Talk:Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand/Archive 2

Refactoring
I object to the refactoring of 07:45 20 Nov. 2007. The refactoring has made it harder for me to follow the changes. It looks like a small amount of material was overwritten or deleted. The section headings such as slaughtered seperate important parts of the "slaughtered" discussion from that below the "Slaughtered" section heading. Will you revert or will you accept me pasting (duplicating) the slaughter description quotation and your response immediately under the "Slaughtered" heading? This ties in with the edit you made that I mentioned made me feel threatened so although this is a small point it is one I am sensitive to.Werchovsky (talk) 23:38, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand/Archive_1"Werchovsky (talk) 17:32, 10 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry for not replying sooner, I didn't notice your comments ... Please see WP:TALK for guidelines on formatting talk pages and WP:REFACTOR for guidelines on refactoring, which I followed. Please thread and indent future comments as very long, poorly formatted comments, make discussion difficult to follow for others and consensus difficult to reach. My apologies if you felt threatened by this. -- R OGER D AVIES   talk 08:22, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. My objection and request for reversion was and is in accordance with WP:REFACTOR as I understand it.Werchovsky (talk) 17:28, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It's neither practical nor appropriate to revert this now, especially as we've moved on from that discussion and there were comments afterwards which would be turn require refactoring to make any sense. If you want to add a duplicate section (clearly marked as such) to the archive that's fine by me. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 20:04, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Moving on
I have a few general concerns which now might be a good moment to share. Firstly. The article includes much detail, which may be information overload. Can some of this be simplified? Secondly, more use of sub-sections to break sections up. Thirdly, it might be better to treat the events in chronological order ... Preliminary preparation, Key players, Final preparations, The eve of The assassination, The day of the assassination, Capture, Trial etc etc. Fourthly, the trial transcripts probably infringe someone's copyright and should be summarised not quoted verbatim. This applies to other non-brief quotations too. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 11:22, 23 November 2007 (UTC)


 * These are not bad suggestions but need careful thought.
 * 1) Reducing the amount of information is a bit dangerous.  Supporting articles presently are not strong.  The literature has a lot of disinformation.  Boiling down a series of facts to a conclusion or summary risks challenge or deletion due to the controversial nature of the subject.  Here and there I'll try, but any major reduction must await stronger supporting articles I think.
 * 2) Yes.   More subsections is a good idea.
 * 3) Chronological order strangely may not be the best sequence for this article.  Albertini chose to start with the assassination and then proceed as a kind of investigator into the conspiracy and then finally working toward blame.  This approach, I believe, was taken due to the controversial nature of the conspiracy and the dissembling of many witnesses and actors in the drama.  You may be right though.  You are the second person to suggest this.  If you are firm in this opinion I will undertake the change.
 * 4) I am working through and almost done reducing the length of the quotes.  Some of the richness of description is of course lost. Werchovsky (talk) 21:59, 24 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment
 * Yes, ruducing the amount of info is a bad idea, however, I do like the idea of more subsections. Chronological order also seems sensible--Phoenix-wiki (talk · contribs) 23:33, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I'd be interested to hear your reasons why. The problems are that : a) much of the detail is unsourced; b) a good deal of it is trivial (ie information that is not important to the main subject of the article. Does an encyclopedia need to list the serial numbers of revolvers; each of the passengers in each car in a motorcade; the number of bullet wounds in an assassination thirteen years earlier for example?); and c) places undue weight on tangential matters. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 11:01, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, the list of serial numbers and a small bit of the rest can go, but most of it is good information, and as said, there are very few supporting articles--Phoenix-wiki (talk · contribs) 12:28, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not good information if it's not sourced.-- R OGER D AVIES  talk 12:46, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I just asked Mcferran to cite his source for the seven vehicles in the motorcade. I've wanted to cite this passage, but McFerran's account (7 vehicles) is at odds with accounts by Dedijer (6 vehicles) and Albertini (4 vehicles). The pistols' serial numbers and the motorcade description are almost the only thing left of the orginal article before I started editing. Werchovsky


 * With that degree of uncertainty why include it at all? -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 08:33, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Legacy concerns
For balance, it should be mentioned that the assassins' objectives (as defined in the opening paragraph) were largely achieved, though perhaps not how they intended them to be. The Austro-Hungarian collapsed as a result of the Great War and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created in the peace that followed. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 12:58, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

It was really Apis' objectives that were largely achieved, but that opens up a can of worms.Werchovsky 01:14, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It's a can of worms anyway. I'll add something next week when things are quieter for me.-- R OGER D AVIES  talk 08:33, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I recommend that you not explicitly state that the "Young Bosnians" objectives were met, although you may wish to state that the Treaty of Versailles resulted in the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croates and Slovenes under Serbia's sceptre. The "Young Bosnians" generally wanted a liberal Yugoslavia, but Regent/King Aleksandar installed a dictatorship.  Of the 3 men confirmed to be at the original planning meeting in Tolouse, Mustafa Golubic became a political refugee unable to return to the Yugoslav region, Vladimir Gacinovic died under mysterious circumstances in France in 1917 and there were rumors of a Serbian or French-Serbian assassination to complete the destruction of the "Black Hand" central committee, and Mehmedbasic of course was briefly imprisoned and became apolitical.  There is probably something that can be said on the subject, but it will need to be supported in the body of the article, and it may end up getting tied "anachronistically" (as Sonnybillyboys put it) into the modern Yugoslav break-up.  The "Young Bosnians", as a result of Pan-slav and Yugoslave propaganda, for the most part, idealistically believed that a common hatred of Magyar's and Germans, a similar spoken language, and close ethnic ties, would be sufficient glue to hold a liberal Yugoslavia together, but it turned out that iron-fisted rule by the likes of Tito and Aleksandar was the way to keep the humpty-dumpty country in one piece.  There were just too many differences in culture, economy, politics, alphabet, and primarily religion for a Serbian dominated liberal Yugoslavia to survive.Werchovsky (talk) 19:57, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Apocrypha
There are a large number of false tales and dubious theories swirling around this subject, some of them coming up from time to time in the discussion section, other's showing up elsewhere on the net or in books. The most common of these apocrypha is the oft cited NY Times article stating that the Archduke batted the bomb away. Then there is Jevtic's fantastic account of the assassination. Central to the plot, and needing more thought and ink to dismiss, are the conflicting stories regarding newspaper articles and clippings announcing Franz-Ferdindand's visit that the assassins variously claimed to have read and claimed were the impetus behind the assassination plot. It seems a section dealing with apocrypha might be in order, but it will lengthen an already long article. Your opinions are solicited.Werchovsky 18:21, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Irridentism or Nationalism?
I think it anachronistic to term the Black Hand and other South Slav/Serbian groups irredentist, it is a projection of the Serbia of the modern Yugoslav and Kosovo wars on the Serbia, Balkans and Austria-Hungry of the early 20th century. Serbia was newly independent (post 1903 coup), the Balkans newly independent of Ottoman rule with their borders ill-defined and fluid, and the Austro-Hungarian empire in perpetual dysfunction and disintegration.

