Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/World War II

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[edit] World War II

Previous Comments of FAC located at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/World War II/Archive I

Ok Guys. Here we go Again. Major work done on this article. Massive improvements everywhere. Every major event of the War covered in chronological order. So I don't see any bias problems. This article is a FAC, just need your approval.--Mercenary2k May 13, 2006 2:24 AM

• Strong support. A fascinating article on an event that need to be remembered. -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 21:06, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

• Strong object; absolutely no attempt has been made to address (or even respond to) the points raised during the peer review. Briefly:

• Masses of extremely short and choppy pseudo-sections (most are only one paragraph; some are only one sentence) don't really qualify as brilliant prose.
• Insufficient use of inline citation; most of the article can't easily be traced back to any particular source, including piles of potentially questionable statements and statistics.

These are the same issues that came up during the previous FAC, incidentally; I don't think simply ignoring them will somehow cause the article to magically be promoted. Kirill Lokshin 21:08, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

What you are objecting to is not bad writing, but writing that is in a chronology format. Passages are short and choppy because that is how timelines are. Is it a requirement for FA status that articles not include lengthy timelines? Apparently in your eyes this is a rule. Drogo Underburrow 19:20, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

The requirements for a featured article are quite clear: the prose must be "compelling, even brilliant". Choppy writing—no matter how seemingly appropriate for creating a timeline—cannot, by definition, satisfy this. (This is, incidentally, why actual timelines are properly the province of the featured list.) Kirill Lokshin 01:02, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object per Kirill Lokshin - 71.115.57.95 21:30, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Strong object. 10 references in a 91 kb article are not enough and I do believe that it should be possible to find sources on WW2. --Maitch 22:27, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object - this is one of those articles which really should be featured, given the ridiculous amount that's been written about it, but this just isn't up to snuff. Also, the lead contains a sentence fragment. Find more sources, and deal with the suggestions from the peer review/last FAC. The Disco King 23:20, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object. There are numerous issues with this article which need to be corrected:
  • The number of short paragraphs in this article is unacceptable. Many are one sentence long, and each section seemingly contains at least one of them.
  • There are no inline citations used in this article, which is an FA requirement.
  • Ten references for an article of this size an scope is not adequate, surely there is more material to be found concerning the topic.
  • I'm not an expert on copyright, but many images seem to have questionable or objectionable copyright or fair use rationale.

More work still needs to be done. RyanGerbil10 23:27, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object per Kirill Lokshin - TomStar81 00:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object per Kirill Lokshin. - Mailer Diablo 08:23, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object. References need fixing. "ref_war" 2 to 4 and 6 to 7 don't appear to be linked to anything in the article. Chances are the points they referenced have been moved into one of the subarticles, but at the moment, the article uses 4 refs, not 10. GeeJo ^(t)⁄_(c) • 13:08, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object Does not correctly follow Wikipedia:Summary Style: The ==Chronology== section should be spun off into its own article at Chronology of World War II and a good-sized summary left in its place. Makes no sense to have anything but inline links and mentions of individual battles and operations from the main WWII article. In other words, this article abuses use of 'Main article' links ; just link inline unless the 'Main article' is a real daughter of this article instead of an article in its own right. For example, an article on an individual battle would not be a daughter article of WWII (and thus not merit a main article link) while the Aftermath of World War II would. Trying to summarize so many stand-alone articles and put it into this one article has resulted in way too many very short sections and disjointed paragraphs. A much more high-level treatment is needed ; detail can be in daughter articles. Also needs a great many more inline cites. Granted, this topic necessarily will be one of the largest we have and thus need to go above the regular max size of 50KB of prose, but I think we can do a much better job of summarizing this topic so it is at a much more comfortable reading length. --mav 14:43, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree with this. The Chronology of World War II should be in prose and not just a collection of headlines like in the Timeline of World War II. --Maitch 16:48, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Those two links go to the same article. Drogo Underburrow 19:14, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I know. I'm saying that if an article gets made for Chronology of World War II it should be different from the style of Timeline of World War II, which means it should be written in prose instead of headlines.--Maitch 23:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object. Sections aren't prosified enough, doesn't flow enough. Lincher 17:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. Maybe breaking the WWII article in sub-articles where World War II would have big lines of what happened and World War II (1939), World War II (1940) ... would be where it goes in deep details in order to have longer sub-sections and not having a big WWII article. Lincher 17:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

• Strong Support. As per nomHezzy 18:37, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Support - The objections that the article is chronology based, or that the writing is choppy (of course it is, it is a chronology) are objections of taste, and have nothing to do with whether the article is of featured quality or not. It seems as if editors are judging not on the quality of the article, but whether the article matches a format they like. Drogo Underburrow 18:47, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Very Strong Object First as per syle/quality objections above. Second, parts of the article are extraordinary US-centric. The introduction has been recently changed to allude to a fringe theory. My attempt to work on this issue met with uncomfortably strong opposition. Myciconia 04:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object: for something as important and documented and written about as World War 2, this article is excruciatingly thin on both citations and content. I'd like to see a lot of the images cleaned up too - they are causing a lot of formatting problems due to their abundance. Also, I feel the WP:LEAD is too long and doesnt give a quick summary of what it was all about -but rather appears to condense the timeline into a few paragraphs. Are subtitles like "the beginning of the end" necessary? they strike me as POV in many ways. Obviously we'd want to be avoiding a sort of "allied" account of it. -- Alfakim --  talk  22:12, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Object as per Kirill Lokshin: Chronology-only descriptions of wars are just plain annoying. Campaign-based formats are much more easily preusable, and more useful in descriptions of wars. In addition, a timeline already esixts that can be prominently linked. UnDeadGoat 00:43, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Support Excellent article. Love it. Great information.
• Comment. You are arguing about either writing a chronology or a campaign-based article. I wonder which style did Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica use in their respective articles?
• Object because I think this needs to make better use of Wikipedia:Summary style. There should be more on cultural ramifications, which are vast (cargo cults, to give one example) -- World War 2 had the effect of moving massive numbers of people all over the world, causing their cultures to intermix. There should be a section on cultural depictions of World War 2. I think that, over all, it's too detailed on military history, which is only one important aspect of the topic. Some of the non-military history sections are also too uncomprehensive to satisfy summary style: "the home fronts" (and why the home fronts?) doesn't cover Japan or the Soviet Union at all. It needs inline citations throughout too. Tuf-Kat 03:35, 18 May 2006 (UTC)