Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Battle of Barrosa

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[edit] Battle of Barrosa

Before I started working on this article, it was hopelessly inaccurate, poorly referenced, and a stub. I spent a fairly small amount of time on it, using the reference material I had to hand, and Kirill Lokshin kindly promoted it to B-class on 3 September.

Since then, I've added significant detail, and loads of good, well regarded references (Oman, Gates, Glover, etc), and believe it to be a pretty good article now. I am therefore requesting a peer review, and if the results are favourable, I think I'm going to take it for GAC!

All comments would be appreciated, and I shall action them if I am able. Carre 17:33, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cla68

A few points:

• The intro should be a little longer, about two paragraphs. You can expand it by naming the opposing commanders and more details on the actual battle and its aftermath.

  Agreed - I had pretty much decided the same, and have been giving thought on more wording. Should get it done tomorrow.

  Y Done Better?

• Although the Siege of Cadiz article gives more background, you should still expand the background section in this article to at least two paragraphs so readers won't have to look at the other article to get sufficient background info.

  No problem.

  Y Done Better?

• You don't need to have citations mid-sentence, they can be combined together at the end of the sentence.

  Is that just a personal preference? There aren't that many occasions of mid-sentence cites, and a couple of those are used to illustrate particular points (for example, Browne's quote on the Spanish running away - MOS says quotes should be immediately referenced, I think, but I could be wrong). I confess to not much liking multiple refs bundled together, but that is definitely just a personal thing. Actually, looking at them, I could probably just ditch some of them altogether.

  Mid-sentence citations cause some formatting problems for the article, making the article's lines appear distorted or with uneven spacing. End of sentence citations also can cause this problems, but by having fewer, combined citations in the paragraph it helps reduce the problem. Cla68 01:27, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

  Y Done Think I got them all - if you spot one I've missed, feel free to shuffle it.

• Do you have a map of the battle, or do you have a map of the Cadiz area as it appeared at that time that you could draw your own battle map on using image editing software?

  Unfortunately not - there are a few out there on the web, but I'm not sure of their copyright status, so have no intention of loading one. The lack of a map is my major concern on the whole thing, as it happens. I've tried drawing my own, but my artistic skills aren't up to it. I've also considered tracing one from somewhere like Oman or Gates, and entering it onto the computer using a graphics tab and Inkscape, but I'm not very good with Inkscape and efforts so far have been pretty poor :(. If someone knows of a PD image of a map, I would certainly like to see one in the article.

  Y Done - got a couple of excellent public domain maps uploaded, one for the battle, and one for the march from Tarifa northwards. :)

• Avoid one sentence paragraphs.

  Are there any? (other than ones at the ends of sections, which would be awkward to extend... I'll see what I can do about those, but if you can point out others, I'll try and fix.) I've asked WP:LoCE to look at the article too.

  Y Done Except for the very very last sentence... which I can't think of a way to expand.

• The aftermath section should explain what affect the battle had on history since the battle, if any.

  OK - Oman has a load on that, which I didn't like to use too heavily since he's my only real source, but I'll put something in.

  Y Done

• The French side of the battle isn't represented very well. What were their intentions and plans before, during, and after the battle? What did they know of their adversaries intentions and how did they respond to them?

  Just the battle, or the prelude too? I can add to the battle bit, I think - again, Oman has good stuff for sourcing details. I think the prelude has about as much as can go in, without vastly expanding the whole section.

  Y DoneThe Background and Prelude sections now have much more on why Victor stayed put, how he got intelligence on the Allied movements, and what he did about them. The Battle section has a lot more detail in it all round, including what the French did and when. Largely though, all they could do was react to an incredibly aggressive, and unexpected, counter-attack from the the British. I hope I've captured that.

Otherwise, the article is well-written and appears to describe the battle well. Good work. Cla68 17:03, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, and thanks for the feedback; I shall see what I can do tomorrow to address your points. Carre 20:45, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I really wish I had a map there now - the Battle section is pretty long and would be much improved with one. Do you think this is GA-worthy now, or would that lack hold it back?