What makes the difference between a minority group seeking self-determination from an undemocratic empire compared to an aggressor irredentist?

The criteria here seems to be a judgement made in light of political settlements made in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990's. That is not the world that the events discussed in this article took place.

I think the Serbs in this article need to be discussed in the correct historical context. That is the context of the new Balkan nationalism of the Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks etc... and the internal nationalism of the subject peoples of the Habsburg monarchy: the Czechs, Croats, 'South Slavs', Slovenes, Poles, Ukrainians (Little Russians) etc...

The Serbs who were behind these events were one nationalist group amongst many that did not like the Habsburgs. They are remarkable only in their success in this assassination that provoked WW1.

Were the Bohemian Czechs irredentist? The Galacian Poles? The Transylvanian Romanians? Or were they suppressed minorities who sometimes fought for, and each achieved, self-determination? i.e. Nationalists. Just like their Serbian counterparts in Bosnia or the Kingdom of Hungry.

They should be judged and written about in the context of their time, of a subject people attacking their undemocratic masters, not in the context of modern Serbian aggression in Bosnia, Croatia or Kosovo.

The tone of the article should not be the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand as the first chapter of 20th century Serbian agression and irredentism, it is inaccurate and anachronistic. It should be in the context of the emergence of the nationalist movements and national states throughout the Balkans and Central Europe and the disintegration of the old empires of Europe into their national constituents.

As such I think this article needs to be rewritten in a more historically accurate, rather than anachronistically revisionist, tone Sonnybillyboys (talk) 12:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

You raise a legitimate concern that the violence associated with the break-up of Yugoslavia should have no place in this article. Irredentism is a term used by authors who wrote on this topic 80 or so years ago. Albertini, who is a major source for this article, expressed a relatively sympathetic view toward irredentism. Some Transylvanian Romanians could be termed irredentists too as you point out. Some of the other cases you cite are not quite as good as they had no "Piedmont" so the analogy to Italian irredentism is not as good, and it might be better to term them independence movements, though either term, I think, is legitimate. Irredentism describes more precisely the collective political objective of the assassins and their backers than nationalism or independence movement.

The Sarajevo assassination and bombing is a very complex and controversial topic. It is already, therefore a very long article. To go into depth concerning Balkans nationalism or the pan-slav movement would double or triple the article's length. If you can find a good article on Balkan's nationalism or pan-slavism, linking to it would be a good approach.

The word aggressor is not in the article. The article itself does not take a position on the legitimacy of the shooting and bombing, although of course it was widely deplored at the time and I do not personally believe the actual ends justified the means.

The primary basis of this article is Albertini's account in "Origins of the War". Albertini is a relatively neutral author and published his work 60 years ago; he and his associate interviewed many of the participants in the plot. At the time he wrote this work, many documents were still suppressed or at least not available for study. Therefore, "The Sarajevo Trial" by Owings, which is in essence a translated trial transcript, Dedijer's "The Road to Sarajevo" which reproduces many important primary documents, and Mackenzie's "The Black Hand on Trial: Salonika 1917" are also heavily drawn on for these documents and quotations from the trial. Dedijer and Mackenzie are not neutral authors and so material from them is used more carefully. Owing's is just used for the transcript, not for his opinions or commentary.Werchovsky (talk) 20:07, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Recent Series of Edits I
The recent seriest of edits started out with comments from AJP Taylor regarding the Serbian warning to Austria-Hungary added to the background section. The article was organized with this topic in its own subsection "Serbia's Byzantine Warning..." under the section titled "Controversial Issues Concerning Responsibility" I must undo all the recent edits in order to undo this duplicated material. The material added was somewhat in contradiction to primary source materials. Let's discuss the differences in the discussion section prior to editing the article if you want to edit that section.

The other edits have some merit, but let me make some comments:

Trialism: Since trialism was never implemented we don't know the exact form it would have taken, and in fact Franz-Ferdinand, although he had expressed approval of Trialism, was far from committed to it. Some authors refer to the proposed kingdom under Trialism as a Slavic state, some as a South-Slavic state, some as a Croatian-dominated South-Slavic state and some as a Croatian kingdom. It is probably dangerous to specifically designate the proposed kingdom as a Croatian kingdom. When quoting, especially an opinion with far reaching consequences, we need to specify who we are quoting ("Trialism 'was designed to disrupt South Slav peoples, as Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine disrupted the Germans.'" If it is Taylor, we should say so, so that the reader can consider the quote in the context of Taylor's personal sentiments, which at least as I understand them, were strongly anti-German.  The particular quote has really quite a negative connotation and is very open to counter argument.  The logic of Trialism as described by Albertini was that South Slav's were mistreated and largely disenfranchised by the Magyars (they were vastly under-represented in the Hungarian Parliament), and this mis-treatment resulted in instability in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.  The second object, as you point out, was to reduce Magyar political power;  on many policy issues Hungary and Austria deadlocked in a kind of 1:1 tie. Adding a third crown, depending on the precise nature of the new constitution, could potential create a more dynamic empire if policy could be decided by 2:1. Rather than quoting Taylor you might want to quote Princip, another conspirator, or an author with a neutral reputation on the topic.

Morganatic: Although court etiquette, which was in general strictly enforced in Vienna, required aristocrats to move and be seated according to their rank and seniority of rank which effectively seperated Sophie Chotek from Franz-Ferdinand at social functions, I have never read that the Morganatic Oath specifically proscribed then from being in public side-by-side. Can you give your source for this? Werchovsky (talk) 18:39, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I suggest that you DO NOT revert. A better course of action is to consolidate the material appropriately into the article. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 18:42, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I didn't see your comment in time. I don't think I can consolidate the material appropriately as it is contradicted by primary sources on the most important point and has too many other problems.  If it had been an author with an ID, I would have tried to contact him, but he had no ID.Werchovsky (talk) 20:25, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You can, for instance, simply report the chunk of the Serbian Warning prefixed by words such as "An alternative view is held by historian AJ P Taylor" etc etc. Contraction is all part of the controversy. The distinction, incidentally, between the sources is that Albertini is a popular journalist who dabbled in history, whereas Taylor is an historian who dabbled in popular journalism.-- R OGER D AVIES   talk 20:40, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It looks more like slight of hand than an alternative view to me. Pasic and his cabinet were focused on the well organized and armed plot to assassinate Franz-Ferdinand not inflamed public opinion in Bosnia.  The information that had been added to the article based on Taylor I suspect of being deliberately vague as the Serbian/Entente position over the warning is contradictory in the details and contradicted by the evidence.  Its the same reason why Serbia was never able to publish the Blue Book it had promised to clear up this issue.


