Talk:Battle of Damme

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Battle of Damme has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 3, 2018	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 17, 2018.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that at the Battle of Damme, a smaller English fleet captured 300 French ships and burned another 100?

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Ship numbers

How reliable are the estimates of ship strength given that Medieval chroniclers were prone to exaggeration? I do not think that these estimates can be uncritically repeated in wiki voice. Kges1901 (talk) 00:40, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kges1901: Good point. One suspects not very. They seem high. I had thought this when I first looked at the article, but by the time I finished I was accepting it uncritically. Thanks for pulling me up on it. I have several sources which talk around the edges of this. I shall see what I can patch together. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:41, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for beginning to address this, as it would have come up on the GA review either way. Kges1901 (talk) 18:25, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kges1901: Oh yes, it needed tackling. Thanks again for focusing me on it. Article heavily rewritten. What do you think? Gog the Mild (talk) 15:43, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The article is much improved. For consistency, you should cite the 1911 Britannica Article on Damme the same way as the one in the bibliography. Kges1901 (talk) 16:34, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kges1901: Gah! I am not doing too well with this one. Thanks for spotting. First time I have had two EB1911 cites in the same article and it tripped me. Corrected, and a couple of other things tweaked. What else can you spot? Gog the Mild (talk) 18:39, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Now both EB sfns go to the first article. The template should have a way of differentiating them. Kges1901 (talk) 18:55, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kges1901: This must be trying your patience. Apologies. I cannot find guidance on how to differentiate EB1911 articles when neither have named authors, so I have fudged it. Is it acceptable do you feel? Gog the Mild (talk) 20:31, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have manually overriden the year parameter myself to differentiate them. Some content notes are that William Marshal is mentioned in the aftermath, but his relevance is not briefly explained, and, do secondary sources discuss Philip's actions after the defeat uncritically repeating what the chroniclers said, or do they qualify it – his actions seem somewhat extreme. Kges1901 (talk) 20:51, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kges1901:

I didn't know that one could do that. It seems obvious now. Thank you.

Marshall - rephrased.

Brookes probably gives the best modern account. He explicitly mistrusts the accounts of the time. Here, about a page from the end of the chapter, the paragraph starting "Philippe had now definitely intended to abandon his intended attack upon England." and ending "Philippe did what many a commander in a tight fix has had to do, he destroyed his stores to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy."

You would probably also like chapter 23 in the same source. (Just check the title in the contents.) Gog the Mild (talk) 21:43, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]