Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battle of Khe Sanh/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 01:59, 24 July 2007.

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Battle of Khe Sanh

Incredibly well written and detailed article, with excellent use of multiple sources, diagrams pictures and maps. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 17:43, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

• Object. There are still unreferenced paras, not to mention sentences. 'Battle in popular culture' list is not pretty, needs to be rewritten into a normal paragraph. For the record, this is the first article that I have seen uses question marks ("Why else would Hanoi have committed so many forces to the area instead of committing them to the Tet Offensive?") - rather unusual style (this is not an objection).-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  20:21, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Comment I've acted on Piotr's suggestion about the "Popular culture" section. Two statements are now tagged within the paragraph. --Fsotrain⁰⁹ 20:31, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

• I could not agree with you more. As a matter of fact, I believe that the entire paragraph should be removed as irrelevent. The author RM Gillespie 15:37, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose. The major issue in my eyes is length. 59 kb is way too long, especially given how many {{details}} and {{see also}} statements there are. By applying summary style, and limiting those sections to three paragraphs or so, pushing the size down to a reasonable read should be quite doable. Also, I visited Khe Sanh a while back and the article doesn't give a good sense of the physical location. In particular, the firebases were set out in a string along Route 9 south of the DMZ. The way the article is written it makes it seem like the fort battles are happening around Khe Sanh, which is actually explicit (and misleading) in the lead ("Khe Sanh Combat Base (KSCB) and the hilltop outposts around it"). Some basic orientation is needed so the reader has a sense of the physical features and distances involved. - BanyanTree 09:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
  • It should be pointed out that the actual prose size is 42K, not 59K; looking at the rendered HTML size isn't particularly useful. Kirill 20:31, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

• Considering that I did not know about this nomination until today I am quite impressed by the response. I do not understand your claim about the confusion of locations. I Corps Marine positions were along route 9 (Gio Linh, Cam Lo, Con Thien, the Rockpile, etc.) The Battle of Khe Sanh took place "around" the Khe Sanh Valley, as any cursory examination of the maps contained in the article would reveal (that is, after all, what they are there for.) As to the article's length, I wrote it to give a detailed, unbiased account of the action and did not consider length as any kind of qualifying measure.RM Gillespie 15:37, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

• • • Let me structure my response, which I probably should have done before:
      • I've never bothered with the procedure of finding "readable prose", as I think of articles in terms of "good read", "lengthy read", "torturous read", etc. So my sense of appropriate size automatically includes markup. I probably should have just used the qualitative terms rather than quoting numbers. Sorry. Let me just say that the article is too long for the number of subarticles it has.
      • OK, now that that is out of the way - spatial orientation: I read through the entire article, including looking at the thumbnailed images, and was obviously entirely confused about what was happening where. If you are going to rely upon maps to inform the reader as to what is happening where, you need to make them much larger so readers don't have to click through in order to see what the little blobs are. Even if you did this, I don't see why giving indications in the text wouldn't be a positive, e.g. "11 km northwest of the main camp".
      • Sections referring to main articles. The most obvious example of bloat are the details, including quotations, about the Lang Vei survivors, which don't appear to have further affected the battle. The article shows classic symptoms of being the focus of a dedicated editor, in that Operation Niagara, Battle of Lang Vei, etc are less comprehensive on their subject, in at least some respects, than Battle of Khe Sanh. Pushing all those details down into the most relevant article and then determining the minimum amount of duplicate text needed to maintain a coherent narrative would significantly reduce the length and help the narrative momentum.
      • I'll add a third concern related to the flow. As it reads now, the article strikes me as largely consisting of a "The Americans were attacked, and then the U.S. troops were shelled, and then the Americans were attacked again, and then the U.S. bombed stuff, and then the Americans were attacked" narrative. This may give a sense of how the Americans felt, but I would really appreciate any sense of the experience of the North Vietnamese. I don't mean the overall Tet strategy, which is already addressed, but something that fills in all the blank spaces when the Americans were waiting to get attacked. It seems unbelievable, given how much detail a 1992 book like We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young has on tactical level decisions by PAVN officers (albeit in a separate battle), that no PAVN soldiers have commented on their experience at Khe Sanh
      • There are some non-structural concerns I could raise, but I figure that the ones above are plenty to work with. - BanyanTree 03:06, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

• • Let's see: 1) I did not write this article to then have to parcel it out amongst others. If another editor wants to expand the pertinent sub-articles by utilizing the information, all well and good. 2) All of the images in this article arpe thumbnails and may be greatly expanded in size. 3) As to North Vietnamese sources, there are none. Every bit of information concerning the battle related by the official North Vietnamese history of PAVN is given in the article. So far as the author can discern, there are no other works (translated into English) concerning the battle. Went through all this with editors to obtain an A rating. If there had been other sources, I most certainly would have used them. RM Gillespie 10:55, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

RM, respectfully, you might want to re-read WP:OWN. All of us editors agree to "parcel out amongst others" whatever we contribute, and we give up proprietary rights. Please assume that Banyan and the others make their critiques with good intentions. Thanks. -Fsotrain⁰⁹ 18:14, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think RM is saying that he owns the article. I think he's saying that now that the information is in the article, he doesn't see the point of splitting it up. Which seems a fair comment to make; the quality of other articles shouldn't have any bearing on whether this particular article is considered of good quality. That said, I think the use of {{details}} probably does give the wrong impression, if the articles being pointed to aren't actually much more detailed. This can be fixed by somebody taking the information in this article and using it to populate the others, but not necessarily reducing the content of this article. -- Hongooi 18:24, 14 July 2007 (UTC)\

• Exactamundo. Kudos to Hongooi for that perceptive eye. RM Gillespie 14:49, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.