 * From "The Blood of Slavism" by Ljuba Jovanovic and as quoted in Albertini: "I do not remember whether it was at the end of May or the beginning of June, when one day M. Pasic said to us (he conferred on these matters more particularly with Stojan Protic, who was then Minister of the Interior, but he said this much to the rest of us) that there were people who were preparing to go to Sarajevo to kill Francis Ferdinand, who was to go there to be solemnly received on Vidov Dan."


 * There are several Serbian documents on the Serbian Government's monitoring and investigation of the plot (an investigation conducted before the warning), and then there is Colonel Lesanin's interview with Magrini. The telegram did not say "inflamed public opinion", Translating Magrini:  "Colonel Lešanin asserted that the Serbian government was well aware of the conspiracy progressing toward Sarajevo.  In the first days of the second fortnight of June a telegram from Pašić to Minister Jovanović reached the Serbian Legation in Vienna advising Jovanović to make known that the Serbian Government suspected that there was a conspiracy against the life of the heir apparent archduke on occasion of his trip to Bosnia."("Il colonnello Lescianin di affermò che il governo serbo era al corrente del complotto che si tramava a Seraievo, tanto che nei primi giorni della seconda quindicina di giugno, alla legazione di Serbia a Vienna era giunto un telegramma di Pašić invitante il ministro Jovanović a far sapere al governo serbo credeva di sospettare che un complotto fosse ordito contro la vita dell'arciduca ereditario in occasione del suo viaggio in Bosnia.")


 * I think "Origins of the War of 1914" by Albertini is an excellent work. It came highly recommended.  I've verified its important footnotes with respects to the article.  I see its back in print.Werchovsky (talk) 22:41, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

That Sophie could not sit side by side with him is referenced in the relevent Wikipedia articles about her. It is also referenced in "The First World War: An Illustrated History" by A. J. P. Taylor (ISBN 0-399-50260-2) on the same page 17. The relevent quote is; "It irked him (Ferdinand) that she (Sophie) could never share his splendours, could never even sit by his side on any public occassion. There was one loophole. The archduke was a field marshall and Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army. His wife could enjoy the recognition of his rank when he was acting in a millitary capacity". Thus the interesting historical note that the visit, and hence the events that followed, were motivated partly out of respect and love for Sophie should remain or be reinstated.

I had missed the later section of Serbia's warning to Austria-Hungry about the assassination when I added it to the opening background section. The main point I sought to add was that made by Taylor with his analogy, that the visit was deliberately provocative and courted a response. When Taylor makes the analogy he begins it with the warning to Bilinski, and like in his book, it gives a better background as to why it was so. In this article however the warning is better delt with in the reactions and controversies section, so I'm happy to have it left out of the beginning.

However I think the Dublin on St. Patricks day analogy should stay, as an important part of the background to the assassination is that the visit was provocative and controversial. It was a clear attempt to assert Habsburg supremacy over Serbian nationalism, and the national principle throughout the empire more generally on Serbia's national day.

As for Trialism, it is not our job to speculate as to what form Trialism could have taken if it were ever developed and it got past Magyar opposition, but in the forms proposed at the time by Ferdinand it was merely the severance from the Kingdom of Hungry of Croatia, and its rebirth as a kingdom under direct Habsburg rule. It was a way for him as a Habsburg emperor to exert more control over Hungry and to divide Croatia from the South Slav movement (not that it needed to be or was a stronghold of any Yugoslav idea). It was not in any way a conception of a modern nation-state that exists in Europe today, or that existed in the Balkans at the time.

For Trialism to incorporate other Slav lands into the Kingdom of Croatia would have meant the acceptance of the South Slav principle, and the national principle more generally, and as such was not proposed by Ferdinand or the advocates of Great Hungry.

Taylors quote offers a more accurate and complete view of what Trialism was. I thought in the form I left it it offered a balanced and complete view of what Trialism was, and left the lines that outlined the threat that it posed to an enlarged Serbia or to South Slav (Yugoslav) movements and why Serbian aggrandisers would aggressively oppose it (to the point of wanting to kill Ferdinand).

After his death Trialism developed into broader ideas that included the annexation of Serbia and other schemes. It is not relevent to the article and barely relevant to history as to what some Habsburg dreamers (who did not make policy) thought during the collapse of their state during WW1.

As for the notion that Taylor is anti-German, he isn't. But more importantly the Habsburg Empire, Austria-Hungry, was not a German state or an advocate of German nationalism. Germans and Magyars were generally the people of state, but the state was not constructed by and for those people. It was based on the personal possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy and an undemocratic Great Hungarian Empire (Kingdom of Hungry). Apart from the Magyars, it denied the National Principle and found it abhorrent. There isn't a Germany to be biased against in pre WW1 Austria-Hungry.

Moving forward. I think the article should contain Taylors quote as to what Trialism was, with the next line that this was a threat regardless to those (Serbs) who wanted to incorporate Bosnia into Serbia (and broader South Slav nationalists) and those who killed Ferdinand.

Any policy by a Habsburg that involved keeping Bosnia (and even any of the South Slav 'Yugoslav' lands) was enough to anger those Serbs/South Slavs enough to plot terrorism and was enough to be a threat to their plans.

The Trialism of Ferdinand was not a policy in the mold of modern democracy, Wilson's 14 Points or National Self-Determination. That should be stated in the article without engaging in partisan insinuations as to whether this justifies his death.

'''But the main point for a Historical article is this: Both Ferdinand and those Serbian/South Slav irredentist/nationalist groups had different views as to what the future of Bosia, Serbia, and Austria-Hungry more generally, would be, that were totally opposed and incompatible. This clash cost Ferdinand his life and sparked a World War.'''

Sonnybillyboys (talk) 06:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I have to comment that this is a really ridiculous statement:

"Pasic and his cabinet were focused on the well organized and armed plot to assassinate Franz-Ferdinand not inflamed public opinion in Bosnia"

Well organized?

That is not credible history. It was an incompetent plot that failed miserably. All the well organized planning failed.

Subsequent to the failed plot one of the would be assassins went to a cafe and got a sandwich. Purely through accident  the Archduke lands in his lap. '''On his own initiative' (not the result of any plans) he moves to the Archduke, shoots and kills him and his wife.

