign. Thanks for taking a look at it. JKBrooks85 21:44, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose for now. The following need to be adressed:

• Your last sentence in the 3rd into paragraph is incomplete; it needs to expanded or removed.

Removed.

• Add a section on the General's earliy life and childhood, if you could; we seem to pick his life up at the age of 19 with no knowlage of who his parents were and whether he had siblings and all that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any of that sort of information. I've written to the History office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia in hopes of getting a copy of his biographical file, but aside from that, I don't know of any other way of getting that information. He hasn't had any biography written, and everything else I've found has been about his military career.

• You have multiple tenses in the main body, an article needs to be written entirely in the present tense or entirely in the past tense.

I was only able to find two instances of this — both having to do with the Scott Building. I've fixed both.

• Some of your sentences seem to be fragmented; others do not seem to flow well, and some sentnece suffer from both problems. See is you can combine some of the sentences and/or rearrange the wording to help make them read easier.

Can you provide specific examples of this? Copy editing your own work is never easy, and readability standards differ from person to person, and a fresh set of eyes is always appreciated.

• Try to aviod instances of the same word appearing in the same sentence. Case in point: the word designed in this sentnece: "Designed by Brigadier General Joseph Totten, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the lighthouse was designed to replace a structure that had been destroyed in a storm in 1851."

Fixed.

• You have too many commas in the article, most are no needed and hence should be removed.

Again, specific examples would be appreciated on this. I've removed a couple optional information clauses, but a readthrough by someone else would be appreciated.

• See if you can gain some consistancy with you refernce section, the cites in some places seem thread bare. SandyGeorgia may be able to help you with this if you are uncertain of how to improve them. TomStar81 (Talk) 07:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Where would you have me add more citations? I've got at least one in every paragraph, and most have two or more. The lede paragraphs don't have cites because the information in the lede is contained later in the article. Thanks for the critique! JKBrooks85 22:16, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

I can not in good faith oppose an article in which the main editer/contributer has tried to find info and had such info elude him, so if the early life information can not be faound I will withdraw my oppose on that ground (you did try, after all, so you have completed your 50% of the work :)

Understood, but it's impossible to prove a negative. I can't prove that such information doesn't exist, merely that I haven't found it in several online searches across a week's time.

I've managed to find a bit more early life information, including his exact birthdate and birthplace. I have managed to find information about his marriage, but it's only on a private genealogy site, and I don't know how trustworthy it is. Should I include it?

On the issue of commas: English grammar rules are to add commas only after the words "and", "but", and "or" if they appear in the sentence; to add commas after listing three or more things; to seperate date, and to seperate proper place locations. Examples where these rules are not exaclty followed would be as follows: "The only exception to this came in late July, 1864, when Confederate forces under the command of Jubal Early attacked Washington's defenses from the north during the Battle of Fort Stevens." (the comma between July and 1864 is uneeded); "In August 1853, Alexander accepted, and by 1855, the Smithsonian Building was complete." (absence of "and/or/but" between "1853" and "Alexander", and between "1855" and "the"); and "After the conclusion of the war, now-First Lieutenant Alexander returned to West Point for a four-year stint as as Treasurer and Superintending Engineer for the Cadets' Barracks and Mess Hall." (the comma between "war" and "now" is uneeded).

As to comma rules: I've fixed the first of these suggestions. Thanks for pointing it out! Completely missed that one. The other two sentences you pointed out are examples of parenthetical phrases or non-restrictive clauses. They can be removed from the sentence without changing the meaning. If they really bother you that much, I can rework the wording.

On the issue of citations: you have enough citations in the article as it is now, no further citation are needed. What I am suggesting has to do more the citations themselves; there is a difference between citing information to "Kelley, p. 128 (cite #25)" and "U.S., War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, (Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, Volume 2, Chapter 9, p. 38. (cite #9)"; given a choice, most people would rather see the latter than the former. If you could reconfigure some the citations so they have more information in them (like page number, volume number, edition number, publishing press, etc) then you can make the page look more proffessional. SandyGeorgia is particularly good at this, she can add meat to the citations anyone has already added to an article (hence the reason I suggested having her look at it).

