Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1994 Black Hawk shootdown incident

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 promoted 01:51, 21 January 2008.

[edit] 1994 Black Hawk shootdown incident

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I'm respectfully nominating this article about a friendly fire incident in Iraq for featured article. The article has been through a peer review [1] and A-class review [2] with WP:MILHIST. Self-nomination. Cla68 (talk) 06:34, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

• Please remove contraction, "didn't, wasn't" etc., unless in quotations. --Doc^g 13:35, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

• I really thought I had removed all of the contractions. I'll go over it again. Cla68 (talk) 21:12, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

• I found four contractions and fixed them. Cla68 (talk) 01:16, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Support - I don't have to time to read the article fully right now (will do it on the weekend probably) but a quick glance shows no list of who was actually on the helicopters, just a general description. Is it possible (and is it a good idea), to include a list or lists (perhaps in the style of the one here), giving names and roles of those on board each aircraft? I think this would be a very interesting addition. Either way, I will take some time to review the article properly in a few days when I am less busy. It looks really good though on first glance.--Jackyd101 (talk) 14:45, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

• I added a box with the victim's names. Cla68 (talk) 02:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm happy to support this excellent article which presents a confusing and controversial subject in an intelligent and coherent way. It is a very, very nice piece. Just to note, my support is not conditional on the presence of the list of those killed. Although there are no guidelines indicating that such lists are inappropriate I know that some editors believe they are unencyclopedic. My personal belief is that they are interesting, informative and excatly the kind of relevant information which Wikipedia's lack of space restrictions can include, but if it is decided not to include it, my Support remains. I have only one small nitpick and one query, neither of which should hold up this FAC. In the "actions taken" section it says "and indeed in Richardson's case, his letter of admonishment had already been removed from his record." but it isn't at all clear when it was removed - was it immediately removed or was it removed before the right to appeal was established? This needs clarifying. The query is that it appears that those US personnel killed in the incident were all awarded purple hearts. Is it standard to award this medal in a non-combat situation like this or was it via a special motion of government (as it was with the USS Stark in 1987)? Once again, congratulations, an excellent piece of work.--Jackyd101 (talk) 11:56, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate your comments on the article. I'm afraid the sources don't give more information on when Richardson's LoAd was removed exactly. Perhaps I should remove that sentence since it raises more questions than it answers. The Purple Heart issue is one of the many details of this subject that I had a hard time deciding whether to include or not. I decided not to include it because I thought that it was too America-centric since it applied to a U.S. military decoration. Some of the victim's family members fought hard to get Purple Hearts awarded to the military victims, while other family members stayed out of that particular debate. After one year of lobbying, the U.S. military caved-in and awarded the Purple Hearts just before the one year anniversary of the incident. Cla68 (talk) 12:47, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support An excellent article which meets the FA criteria. I'm not sure that a list of the dead is a good idea - similar 'honour rolls' are routinely removed on the grounds that they're out of place in an encyclopedia, but it is relevant here given that the mixed nationality of the dead was an issue, albeit a minor one. --Nick Dowling (talk) 07:05, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
• Support - excellent, perhaps a little too long for my tastes- but I'm quibbling.--Doc^g 13:46, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
• Suport - another excellent article by Cla68. Kyriakos (talk) 03:53, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

• Support - not entirely unbiased as I was one of the editors who passed this following an A-Class review. I personally like close focus on slightly obscure incidents as I think it plays to a major Wikipedia strength. Oh, and one slight grumble, "U.S." ---> "US" for consistency with the other acronyms and abbreviations in this article. --ROGER DAVIES ^talk 08:54, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Support extremely thorough. -Ed! (talk) 17:06, 19 January 2008 (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.