Sonnybillyboys (talk) 07:16, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The plot was well organized compared to previous assassination attempts against the Governors of Bosnia and Croatia. First it was organized into cells, each cell not knowing of the other and only connected through Ilic.  Second, the transportation of the weapons and assassins from Belgrade to Sarajevo was professionally done.  Trusted agents and safe houses were employed.  The weapons were brought into Sarajevo seperately from the assassins and in an intricate manner skillfully designed to avoid detection. A card with just the initials M.C. was used to activate the channel.  The assassins were given cyanide to prevent exposure of higher ups under police interrogation.  Military officers trained two of the assassins in shooting.  The assassins were brought in early to avoid suspicion.  The assassins had a special map detailing military and police positions.  The assassins received pistols and bombs of military quality.  Attacks like this though often come out messy in the execution.


 * As to trialism, you state: "...in the forms proposed at the time by Ferdinand it was merely the severance from the Kingdom of Hungry of Croatia..." if you have a direct quote from Franz-Ferdinand that will be wonderful to include because Albertini was of the opinion that Franz-Ferdinand while on occassion praising writings on Trialism never fully embraced it in any form. A quote from Franz-Ferdinand will really clear the matter up.Werchovsky (talk) 08:42, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Hew Strachan—The First World War Volume 1: To Arms (p 65)—writes: "the prime responsibility rested with ... an amateurish student revolution body, Young Bosnia, whose success owed far more to luck than to a sophisiticated conspiracy".-- R OGER D AVIES  talk 13:40, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well-organised

Yes it was organised, and yes it was an incompetent plot and a failure... and yes in the end it was a very lucky second (or eight or ninth?...) chance for the bumbling assassins that cost the Archduke his life. How hard was it to kill Umberto or McKinley? (Or in the end Ferdinand? All politically motivated killings and roughly contemporary) They had how many men and how many chances planned in Sarajevo and they still failed again and again. It is not the hallmark of a well organised or competent plot. I can not see how a Comedy of Errors translates as a particularly well organised plot and I don't think it is accurate to portray it as such.

The article has room to express all those aspects so I don't think its too much of an issue. The point that I think needs to be made in the article is that the death of the Archduke was not so much the result of a plot, (that was an incompetent failure), as it was Princep's solo actions and the accidental circumstances that put the Archduke outside that cafe. Just a rebalancing in emphasis. The overview and progress of the plot in the article is otherwise quite good.

I don't have any direct quotes from Ferdinand on Trialism. Taylor devotes a few pages to it in "The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918" which is the source for those additions/statements. Taylor is clear to talk about Ferdinand's circle rather than just him as the source for the ideas, but if we are to associate Trialism with Ferdinand (which he clearly was) then that's sufficient, the caveat of "widely believed to be associated with" or something similar may be appropriate.

I think the lack of specific sources on the historical record is telling, in that Trialism wasn't a particularly well thought out or rigorous political program or policy. It would seem more a pipedream that others projected their ideas onto what the exact final concept would be. It is not a stretch to say that the Magyar's would never had accepted it or let it happen, which would have killed the idea had Ferdinand and the Empire lived on. I'll try and find some first hand sources, but I think that we can trust Taylor's authority in his assessment on Trialism and incorporate it into the article in an encyclopedic fashion.

I would like to add some more info on the reactions (or Consequences) to the assassination. There is a very telling and macabre quote from Tisza, the Prime Minister of Hungry and behind the scenes powerbroker in Austria-Hungry. He was no friend of Ferdinand - Trialism was aimed at and a threat to his 'Great Hungry'.

The quote is referenced in "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918" by A. J. P. Taylor p521 (Footnote 2) as is as follows: "Tisza also disliked Francis Ferdinand personally, for his favouring the South Slavs and Rumanians, He said on news of his death: ' The Lord God has willed it so, and we must be grateful to the Lord God for everything.' "

Wanted to run it by this page and see how it could (or should) be included.

Sonnybillyboys (talk) 14:31, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I didn't get around to mentioning that the new quote on Franz-Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek appearing together looks excellent; if you can work it into the article that would be great.


 * The quote on Count Tisza's dislike of Franz-Ferdinand is on the mark. Frankly, few people really like Franz-Ferdinand due to his strong personality, and for the Magyar's at least, his planned reforms.  I won't object to you putting it in, but I do have a couple concerns that caused me not to cover this topic in the first place:  1)  Internal jealousies and hatreds of Franz-Ferdinand are often used as a jumping off point to blame Franz-Ferdinand's death on one apocryphal Austro-Hungarian plot or another.  2)  I thought the internal dislike of Franz-Ferdinand was not closely related to his assassination, although it does belong in his biography.  To me, the quote seems to make the most sense if included in a brief discussion of federalism and trialism.


 * On federalism and trialism I think we are making progress toward agreement. Let me give you a few quotes from Albertini and then let's see if we can agree on a paragraph concern Franz-Ferdinands politics which forms a part of the reason he was assassinated.


 * Vol. II Pg. 14:  "Although trialism would in fact have been easier to put into operation, a federal Greater Austria still remained the archduke's ideal.  Margutti states that in the summer of 1913 Francis Ferdinand said: 'I live and shall die for federalism; it is the sole salvation for the Monarchy, if anything can save it.'"


 * Vol. II Pg. 12: "...Aurel C. Popovici...had devoted a book to the subject (Die Vereinigten Staaten von Gross-Osterreich [Leipzig, 1906]), formulating a plan which won the warm approval of the Archduke.  The Monarchy was to be divided up inot fifteen nation states, which were to be autonomous and free to use their own language, but linked together, through the intermediary of the German language, by a central government with the Emperor at its head and a small parliament of not more than forty-two deputies elected by the member states in proportion to their total inhabitants."  The Hungarians naturally hated this idea as it meant the carving up of Hungary.  There is a stub article on Popovici we can link to.


 * Vol. II Pg. 13: (On trialism)  "This contemplated the formation within the frontiers of the Empire of a third state consisting of the territories inhabited by the Southern Slavs (Croats, Slovenes, Serbs).   ...sooner or later solving the problem of Jugoslav union by the forced or voluntary absorption of free Serbia into the new state.  ...with the Magyars the trialistic solution would have found fewer opponents that that of absorbing the Slavs into a Greater Austria..."


 * Also on page 13 there is discussion that Franz-Ferdinand had decided to use Article 44 of the Hungarian Constitution (rights of nationalities) as a weapon to force through reforms. On page 15 it mentions a program of government worked out by Franz-Ferdinand with Colonel Brosch, which contained a partial acceptance of trialism but made no mention of federalism.  A footnote points to Glaise-Horstenau "Neue Osterreichische Biographie" (Vienna 1926), Vol. III, p 22


 * So, that part of the article, as I wrote it, was an over-simplification, as I think were your words. Let's see if we can get the story more or less right with a full paragraph.  I note the Wikipedia biographical article on Franz-Ferdinand mentions nothing about his politics.