Thanks a lot for the pointers - I've really enjoyed researching and writing this article! Carre 14:51, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

The article looks very good now. One thing, however, I'm still left hanging when I read the article...what ever happened to Cadiz under siege? Were the French ultimately successful in taking the city? If not, what happened? Also, two other things I've learned recently is that sentence fragments in image captions shouldn't have punctuation and the – (anddash;) format should be used for all hyphens. Nevertheless, excellent work on the article and I think it may be ready for A-class review although you could keep it here for a while to see if anyone else would like to comment. Cla68 03:29, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

A-class? Wow - I was only going for GA! Thanks very much! To your couple of points

• The &ndash – all the hyphens are actually endashes already, they just don't use the HTML code for them... if you look at the edit screen, below the save page and show preview buttons, you can see a couple of dashes in the Insert bit; the first is endash, the second is emdash. I could change them to explicit endashes, but I hate seeing those when editing - I find it makes it harder for an editor to read.
• Punctuation in sentence fragments in image captions. I could have sworn I recently saw a comment in an FAC complaining about missing punctuation in captions, which is why I put them in (they were originally not there). I'm happy either way. Found the FAC review, and I'd remembered it wrong - you were quite right, and I've removed the trailing full stops. Carre 08:18, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I shall add a little about the end of the siege - I learnt yesterday that one of our Spanish colleagues is translating my article for the Spanish wiki, and he has put in something about the siege being in force until... whenever it was - sometime in 1812. I could put something similar in the lead and the consequences/aftermath section. I'll follow your advice and leave the article for a while, to make sure it stays stable, before going for A-class. Thanks for your kind words and pointers. Carre 06:44, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] jackyd101

I was going to comment on this the other day and was called away and since then the nominator has commented on my article above so I figured it was only polite to return to where I left off. In fact however, I lot of the points I was going to raise last time have since been addressed. Nevertheless, there are still a few points I want to raise regarding this excellent article.

• The sentance structure throughout the article is far too comma-heavy. Try to trim about half the commas from the article, which will help it flow better. I also have this problem and usually have to read my articles aloud to work out where commas should or shouldn't go in a sentance.

• The article is in the hands of WP:LoCE for that very reason! I know I'm heavy handed with commas, and have, believe it or not, already pruned many out! Unfortunately LoCE is heavily swamped at the moment, so haven't looked at it yet. I shall try and remove some more.

Y Done - sort of. I don't think I'll take any more out, because I'm worried I'll totally destroy the prose. When I take this to GAC, it should bump the article up the queue for the LoCE, and they're bound to be able to improve matters :)

• That brings me (sort of) to my second point. The article has a few ocassions where you use contractions like couldn't, didn't or likewise. All of these need to be written out fully as they are not very encyclopedic.

• Aye, I read that in MOS yesterday. Some of them I can replace with better structure, but I find "could not" and "did not" somewhat stilted. I'm trying to come up with alternatives to avoid the cumbersome.

Y Done - didn't write any of them in full, just rewrote the sentences to avoid their need.

• A few names need clarification, for example I don't think Whittingham or Keats are explained. If there is no wikilink then at least give a full name for readers to use in further research.

• Keats was a recent addition - I should be able to wikilink him (haven't looked). Whittingham will be extended, and I'll look for any other instances.

Y Done Whittingham's rank given, and a footnote provided to explain who/what he was. Keats is wikilinked now, but none of my sources actually explain why he was there. Oman is the only one who mentions his name...I think he was in command of the RN force helping to defend Cádiz, but I could be wrong, so I won't speculate in the article.

• All numbers under nine (some say twelve, up to you) should be written out as words rather than digits.

• Damn, thought I'd got all those, but just spotted the "2 days behind"... consider it changed

• Just a minor stylistic point, but you might consider some sub-headings in the Battle section. Thats quite a chunk of unbroken text.

• Again, something I've been thinking about myself. I think the only way would be to split the Ruffin and Leval fronts into two sections. At present, the article switches to & fro between the two fronts, which I did for ease of reading. If I bring each front into continuous narratives in their own subsections, it would address this, and also fix the next point which was also more of a stylistic thing to aid ease of reading than anything else. Just have to watch what happens with the images, but should be easily enough.

Y Done - Not 100% happy with the subsection titles (would prefer "The French attack", for example, but not supposed to use articles in section headings).

• Where you say: "Returning to the battle between Wheatley's brigade and Leval's division . . .", who is doing the returning? If the reader, then this should be changed as its unencyclopedic. Something like "Meanwhile, in the battle between . . ."

• As above point. Also, I've already used "meanwhile" and "in the mean time" quite a bit. Doing the subsection split would remove the need for this, anyway.

Y Done

Other than these fairly minor issues, this is an excellent article on an often nelected battle and congratulations on all your hard work.--Jackyd101 01:11, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. Once fixed, I shall leave a note here, then leave the article a while before trying for A-class. Cheers. Carre 14:29, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Excellent work, I'd vote for A-class for this article (and I will if I'm around when it goes up for it). congratulations and all the best.--Jackyd101 17:55, 15 September 2007 (UTC)