Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Battle of Albuera

Battle of Albuera

The second in my current campaign to extend or write Peninsular War related articles. Following the last one's peer review, I hope I've avoided most of the mistakes this time. A couple of things I personally am not sure about are:

Are the Background and Prelude to battle sections too long? In their defence, it's largely because the details aren't available in other pages - the background information, in particular, should probably go in the Lines of Torres Vedras and Second Siege of Badajoz (1811) articles. I will probably create the latter, and update the former, before taking this article too far.
Does the Organization belong in the article? This was a legacy from the version before my rewrite. I'm in two minds about its presence - it's not a normal feature of the better rated articles, I think, but then I found it useful in writing the prose. Also not having to remember to give ranks and first names on first occurrence, since they're already in this section, is a boon! So - keep or delete? If keep, in that place, or elsewhere (Weller and Oman and the like put this sort of detail either in an appendix or at the end of a chapter)?

Other than those, normal review I guess - prose, grammar, punctuation, silly MOS mistakes and so on :) Thanks. Carre 08:03, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This one's been idle for a little while now, so I think I'll archive it shortly if no-one has any objections. I haven't, yet, addressed all of Kirill's points; I'm in the process of writing some supporting articles (just done the Gebora one), and once I've done with those I'll trim the Background and Prelude to battle sections, add some historiography, and mention the Napier/Beresford war-of-words. Carre 20:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kirill Lokshin

An excellent article, overall. In response to your questions:

The sections do seem rather long. A dedicated article on the campaign might help here; you can have the overall narrative there and provide only a summary of the preceding events (with a {{details}} link) in each battle's article.

Hmm, a dedicated campaign article - hadn't thought of doing that... A daunting task!

In a set-piece battle, the material in the organization section could be worked in with a description of the troop placement (as, say, here). If the two are separated, then you wind up with, essentially, an order of battle. This can work as prose, but you might consider using some manner of table instead, as it's mostly numeric data if one doesn't need to describe positions. The material ought to be cited directly, in either case.

I think I'll lose the section. A disposition section wouldn't be appropriate, I think, since there was so much manoeuvring during the battle. I can certainly source the numbers, but haven't the faintest idea how to make a table in wikiland!

Aside from that, a few suggestions:

The quotes seem to be a bit short to use block quotation formatting with; you might consider simply placing them inline with the text instead.

OK - I did have them in {{cquote}}s at first, until I read an MOS policy against the use of that sort of quotation template.

Is there anything interesting to say on the historiography of the battle? There are some allusions to various sources made (e.g. "British sources state that the Polish cavalrymen refused to accept surrender..."), but these aren't really followed up in any detail. Oman—in the works I've read, at least—tends to mention sourcing issues quite frequently; is there any potential in this topic?

For that particular part, Oman cites the journal of Major Brooke from the 48th and the regimental annals of the 66th. However, (I don't know if you already know the answer to this and are gently suggesting?) the most interesting part is the subsequent war of words between Napier and Beresford, that lasted for something like 40 years and coloured all future histories. Fortescue, for example, takes his lead from Napier and is scathing about Beresford, while Oman favours Beresford and indeed has several pages refuting some of Napier's statements. This battle is one of the few cases where Fortescue's and Oman's accounts differ drastically. I was actually going to put some of this in the Consequences section, but wasn't sure if it was more appropriate to the Napier/Beresford articles.

Ideally, "References" should be "Notes" and "Bibliography" should be "References"; the use of "Bibliography" as a section header is a bit confusing, as it may refer either to references or to further reading.

Keep up the great work! Kirill 02:22, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the review - a lot less than my last one! Carre 10:32, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]