 * On the bungling assassins, Dedijer states there were and describes a dozen failed or aborted assassination (never got off the ground and in some cases never detected by the authorities) attempts by ethnic Serbs or Croates from 1910 to 1913 against Austro-Hungarian officials. None succeed in killing the intended victim, although a police officer and a secretary were killed in one attack (they were trying to capture the gunman using sabers and he kept shooting them, eventually a civilian, saw the gun and subdued him) and the Ban of Croatia received a wound in the arm.  These are the assassination attempts I was comparing June 28 to in saying the Sarajevo attack was well organized.  ...but "well organized" is not part of the article so this is not a point for resolution, I just wanted to make my explanations as you had characterized my words "well organized" as "very ridiculous".


 * On the Irish War of Independence on St. Patrick's day analogy, I have a few concerns. First, I've tried hard not to introduce opinions or analogies into the article, rather just sticking to a factual account of events.  Second, depending on how the sentence is introduced, it may seem that we are calling the shootings and bombing a kind of suicide or at least blaming the victims.  Third, Bosnia was not in rebellion as Ireland was.  Jovanovic quotes Bilinski as saying "Bosnia was completely quiet" and indeed the last failed assassination attempt had been made in August, 1913 (and that was in Croatia) and there had not been any insurgency for a long time.  It should be noted that Princip, Grabez and Cabrinovic did not know that Franz Ferdinand would be in Sarajevo on exactly June 28 until Cabrinovic asked a police officer on the train ride from Tusla to Sarajevo.Werchovsky (talk) 01:56, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Morganatic Marriage July 1, 1900
A recent edit is showing the "morganatic marriage" anniversary as being June 28, but it was in fact July 1. The "morganatic oath" was sworn on June 28, 1900. I am not sure where the couple was going to be on July 1, so I am not sure how best to fix the edit.Werchovsky (talk) 17:56, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Fixed. Changed "morganatic marriage" to "morganatic oath". -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 18:06, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for fixing it. There are still some subtle problems of implication with the passage as I read it more carefully.  The oath was Franz Ferdinand's alone, and so the phrase "their morganatic oath" may be slightly misleading.  Another issue is that Sophie was elevated on marriage and again in 1909; the effect of the two sentences taken together may lead the reader to believe that had the couple remained together in Vienna Sophie would have been treated as a commoner, where in fact she would have been treated as Her Highness, Duchess of Hohenberg.Werchovsky (talk) 18:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I have added a quote from AJP Taylor to clarify this. All the accounts suggest that she was treated like dirt in Vienna and certainly not like the wife of the crown prince. You seemed to think so too:

"::::Although court etiquette, which was in general strictly enforced in Vienna, required aristocrats to move and be seated according to their rank and seniority of rank which effectively seperated Sophie Chotek from Franz-Ferdinand at social functions Werchovsky (talk) 18:39, 6 December 2007 (UTC)"


 * For a general encyclopedic article it is probably unnecessary to get too bogged down with the detail. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 19:59, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The quote looks good. Thanks for adding it and making the other change.  Let me suggest solving the issue of the two sentence combination being misleading (causing readers to think she was still treated as a commoner) with the following change from:  "court' and Emperor Franz Josef had only consented to the marriage..." to "court.'  Emperor Franz Joseph had only consented to their marriage..."  I believe adding the period and changing "the" to "their" makes it somewhat less likely the readers will draw the inaccurate inference without damaging the prose. Werchovsky (talk) 22:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I have no problem withe the amendment but I'm not sure what the inaccurate inference is. The clear inference in Taylor and Strachan is that she was a duchess in name only. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 23:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Section headings
These are very long and I sggest shortening them per the table below. This probably a good moment to mention that the maximum recommended wordage for a section is 500 words, and three run to nearly 800 words.


 * {| class="wikitable"

! colspan=1 width="400" | Existing header ! colspan=1 width="250" | Proposed header
 * The assassins on their way
 * Preliminaries
 * The plan to kill Bosnia's governor (November 1913-February 1914)
 * Original plan
 * Potiorek assassination plan dropped; robust preparations to assassinate Franz Ferdinand made (March 1914-27 May)
 * Revised plan
 * The weapons and assassins make their way from Belgrade to Sarajevo and wait (28 May-26 June)
 * Underground railway
 * Eve of the assassination (27 June-28 June)
 * Assassination (28 June)
 * Criminal penalties (28 October, 1914 and 23 May, 1917)
 * Trials and punishment
 * Sarajevo Trial and verdicts (12 October to 28 October, 1914)
 * Sarajevo trial (October 1914)
 * The Salonika Trial and verdicts (15 March to 23 May, 1917)
 * Salonika trial (Spring 1917)
 * Controversial issues concerning responsibility
 * Controversies about responsibility
 * Serbia's Byzantine warning to Austria-Hungary of the impending assassination
 * Serbia's warning to Austria-Hungary
 * Master spy Rade Malobabić
 * Behind the attack: the "Black Hand" or Serbia military intelligence
 * "Black Hand" or Serbia military intelligence?
 * The Narodna Odbrana
 * Milan Ciganović: police informant
 * Milan Ciganović's role
 * The Russian military attaché's office
 * Russian involvement
 * }
 * Controversies about responsibility
 * Serbia's Byzantine warning to Austria-Hungary of the impending assassination
 * Serbia's warning to Austria-Hungary
 * Master spy Rade Malobabić
 * Behind the attack: the "Black Hand" or Serbia military intelligence
 * "Black Hand" or Serbia military intelligence?
 * The Narodna Odbrana
 * Milan Ciganović: police informant
 * Milan Ciganović's role
 * The Russian military attaché's office
 * Russian involvement
 * }
 * Milan Ciganović: police informant
 * Milan Ciganović's role
 * The Russian military attaché's office
 * Russian involvement
 * }
 * The Russian military attaché's office
 * Russian involvement
 * }

Comments? -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 15:33, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Looking good. Phaunt (talk) 15:43, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * For the most part, the changes seem O.K., but let me comment on some of them over which I have concerns.

1. "Original Plan":  While I personally agree with this new title, the title is a bit radical. That is to say that even though Mehmedbasic was taken from the Potiorek operation and put onto the Franz-Ferdinand operation, many people will not view the plan to kill Franz-Ferdinand as a revision of the plan to kill Potiorek, but rather that they are just two related plans. How about: "The plan to kill Potiorek"

2. "Revised Plan":  The same problem as #1. How about: "Franz Ferdinand supercedes Potiorek". Again, in both these cases I don't object personally to the new proposed title, I just think it will be open to attack by others.

10. I would like to keep the word Byzantine:  "Serbia's Byzantine warning to Austria-Hungary". It was not a straightforward warning.

