Wikipedia:Featured article removal candidates/Battle of Aljubarrota

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[edit] Battle of Aljubarrota

Article is no longer a featured article.

Primarily, this article is not comprehensive at all and is very poorly sourced. The battle appears to be one of the most relevant in Portugese history, yet nothing is mentioned about its reception in popular culture. Contrast this article with the recent FA Battle of Badr. Furthermore, it's repetitive. This is part of the introduction:

"Independence was assured and a new dynasty, the House of Aviz, was established. Scattered border confrontations with Castilian troops would persist until the death of Juan I in 1390, but these posed no real threat to the Portuguese monarchy. To celebrate his victory and acknowledge divine help, João I ordered the construction of the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória na Batalha and the founding of the town of Batalha (pronounced /bɐ.'ta.ʎɐ/, the Portuguese word for "battle"). The king, his wife Philippa of Lancaster, and several of his sons are buried in this monastery, which is an important part of Portuguese heritage."

And this is most of the second paragraph in the Aftermath section:

"Independence was assured and a new dynasty, the House of Aviz, started. Scattered border skirmishes with Castilian troops would persist until the death of Juan in 1390, but posed no real threat to the Portuguese crown. To celebrate his victory and acknowledge divine help, João ordered the construction of the Monastery of Santa Maria of Batalha, and the founding of the town of Batalha (battle in Portuguese). The king, his wife Philippa of Lancaster, and several of his sons are buried in this Monastery, an important part of Portuguese heritage."UberCryxic 21:14, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

• Remove. Referencing is a big problem, the article does not seem comprehensive and a substantial amount of important information is presented almost as an afterthought ('oh, the English were on the field too'; 'oh, there were 30,000 troops' etc.). Additionally, the prose is lacklustre at best and the information is simply not conveyed in a precise manner. The lead does not conform to WP:LEAD and "Prelude" is very unsatisfactory. Mikker ^(...) 17:27, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
• Remove for all the reasons stated above. Tobyk777 00:51, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
• Remove. Besides the issues listed above, a quick Google search has led me to seriously question the article's factual accuracy. This site, one of the first search results, describes casualties as 54 Portuguese dead and a few hundred Castilians. Somehow, this doesn't strike me as compatible with the article's description of heaped Castilian corpses damming the area's creeks. And what the article, in "Aftermath," describes as "scattered border skirmishes posing no real threat to the Portuguese Crown" was in actual fact a series of pretty crushing (albeit small-scale) Castilian victories. I'm no expert on Medieval Iberia, of course, but there clearly exists a radically different POV here that hasn't been touched upon at all. Albrecht 20:51, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - A few hundreds of casualties in the biggest battle that ever happened in Portuguese territory? It seems to me, a Portuguese, that your sources are not correct. The article provides the most widely accepted numbers. The battle was indeed a decisive victory to the Portuguese, in the site of the battle you may find the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória na Batalha [1] (something like Holy Mary of the Victory in the Battle), why would the king build such a monument if the battle was just a skirmish? Along with this, the presence of hundreds of british longbow archers were decisive to the victory, although the battle was held in Portuguese territory, it was an event of the Hundred Years' War, as the Castillians were allied with the French. The role of the British archers was like the one they had, for example, in Agincourt. The aftermath was not as you describe it, the Castillian king had to flee the site of the battle and in the way, he found several Portuguese groups, nothing of important as the real battle had already happened. Probably, this old time FA is not up to the standards anymore, but do not laugh at its content, as it still is a very good article. Afonso Silva 10:13, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Please don't take offence at my comment. I don't mean to ridicule the effort that was put into the article, nor do I doubt that it was a seminal event in Portuguese history. My feeling, however, is that the material results of Aljubarrota might have been exaggerated (not exactly uncommon with Medieval events) to fit the moral impact. The website I cited isn't necessarily an authority; I only wanted to show that a different POV exists. The article simply doesn't give the impression of rigorous historical standards with attempts to balance analyses with more than one POV (Battle of Agincourt, for example, has a section on historiography and the debate over French numbers and casualties). I don't think these are calculated Portuguese plots; they're probably just human errors. Albrecht 15:29, 20 April 2006 (UTC)