Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Democratic peace theory/Archive 1

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[edit] Democratic peace theory

Self-nomination. --Neutralitytalk 03:33, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

  • I read this one a while back and, while it does seem well-written, it also seems a bit short to be featured. I'm torn. Everyking 04:57, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Good article. Support. Andre (talk) 16:17, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
  • Object. The article needs to be much more up front about how dubious this theory is. Statements like "Using some 2,000 cases of war or other armed conflicts, the Correlates of War Project did not find a single case where the theory did not hold" makes the theory sound rather impressive but this result was achieved by defining away all instances where one democracy fought another. For example, they didn't count wars between democracies within the same country such as the American Civil War or the Croatian War of 1991, or cases where a democracy went to war before its first change of government, such as the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, or undeclared wars like Operation PBSUCCESS. And so on. The theory is a lot like the No true Scotsman fallacy. Another "anti" argument points out the scarcity of democracies before 1945 and the very few international wars since 1945 and notes that a theory based on a handful of events may not have much predictive power. Anyway, the mere falsity of the theory shouldn't rule out the article being featured, but the article — and particularly the lead section — needs to present the "anti" position as fairly and as neutrally as the "pro" position. Gdr 19:21, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)
  • Weak Object (15% over Support)
  1. The article rates low in an online readability test. (See Readability test)
  2. Shocking (for a FAC) Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test Index (A US Government standard) of only 47.2 (Most articles should be at least 60 at very minimum). It is not easily to be read by non-college people. I assume this as 0-30 is the college graduate score and 60 and above is general public.
  3. There are 59 (48% of article) short sentences (14 words). 30% (37 % of article) long sentences (29 words) which is not consistent at all.
  4. 2288 words, I think it is fairly too short for an article such as this one. I think it can be expanded a little bit more and more accompaning picture. Squash 23:01, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Support. I don't know why you're talking about reading level, Squash, but I can read it just fine, and I'm not a college student. I'm in eleventh grade. [[User:Premeditated Chaos|User:Premeditated Chaos/Sig]] 01:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Oppose. Having taken IR 101, and written a paper making many of the same arguments, I agree strongly with Gdr. Noah Peters 06:33, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)Noah Peters