14. I would like to keep the title unchanged as "Milan Ciganović: police informant". "Rôle" won't do because his primary rôle was as a cut-out between Tankosić and the assassins. Ciganović was a police informant. The point of controversy is when he assumed that rôle. An alternative would be to title the section simply "Milan Ciganović".

15. "Russian involvement"  Yikes! That is a strong title. Nothing can be traced beyond the attaché's office, except that the fact that there was a plot probably eventually leaked out. A "?" would tone it down, but perhaps too far down. I don't have a good solution.Werchovsky (talk) 17:22, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Done. I've modified the headings to accommodate your helpful comments. (I've not used "Byzantine" as it has too many unrelated meanings but instead put "warning" thus.) -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 18:35, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I chose the word Byzantine because Pasic's political skills and ability to lie and contradict even his own statements with a straight face won him the label of "the consumate Balkan politician", "an offshoot of the venerable Byzantine tree". The primary intended meaning was labyrinthine, but the connotations of Byzantine were also intended.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Werchovsky (talk • contribs) 19:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Military maneuvers and Sophie; introducing Mehmedbašić
The new quote from AJP Taylor places the decision to observe the military maneuvers in 1914, but Albertini citing Conrad and Fay places it in September 1913. Dedijer similarly states that the Emperor gave the order that Franz Ferdinand should attend the Bosnian maneuvres of 1914 in 1913; he too cites Conrad and gives a quote from Conrad on the subject.

Another controvery relating to the AJP Taylor quote is that there are two schools of thought on why Sophie wanted to accompany her husband. Dedijer notes (after mentioning AJP Taylor's statement in the London Observer and mentioning that Margutti and Collas had a similar opinion) that Eisenmenger and Max Hohenberg convincingly state that Sophie's reason for accompanying her husband was fear for his safety and the wish to share his fate. If your French is good, you may find a good quote in the Max Hohenberg interview in Paris-Soire-Dimanche, July 4, 1937.

It seems that even these relatively fluffy issues are shrouded in controversy. I am sorry I didn't catch these problems with the quote sooner.Werchovsky (talk) 20:05, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Firstly, does Taylor place the decision in 1914? I read that as placing the visit in 1914.
 * I read it as placing the decision in 1914. I also read it as Franz Ferdinand's decision while apparently Conrad is saying it was the

Emperor's order. In 1914 there was a discussion between the Emperor and Franz-Ferdinand in which the Emperor left the final decision up to Franz-Ferdinand, but that was in the context of the safety of the journey (and perhaps the summer heat, although that seemed to be more of an excuse than a reason).Werchovsky (talk) 18:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Secondly, decisions are complex things. Sophia's concern may well have been factor as would have been Franz Ferdinand's desire for some pomp for his missus, no? Why must it be either/or?
 * I personally expect what you are saying is the correct view. Yet somehow these authors all seem to be expressing it as one or the other.  Probably we should introduce both views and leave it ambiguous as to whether the views are in conflict or simply different aspects of the same story.Werchovsky (talk) 18:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * However, there are greater issues than these with this article. It's missing all kinds of connective and contextual narrative. For example, who is Mehmed Mehmedbašić? He plunked unannounced into the text. :-- R OGER D AVIES  talk 16:01, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I introduced Mehmedbašić a little better. If you read Albertini, then you will see he introduced the "Black Hand" and two more characters at this time, and if you read Dedijer, he obliquely brought up the agrarian issue at this point.  Bringing in the "Black Hand" at this point would confuse the article.  The agrarian issue could spiral out of control.  I think we need a seperate article on agrarian reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina to link to before we can safely bring this in.  With reference to the other connective and contextual narrative, since I am so close to the article and wrote so much of it, it is probably easier for you as more of an outside reader to detect these problems.  Please point them out and I will try to clean them up.Werchovsky (talk) 18:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The car
A Gräf & Stift Rois De Blougne tourer according to the caption; similarly in the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria article. In the Gräf & Stift and Gavrilo Princip articles it's a Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton. That name seems correct: so what does Rois de Blougne mean? It couldn't be Bois de Boulogne, could it? And rew D alby 15:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's certainly a double phaeton (2 x 2 rows of front facing passenger seats). Your guess about Bois de Boulogne seems plausible enough. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 16:24, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Article Name Change
Is there any reason not to revert this article name to Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?Werchovsky (talk) 06:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I say revert it. There was no discussion of why it should be renamed prior to being moved. --Mperry (talk) 06:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * How do you revert a name change. Clicking the undo button does not do it.  It says the edit can be undone, but has no effect.Werchovsky (talk) 18:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Done. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 18:21, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Run-on sentences
There are a number of these in the article. Some examples are shown here, but these are not the only ones.

"Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened nationalistic elements in Serbia and amongst the indigenous Serbian populations within Austria-Hungary who chafed under Magyar rule and who through 'cultural' organizations were inspired by Serbian or South Slav nationalistic ideas."

"The five bullets Žerajić fired at Verešanin and the fatal bullet he put in his own brain made Žerajić an inspiration to future Serbian assassins including Princip and Princip's accomplice Čabrinović."

"During this January 1914 meeting, various possible Austro-Hungarian targets for assassination were discussed including Franz Ferdinand, but ultimately, at this meeting, it was decided only to dispatch Mehmed Mehmedbašić to Sarajevo, to kill the Governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek."

I'm not sure how I would rework these, short of wholesale clause cutting. For instance, the meat of the first sentence seems to me to be:

"Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened "; where seems to be
 * nationalistic elements in Serbia
 * indigenous Serbian populations within Austria-Hungary

Then there is the last clause in the sentence: "and who through "cultural" organizations were inspired by Serbian or South Slav nationalistic ideas". And I can't make head nor tail of what that means. The second quoted sentence is easier to fix:

"The five bullets Žerajić fired at Verešanin (and the fatal bullet he put in his own brain) made Žerajić an inspiration to Princip and Princip's accomplice Čabrinović."