If you'll re-examine the citations, you'll find that I fully cited the Kelley work the first time it appeared in the article. In order to keep the citations list from becoming unwieldy, I used shortened citations. It's the same format used in scholarly works and in other Wikipedia articles, and it provides the necessary information without becoming more wordy than is needed.

On the issue of fragmented sentences: I am aware that one of the ten commandments of writing anything is "Thou shalt not copyedit thy own work"; but I am afraid that if I mess with it I will add uneeded spelling and grammar mistakes, solving one problem at the cost of adding another and possibly subtracting from the overall meaning of the work. If you want I can try to edit the article for you to adress the issue; or you can wait and gamble that someone else will review the article and fix the problems. TomStar81 (Talk) 23:03, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

I really do want someone to look it over — I wouldn't have asked if I didn't mean it. Though I may disagree with you on some of the individual sentences, it'd be nice to make sure everything's clear enough for others to understand. Thanks. JKBrooks85 00:30, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. I did a quick edit to align the format with most of the other Civil War generals' biographies. You were using a lot more fully spelled out ranks for people over and over again than we typically use in these biographies. Two remaining things to consider: In your footnotes, the external links should be composed on the title of the work, not appear as a separate numeric link, such as Title of my book rather than Title of my book [1]. You should do a reevaluation of the ranks. The paragraph in which it describes him being a major of engineers while a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army was confusing. My typical reference for command history is Eicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3, and they indicate that most of the promotions he received during the war were brevets. For instance, he was not promoted to permanent Lt. Col. USA until 1867. And the sentence that indicated his brevet promotion was not permanent is a little misleading. Normally, we use the term permanent to differentiate regular army ranks from the volunteer ranks that were given out freely during the war. Alexander was one of the rare generals who had exclusively regular army ranks throughout the war. Brevets were honorary ranks, and unless they were revoked somehow, were permanent enough. Hal Jespersen 17:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for doing all of that, Hal. It's really appreciated. Since we are dealing with two different sets of ranks here — engineering and U.S. Army — which one should predominate, and what should I indicate as his final rank, General or Colonel? As you said, it's really confusing to someone new to the topic, and was for me as well. Incidentally, I made contact with someone at the Office of History at Fort Belvoir, and they're sending me Gen. Alexander's biography file via mail. From the email exchanges I've been having I don't expect too much new information, but we'll see when it arrives. JKBrooks85 20:31, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Here is a table of his promotions, all the the regular army (USA) which I extracted from the Eicher reference and also http://www.civilwardata.com/active/hdsquery.dll?Officer?476&U (for which a subscription is needed):

07/01/56	Captain	Full
07/21/61	Major	Brevet (for First Bull Run)
05/04/62	Lt. Col.	Brevet (for Siege of Yorktown)
03/03/63	Major	Full
03/13/65	Colonel	Brevet
03/13/65	Brig. Gen.	Brevet
03/07/67	Lt. Col.	Full

so the confusing sentence actually should indicate that he was a full major in the regular army (engineers or not, makes no difference) but that he had previously received a brevet promotion to Lt. Col. in the regular army.

Thanks for clearing that up. I've fixed the sentence and am wondering if it's okay with you if I include the table you created in the article. JKBrooks85 11:41, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

It is generally not our style in ACW biographies to include command history tables of this type. (Of the 400 or so I am familiar with, I can think of only two that have them and I intend to rewrite those eventually.) I have made the appropriate changes to the article to include the promotions within the context of his assignments. See if you are happy with the format of the footnotes I added; you are using a different format than I generally use. I removed the Warner footnote because he really provides no additional information of value. Hal Jespersen 15:35, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I've brought my web citations into a more standard format and corrected a few niggling problems that had been overlooked. I think it's all set now. JKBrooks85 20:24, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

• Support Took another read through after leaving it be for a dew days, and this time it looks much better than it did. TomStar81 (Talk) 18:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.