Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Operation Brevity/archive1

I've no idea whether this it's accepted practice to make counter comments on a FAC discussion page, but these points are not really worth bogging down the main FAC page for. Some of Deckillers points I think, with respect, are excessively nit-picky and tend to characterise the article as something which cannot pass a FAC, whereas I think, with a will, this article can be brought up to scratch in the timeframe normally available to a FAC. Specifically...

• "back" is not redundant. It relates that sentence to previous statements detailing Allied advances.
• Sollum, Capuzzo, and Bardia may well be forts/bases/settlements, but the Axis forces were located in an area defined by these points. The content of that sentence is correct.
• "exploit" is a perfectly valid term for a military action such as that described in the objectives.
• The third column was indeed out in the desert, and the use of 'out' here, far from being redundant, is intended to convey a sense of separation from the other two columns.
• I don't agree that an accurate statement about withdrawal should be changed to something less accurate simply for the sake of stronger prose.

Excessively nit-picky? I don't know, but that's 5 prose comments out of 8 made that seem a little off the mark to me. --FactotEm (talk) 14:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

• • Feel free to post rebuttals beneath each point on the main page. Please note my use of rather weak wording ("you could", "perhaps", etc.) on the project page; I am not very familiar with military history, so I'm just calling what I see as potential opportunities for improvement. There were bound to be questionable examples, and I assumed someone would dispute a couple of the points.
  • Looking at the "back" issue, I still think it can be removed without changing the meaning or confusing the reader (given the context).
  • Perhaps the colon before "Sollum, Capuzzo, and Bardia" made that part confusing. Changing the colon to an "of" would help matters a bit, although I still think listing the forts/cities out would help readers unfamiliar with military jargon.
  • I still disagree wrt "exploit". I always thought it was a synonym for "take advantage of" or "use", not "advance". If this is a specific military term, then perhaps it could be linked; otherwise, I still feel it should be changed to a word that more readers may associate with an advancement into enemy territory. Looking at google, it seems the term "exploit towards" is used only two times on Wikipedia and 190 times on the internet (in military context).
  • Is the desert flank extremely far away from the other two columns? The sentence already implies that they are separate waves in separate locations.
  • Looking at the "was withdrawn" issue, I'll withdraw that comment (no pun intended).
  • My eleven examples really only took a couple minutes to identify, and they cover the entire lead. FACs typically last for several weeks, so there is plenty of time; if I had wanted to imply that the article couldn't pass FAC in the timeframe, then I would've posted a strong oppose instead of a weak oppose. As I noted on the FAC page, the article is quite good and a lot of effort has been poured into it, but the prose just needs a few more passes by editors unfamiliar with the text and/or military history. — Deckiller 16:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)