Though I'd be tempted to cut it down even more to:

"The five bullets Žerajić fired at Verešanin made Žerajić an inspiration to Princip and Princip's accomplice Čabrinović." or "The five bullets Žerajić fired at Verešanin made Žerajić an inspiration to future assassins like Princip and Princip's accomplice Čabrinović." Loren.wilton (talk) 03:43, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Suicide or attempted suicide following assassination or attempted assassination is a key theme. Žerajić's suicide therefore is mentioned in Dedijer, Albertini and in this article. "'Cultural' organizations" refers to the Narodna and the Sokols. The quotation marks surrounding the word "cultural" are there because in addition to their official cultural activities these groups were involved in organizing anti-Austro-Hungarian activities including the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand. Werchovsky (talk) 04:59, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

I reviewed the sentences listed above as run-on sentences with a grammar expert, historian and author. It was his expert opinion that none of the three sentences were run-on sentences, but there was some room for improvement in clarity and I made the changes he suggested. IF there are no further complaints I will remove the tag tomorrow.Werchovsky (talk) 21:04, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Recent series of edits II
This series of edits is a mixed bag. In some cases there does seem to be some improvement, but in others the effect is to degrade the grammar, introduce inaccuracy, or dumb down the language. Do we need to start sentences with conjunctions like the word "but"? Is the stand alone sentence "The truth, however, lies elsewhere?" a proper paragraph, or ought it not complete the thought of the paragraph above it? Should we really be changing the words in a direct quote from an english language source? Is the sentence structure created by the word "thereby" really too advanced for readers? I am not fond of the use of bullet points in this context either.Werchovsky (talk) 07:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree with some of what you say. Quotes, for example, shouldn't be tampered with, and stylistically it's weak in places. That said, however, I see this overall as a good faith attempt to make the article more accessible. That hasn't been entirely successful as the balance – between how it was and how it now is – is not yet quite right. Your example apart, most of the paragraphs are now too short, making the article choppy and staccato. I personally have no particular problem with bullet points, though I tend to use them sparingly myself, if they clarify and speed up the flow of reading of complicated material. The answer is probably a further copy-edit by another uninvolved editor, thus preserving the best of both. It's also very good to see new editors involving themselves in the subject. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 08:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)


 * On going back and rereading it I have to agree that it is too choppy at this point and I'd probably be inclined to recombine a few of those short paragraphs into somewhat larger ones. I wouldn't be inclined to get them back to anywhere near as large as they were; at least not yet.  My opinion might change some more over the next day or two. :-)  Loren.wilton (talk) 09:37, 18 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the explanation. -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 16:38, 19 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I am certainly open to discussion on various points. It is said that in German you can write a novel in a single sentence and a word can span an entire page of text. English is not that bad, but there were novels written a century ago that had single sentences spanning more than a page.  They were very difficult to read at the time with all of the subordinate clauses, and they are essentially completely  unreadable today.


 * A modern "rule of thumb" for English is that a sentence shold not contain more than 15 words. I clearly don't subscribe to this myself; if I turn on grammar checking in Word it will flag virtually every sentence as being too long and having too many clauses, this sentence being a case in point.  But while I will use moderately long sentences and multiple clauses of various sorts, I tend to draw the line at sentences where I start having to make tickmarks to divide up the sections, then put in nested parends, and finally join up the main clauses to find out what the very simple sentence actually meant after the extra clauses were removed.  And once I've spent 30 seconds diagramming the sentence, I now know what I could have discovered at reading speed if the sentence had been broken up into smaller fragments (or in many cases, the subordinate clauses simply removed).


 * I did not want to eliminate any information while adjusting things. So in many cases where, in text of my own, I would have wholesale tossed out information, here I carefully kept it.  But while keeping the informaiton I still wanted to get the sentence structure to the point that I didn't need to put tickmarks on the page to sort out the clauses.  Sometimes I could do this by pulling the last few words up and putting them with the first few, making the main concept, and then put the remaining clauses in subsequent sentences.  Sometimes I could do it by putting in the tickmarks permanently in the form of commas.  Sometimes I had to use parends or semicolons to try to divide things up when there were already too many commas in second or third-level clauses in the sentences, and I was not happy about doing that.  In a very few cases, the only thing I could come up with was the bulleted lists.  I don't like them.  But I couldn't come up with any other way to both preserve all of the information and make the result moderately clear without repeated re-reading to sort out the clauses.


 * I strongly considered taking many of the clauses and bracketing them in 'ref' tags to turn them into footnotes. But I didn't want to do that until I had the thing broken up a bit and still in linear order.  I think it would be useful to do in a number of places though.


 * Some of the results I came up with are not as grammatical as I would like, such as those single-sentence paragraphs. However, a paragraph is generally supposed to encompass a single concept, and the single sentences did not fit comfortably with either the preceeding nor following sentences.  This could perhaps be fixed by wholesale rearrangement in a few places, or by simply dropping the stub sentence.  Again though, I was trying very hard to not rearrange at larger than the single-sentence level, and trying to not remove any information.  (In the specific case you mention I tried that sentence both ways, and was unhappy with both.  It ended up the way it dod because I couldn't convince myself that it really belonged on the end of the preceeding paragraph.  There is at least one other case that suffered the same fate.)


 * I did in a few cases change a word ot two in either obviously quoted text, or text where there seemed to be several levels of quoting going on, and I could not tell with certainty where the bounds were of the quotation. I had been assuming that these quotations had been transliterated from a middle-European language, and that in some cases the wrong English word had ben chosen for the original-language word.  If indeed these were English-language quotations, then my changes to them need to be reverted. Loren.wilton (talk) 09:21, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the cleanup; can we compromise in a few places?

 * I am indenting your replies, so that as necessary I can thread mine underneath and they do not get lost in the mass of text. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Werchovsky for reducing the chop in my last series of edits and removing the errors I had unintentionally introduced. I feel that the article is now better than it was after my edits, and also before my edits. In general paragraphs seem to be of reasonable length and not choppy, and the sentences are mostly of reasonable length too.

There are a few places that I would like to see changed to somewhat of a compromise between what I had done and what you have there now. Rather than changing them I want to list them here and see if I can get your agreement. I will include reasons why I want them changed.

In the opening section, I would like to split the lead paragraph at "The political objective". If that were done, the first paragraph would describe WHAT was done, the second would describe WHY it was done, and the final paragraph of course describes the result of the actions.
 * In a theoretical way I agree with what you are saying. I think we need to add some additional sentences to flesh out each of these three proposed paragraphs.  The opening was left short in part because this is a controversial topic.  Let me give this some serious thought.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree that a little more text would be desirable, but I think only a little. The lead should concisely describe what the article is about, and leave the details for the article itself.  But I still think splitting the existing paragraph, even without more text, would be worthwhile. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

