Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battle of Moscow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Battle of Moscow

An article about one of the most epic and bloodiest battles of World War II, when German Panzers were less than 30 kilometers from the Kremlin. This article, embarassingly short so far, was overhauled by the Military History Wikiproject. -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 12:16, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

• Support as nominator. -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 12:17, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support - very good article about a very imprtant event abakharev 12:56, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support, excellent article. Kirill Lokshin 15:08, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support Good article. UberCryxic 15:35, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Good work on the article! -- Underneath-it-All 16:02, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Great stuff. One line bothers me, The battle was also one of the largest during World War II, with more than 1 million casualties on both sides. This reads either that both sides lost over a million men or over a million men total. Other than that a very nice FAC. Sabine's Sunbird talk 18:05, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support. KNewman 19:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Conditional support. 1) Can use more hyperlinks (per WP:BTW), for example in the lead the words to be linked include Soviet, counter-offensive, invasion of the Soviet Union, binoculars, etc. 2) Footnotes are references, please merge and moved unused references to further reading.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  19:18, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Very good point about the links. I linked several more important concepts in the lead. It's because a lot of people said I wikilink too much, so now I guess it's the other extreme... :P
  • As for the second one, I must admit I do not quite understand it. Yes, footnotes are references, and references are just a way of summing up all books used for footnotes. Quite a lot of recent FAs (for instance Battle of Rennell Island or Battle of Bicocca) use exactly that system, so I'm pretty lost here... -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 20:57, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Indeed. It's quite standard to provide a summary of the works cited under a "References" heading, quite separate from the footnotes (see WP:CITE#Maintaining a separate "References" section in addition to "Notes"), as this allows the footnotes to omit a lot of the publication information that would otherwise need to be included directly. In any case, labeling works that are actually the sources for the material in the article—even if they are not cited directly—as "further reading" would hardly be a model of intelectual honesty. Kirill Lokshin 21:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support per nom. --GoOdCoNtEnT 02:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support, excellent article. The only thing I might add is that "aftermath" might be expanded a little bit- how do people remember it today, etc. Still, that doesn't change the fact that this definitely deserves to be a FA. Stilgar135 17:10, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support. per nom. —dima ^/sb.tk/ 21:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support --Ghirla ^-трёп- 15:01, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support--Kuban Cossack 00:46, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support Elk Salmon 10:21, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support--Eupator 01:35, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose. Not enough sources used. Also, as Irpen once noted, soldiers taking part in battles seldom see the entire picture, while the article was written mostly with Zhukov's and Guderian's memoirs. Other than that, I believe the article is well-written and could be promoted one day, but not just now. //Halibutt 12:36, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

  Huh? Halibutt, was not that you who vigorously dismissed that argument of mine, brought two supporters of your POV and expelled me from the article then? Interesing memories. --Irpen 07:00, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

  • Certainly, I did dismiss that argument since I do not consider it serious. However, since it was you to adopt it as a rule of thumb, I thought reminding you of such double standards would be a good idea. However, it was not me to "expel" you from that article, it were the common sense and a wiki consensus. Anyway, I withdrew my opposing vote so there's no need to discuss it any more. //Halibutt 08:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

  Reply. Most of the article is written based on Glantz's When titans clashed and a post-1991 encyclopedia released on 850th anniversary of Moscow. And it's based on Jukes too, who is a well-known British historian. It's just that its references are multiple, so it looks like they take like only 2 or 3 lines, giving you the impression they're not used but they are (Glantz's refs are 15 but grouped on just 4 lines). This is just a visual impression.

  So no, the article is NOT written on memoirs. If I would remove the memoirs, the article would be a collection of raw facts - totally accurate but not showing the full situation at that time. -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 12:46, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

  This isn't really an actionable objection unless you know of other sources that should be used here... Kirill Lokshin 13:52, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

  Any of those would be nice. Come on, the topic is pretty well covered in a plethora of books, why not use them. But of course I might be wrong and perhaps using just four or five is enough. //Halibutt 08:27, 19 August 2006 (UTC)