Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battle of Svolder

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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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 06:16, 31 January 2007.

[edit] Battle of Svolder

Self-nomination (not to play down some excellent contributions by other editors, including images). I've been working on this article on and off for more than half a year now and I think it's ready for a FAC discussion. Along the way it got translated into Norwegian bokmål and expanded a bit, becoming a FA over there. In turn, I've used the Norwegian article to improve this one a bit. Peer review was fairly quiet and I think the article could probably still use a thorough read by someone whose English is better than mine. Haukur 23:13, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Support. Great article but it has a lack of citations escpecially in the Context section. If you add some more citations I would be more than happy to support the article. Kyriakos 00:04, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
    I'll see what I can do, might take a couple of days. Haukur 12:13, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
    All the problems I had have been fix. I am giving the article my full support. Kyriakos 05:24, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Conditional support, per Kyriakos. A number of points in the article (mainly in the "Context" and "Events leading up to the battle" sections) could use direct citations; see the WikiProject guideline on this. Aside from that, a minor formatting suggestion: {{cquote}} doesn't work that well when combined with images, so I'd use normal blockquote formatting instead. Kirill Lokshin 00:16, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
    Thanks for the formatting hint, I'll try that. Haukur 12:13, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Conditional support, umm.. certainly very detailed. The lead looks a little involved and is in 4 paras. Has a lot to cover though. Cas Liber 05:50, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support--Never heard of this battle so can't comment on the authenticity. But looks well cited. Mercenary2k 12:22, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Reluctant objection for now, which can easily become full support. The first three sections are not properly cited; especially the first one. Additionally, in Notes the links to online sources are not proper; you don't offer full citations of these online sources per WP:CITE. You can use Template:cite web or Template:cite news.--Yannismarou 18:25, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
    Fair enough, I'll add more citations. I'm not really sure about the weblinks though - where I've used a web page as a source, like Mona Levin's article, it appears in the references section but where I intended them more as "external links" or "further reading" they don't. Haukur 00:12, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support excellent coverage of this battle. The info that is claimed to be unreferenced in the intro is referenced in the subsections, AFAIK.--Berig 10:48, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Just wanted to say I haven't given up on this. I've gone to the library, got some more books and started reading but the week has shaped up to be busy and I haven't managed to make any updates yet. Fortunately there is no deadline :) Haukur 00:14, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
  • If somebody works on improving the minor deficiencies of an already high quality article, Raul always demonstrates the necessary understanding.--Yannismarou 08:27, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. I tend to be a little uncomfortable with this sort of article, which combines history and accounts from sagas written hundreds of years later; but on its own terms, it is very impressive, in my opinion. I would like to congratulate the main editor, particularly as he started this article from scratch.
  • I've completed a copy-edit, mostly of punctuation and syntax. I've also made the tenses more consistent. Since Wikipedia uses the present tense to represent fictional narrative, I've converted more passages to the present tense as a means of reminding readers when they are reading reconstructions from the sagas.
  • I was surprised not to see Canute's empire mentioned as a legacy of the battle. qp10qp 17:52, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Thank you, you've done excellent work and I agree with you that present tense is most appropriate for pseudo-historical narratives. It's very nice to have the touch of an academic historian :) We could certainly mention Canute, though Danish claims on Norway go back even before the battle of Svolder. Haukur 02:30, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. I shared at first qp10qp's uncomfortableness, but the article's great. Two questions yet:
    • Do you have references about modern historians' opinions about the location of the battle?
    • Does the article still incorporate text from the Encyclopædia Britannica? Sigo 20:47, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
      • Well, if you look at the article's references you'll see that some of them say one thing and others the other :) I could cite Baetke for this, he gives a nice overview of previous works. Unfortunately I've returned his book to the library but I can get it again, just give me a few days and I'll have a cite.
      • The section on the battle itself still traces some wording from Britannica which I liked (and is cited as such). There's a Wikisource link to the original Britannica article so you can compare. Haukur 02:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I've finally added a few more footnotes to the Context section. I've been under the impression that omitting explicit references in the summary section is kosher since everything there is supposed to be expanded upon in the body of the article (where it should be referenced). I also switched from cquote to blockquote per KL's suggestion. Haukur 00:13, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Weak support. I still don't like the way URLs of online sources in "Notes" look. IMO this is not the right formatting, but I know this is not enough to prevent this article from getting FA.--Yannismarou 18:13, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I tidied those up. --qp10qp 00:20, 31 January 2007 (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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.