Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Warsaw Uprising (1794)

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[edit] Warsaw Uprising (1794)

While less famous then it's more modern counterpart we FACed two years ago, I think this nicely represents progress in quality and reliability (inline cits!) we have made since then. I believe this article is comprehensive, neautral and easy to read; we also have pictures and maps. Your comments are as always much welcome. Partial self-nom. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  18:03, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

  • Support, very good article; all the issues raised during the peer review have been resolved. Kirill Lokshin 18:06, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. A very good article! A minor comment however: is this really necessary to have a "History" section with all these subsections? Why not move them one level up? (It's just a proposal, I don't insist on it). -- Grafikm (AutoGRAF) 20:59, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Support I've heard of this uprising, as part of the reaction to the second partition, but never before have been able to read so much detail. Excellent work. --JohnDBuell 03:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. Excellent: very interesting to read, well-written, and well-referenced. One quibble: I'm not keen on the inline/general distinction you make in the notes/references section. If the three general ones weren't actually used as sources for material in the text, they should be in a further reading section. But it's a small point and if you prefer to do it that way, fair enough. SlimVirgin (talk) 07:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
    • I do agree, this is the same issue I am raising when people list actual inline references as footnotes and further reading as references... I will take a look at that issue here.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  09:00, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Again, I don't see any problem with this. It's perfectly possible, with a reasonable level of footnoting, for a work to have been consulted but never directly cited. Considering that it may very well be the source of certain points in the article, I think that listing it as a reference is the appropriate course of action. Kirill Lokshin 12:30, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • One small comment: It's not mandatory but it's common practice in war articles that the image in the infobox be a scene of the conflict/war. Could you replace the map? CG 14:00, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: lead needs to be totally rewritten if this is going to be a FA. Currently, it merely briefly retells the plot of the development of the events. Instead it should tell what it was, what was the result and what was the significance of the uprising. The details on who and when did what belong to the body of the article. --Irpen 18:56, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose TONS of redlinks, to the point where it would be embarassing if this were on the Main Page. Some of them, especially those on individual people are perhaps allowable, but (for example) the Revolution Association sounds like it deserves at least a stub, as do the various infantry regiments. Also, falls far short of beautiful prose. Some mistakes are very elementary (there was a it's/its error, which I fixed). Others:
  • "the presence of Prussian and Imperial Russian garrisons on Polish soil was almost permanent." Awkward. Maybe change to "continuous"
  • "Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski was opposed to the idea of the uprising, and together with the Permanent Council issued a declaration on April 2, condemning the uprising. " How could he condemn if it didn't begin until the 17th?
  • "He also ordered the increase in surveillance of suspected supporters of the uprising" - shouldn't than be "an increase"?
  • "On the Polish side, weakened by the arrests of some of its leaders,[8] both the radical Polish Jacobins and the centrist supporters of King Stanisław August Poniatowski began preparing plans for an all-out attack on the Russian forces to drive them from Warsaw, still, in theory, the capital of an independent state."Awkwardly structured and a borderline run-on.
  • "General Mokronowski repeatedly begged his cousin, King Stanisław August Poniatowski to support the uprising." Should read something like "begged King Poniatowski, his cousin to"... You don't use the full name along with the title on a second reference.
They're plenty more. I'd suggest getting a copyedit at the bare minimum.--Pyroclastic 20:02, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Red links are a problem related to other articles, not this one. We are constantly writing relevant articles, but there is only that much we can do. As for copyedit, the article was written mostly by non-English native speakers, so by all means, if you can help us with brilliant prose, please do so - we simply can't deal with that alone.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  09:13, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Support interesting Gdarin | talk 08:20, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: I was trying to give this article a good copyedit and came across these sentences: "In such situation, the Russian forces prepared a plan to seize the most important buildings in the city and secure it until further reinforcements are drawn from Russia. General Johann Jakob Pistor suggested that the barracks of unsafe Polish units be surrounded and the units unarmed, and the Warsaw Arsenal captured to prevent the revolutionaries from seizing arms." I'm afraid I don't understand how to proceed editing it. What does "in such situation" mean? Can it be dropped from the sentence? Can "until further reinforcements are drawn from Russia" be accurately re-worded as "until further reinforcements could arrive from Russia"? Why is "unsafe" italicized, or are those meant to be quote marks? Is "unarmed" intended to mean "disarmed", or are they saying the Polish units were already unarmed? Andrew Levine 10:17, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I'd say use your best judgement, if you make a mistake, we will correct it, so far I think your suggestions are right on target.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  16:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: as the author of most of the article ([1]-[2]) I should not be voting in favour of my own work, but I would like to assure you that I really did my best and I believe this is one of the best articles I've written in English. Sure, English is not my native tongue and there might be lots of errors, but there's nothing that could not be fixed :) As to specific issues raised here: SlimVirgin, those were indeed used in creating this article. However, as these are monographs, I could either list them in whole, or go again through them and add the reference in dozens of places in the article, pretty much the same way I did with Bartoszewicz. As I got tired, I chose the earlier option. Pyroclastic, I fixed all the issues you raised. If only people were as helpful during the Peer Reviews... Anyway, I also reduced the number of red links by more than half. If the rest's a problem we could safely remove them, but I'm sure one day someone would write an article on, say, Fyodor Gagarin and it would be nice to have the link already there. Andrew Levine, you got it right :) I corrected that already. Piotrus - why the hell didn't you let me know you're nominating it? :) //Halibutt 09:43, 17 August 2006 (UTC)