Wikipedia:Peer review/Battle of Marston Moor/archive1
- A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for August 2008.
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article as it passed GA in the last few months and I would like to see it up for A class reivew when it is ready (and, hopefully, FAC) in the near future. Qjuad (talk) 01:06, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Comments from Ealdgyth (talk · contribs)
- You said you wanted to know what to work on before taking to FAC, so I looked at the sourcing and referencing with that in mind. I reviewed the article's sources as I would at FAC.
- What makes the following sources reliable?
- http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/upload/pdf/marston.pdf dealinks (and it should have (pdf) listed after it to let folks know its not an html file)
- Hope this helps. Please note that I don't watchlist Peer Reviews I've done. If you have a question about something, you'll have to drop a note on my talk page to get my attention. (My watchlist is already WAY too long, adding peer reviews would make things much worse.) 13:06, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: This is interesting, generally well-written, and seems comprehensive, stable, and well-documented. I think your chances of working this up to FA are good, but I see some things that need fixing. Here are my suggestions:
- The article in the main reads well, but I'd still ask a copyeditor to go through the whole article looking for the last of the low-level, nit-picky things like comma splices or extra commas and their evil twins, the missing commas. An example of an unneeded comma occurs in "Prince Rupert had been decisively beaten for the first time in the war, and lost his reputation for invincibility." Paradoxically, I might suggest fixing this by adding another comma, thus: "Prince Rupert, decisively beaten for the first time in the war, lost his reputation for invincibility." An example of a missing comma occurs in "From there he proceeded via Clitheroe and crossed the Pennines to Skipton where..." I'd recommend a comma between "Skipton" and "where". I see a few other kinds of low-level things; for example, "enfilade" could use a wikilink.
- Pairs consisting of digits modifying nouns should be cemented together with no-break codes to prevent splitting on line-wrap. See WP:NBSP. An example would be "raising his force to 2,000 horse" in the "Relief moves" subsection.
- I'm sorry to have to mention a problem with a map, because maps are a lot of work, and this one is lovely. The base map for Image:Marston-moor-campaign.jpg is licensed as "Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported". Alas, I think the "noncommercial" (NC) part of the license puts it out-of-bounds for Wikipedia. The license for the modified version used in the article is cc-by-sa-2.5, but I don't think that is valid because the NC in the original can't be ignored. See WP:IUP for an explanation of "free" vs. non-free images. Also, please ask another editor or editors familiar with licensing issues before you act on my warning. I know less about licensing than I'd like to, and it's possible that I'm not assessing the situation correctly. If my assessment is correct, I'd recommend explaining the situation to the copyright holder and asking him/her to consider re-licensing without the NC module.
- Image:Marston-moor-battle.gif is from the same source and has the same NC problem.
- I'd double-check the licensing on the other images as well because at least some of the image summary and source data is insufficient for fact-checkers at FAC or elsewhere to verify the validity of the copyright tag. For example, the Commons description for Image:Alexleslie.jpg lists Robi01 as the uploader, but Robi01 doesn't have a user page. A web link is given as the source of the image, but the link goes to the image alone rather than to a page with any other information. How can anyone verify that this face is that of Alexander Leslie? Who painted this portrait? When? Where?
- A couple of the books in the Bibliography section are missing their ISBNs.
- I'd suggest moving the orphan sentence, "Rupert personally commanded a reserve of 600 cavalry, including his elite Lifeguard of Horse" into the paragraph above it.
- In the "Events" section, "James Lumsden managed to reform part of the allied centre" probably should be "re-form" to avoid confusion.
- I'd suggest moving the Cromwell image to the left so that he looks into the page instead of out.
- The ampersand in constructions like "Newman & Roberts" should be changed to "and". The ampersand is generally reserved for official company names like "Procter & Gamble".
- WP:MOSNUM has changed since this article passed GA. It now says, "Dates are not linked unless there is a particular reason to do so." They still need to be internally consistent in the main text and in the citations. I don't see a particular reason for linked dates in this article, but it's your call. Only one in the notes, citation 42, is linked and would need to be fixed by hand. A script exists to remove the date links from the main text. I could run it for you if you let me know, or you can acquire and run it yourself. You can find a full explanation of the script here.
If you find these comments helpful, please consider reviewing another article, perhaps one from the backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 02:52, 27 August 2008 (UTC)