The sentence "The attackers threw the corpses of King Alexander Obrenović and Queen Draga, out of a palace window ending any threat that loyalists would mount a counter attack." I believe should be changed to "The attackers threw the corpses of King Alexander Obrenović and Queen Draga out of a palace window, ending any threat that loyalists would mount a counter attack." There is no reason for a comma before the 'and'. There are really two complete thoughts in this sentence: "The attackers threw them out the window", and "doing so ended the threat". Those ideas could be two sentences, but if they are one, I believe there should be a comma to break the flow between the separate parts.
 * I agree that the comma deletion and addition.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I made this edit. Loren.wilton (talk) 02:43, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I am still really unhappy with the clause (and its subclause): "the Bosnian crisis of 1908 where Serbia assumed an attitude of protest over Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina ending in a Serbian climb-down in March 1909". This is long enough to be a sentence by itself, and the subclause makes it quite difficult reading, since there is yet another clause following this at this same level. Could we either simplify the wording "assumed an attitude of protest over" into "protested", or eliminate the actually completely irrelevent subclause of "ending in a Serbian climb-down in March 1909"? I would favor the later change over the former. But either of them would greatly improve the readability here. (And in the last sentence of the paragraph, I believe there should be a comma after 'Kosovo'.)
 * On reflection, now that we have a good link for the Bosnian crisis, I think we can delete "ending in a Serbian climb-down in March 1909" but we should change to "the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909...." I don't think this sentence structure is too complicated for college level reading, but the detail is no longer required because of the link.  Yes, the comma you mention is needed.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with your changes. As a side thought: American newspapers were traditionally targeted at an 8th-grade (pre-highschool) reading level, so that they would be accessable to the largest reasonable set of probable readers.  Wikipedia is commonly used as a reference these days in schoolwork for both upper gradeschool and highschool.  I contend therefore that we really should be targeting a highschool reading level and not a college reading level.  (Besides, most Americans no longer have a college reading level, even when entering college.) Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I made this edit, I think as you suggest -- please check. Loren.wilton (talk) 02:43, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

The first sentence of the next paragraph is also problematic. There are enough separate clauses here for several sentences. The full and complete meaning of this sentence is given in the first two clauses: "Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened nationalistic elements." Next we have a description of where these nationalistic elements lived: "in Serbia and in Austria-Hungary." Next we discover that these aren't merely "nationalistic" Serbs, but they are "nationalistic Serbs who chafed under Magyar rule." But wait, there's more! Not only do they chafe under Magyar rule, but their "sentiments were stirred by Serbian "cultural" organizations." There HAS to be a better way of conveying this information than piling it all into one sentence, clause upon clause until you wonder if they will ever stop coming. If I had my choice, I would toss out everything except the first part of the sentence. Knowing that these elements are nationalistic Serbs is really sufficient for the understanding of what follows. If that is not deemed sufficient, then perhaps the concepts could be introduced front to back rather than back to front:
 * I had this sentence checked by a professor of history who has written several scholarly history books and whose grammar is excellent. The sentence has already been modified to what he recommended.  We can't have the sentence just end with "emboldened nationalistic elements." with the reader left to guess whether these are Austrian, Magyar, Croatian, Serbian, or Austro-Hungarian Serbs.  As it stands, the sub-clauses are simply enough arranged.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I will still contend that this sentence is overly complex, and would be marked down by the English instructor if this showed up in student work in the US, even in a college English course. (And even more difficult for a highschool reader who has been given an assignment on this topic.) There should be a concise way to introduce the same information. Please think if there is any other way this same information could be conveyed. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

"There were Serbian nationalistic elements living in both Serbia and Austria-Hungary who chafed under Magyar rule. Their nationalistic sentiments had been aroused by various Serbian 'cultural' organizations that operated for this purpose. The Serbian military successes, and outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened these groups."
 * This won't do at all. Serbs in Serbia were not under Magyar rule.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Also in the same paragraph, it is my belief that an em dash should have spaces before and after, not be attached to the words on either side of it.
 * This is the first time I used em dashes. I just tried to copy what Roger Davies had done at another point in the article.  Perhaps he can asnwer this question.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Dashes are explained in WP:MOSDASH, the section of the Manual of Style pertaining to dashes. The choice is spaced endashes or unspaced emdashes. I prefer the former but occasionally use the latter. Hope this helps, -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 19:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

In the section "Franz Ferdinand chosen", the opening sentence of the first paragraph: "Mehmedbašić was delayed" makes little sense by itself. I think it is logically part of the preceeding paragraph; but it also needs to be here. If you are simply scanning the article looking down by section headings, you read this sentence, and the first thought is "Delayed? Delayed at what?  Why does it matter that he was delayed?  How long was this delay?" It rases more questions than it answers. To clear this up we need to show "delayed at doing what?" This requires duplicating a little information from the preceeding paragraph to make this new "entry point into the story" stand on its own.
 * I see what you are saying. The section headings were inserted after much of the article was written.  The right way to go might be to add something about the nature of the delay.  What happened was that, on his way to Bosnia-Herzegovina from France, police searched his train for a thief.  Thinking the police might be after him, Mehmedbašić threw his weapons (a dagger and a bottle of poison) out the train window.  Once he arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina he set about looking for weapons.  He may have eventually got hold of a revolver in Stolac, but before he could act against Potiorek he received new orders from Ilic.  This is really quite a side track from the main story, so I am not sure what to do.  Let's each give it some thought.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I might suggest something along the lines of "Mehmedbašić was delayed on his trip from France to Serbia when he was forced to throw his weapons from the train, and later lost time acquiring new ones." Your whole explanation is quite interesting, and I might be inclined to include it as a paragraph by itself in place of the existing sentence, or I might be inclined to include it as a footnote with something like the sentence I suggest above.  You could object that the sentence as I have worded it is misleading; and in detail it is.  But as you point out, it is irrelevent detail, and it is not actually incorrect in its statements, merely incomplete. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I have added a paragraph to the end of the previous section describing the trip and loss of weapons basically as you describe it above. I then reworded the first couple sentences of the lead paragraph here to both flow from the preceeding paragraph, and to an extent stand on its own if the reader starts at the section heading.  Please check this and see if it meets your approval. Loren.wilton (talk) 02:43, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

The sentence "On the morning of May 30 Prvanović's revenue sergeants assembled and Sergeant Budivoj Grbić accepted the task and led Princip and Grabež with the weapons by foot to Isaković’s Island, a small island in the middle of the Drina River that separated Serbia from Bosnia, on May 31." should not start and end in dates. We have two dates and many actions between them. Which actions happened on which day? We can only guess or rest in confusion. This could perhaps be refactored into:

"On the morning of May 30 Prvanović's revenue sergeants assembled and Sergeant Budivoj Grbić accepted the task of leading Princip and Grabež into Serbia. On May 31 Grbić led them, with their weapons, by foot to Isaković’s Island, a small island in the middle of the Drina River that separated Serbia from Bosnia."


 * Instead, let's break the sentence up with a period after Bosnia, and then "They reached the island on May 31."Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. Loren.wilton (talk) 02:43, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

At "Cubrilović stated to the court", could we turn the ensuing quote (which I think is the remainder of the paragraph) into a block quote? If it is not the full paragraph, then there seems to be at least one missing quotation mark, as I can not tell where "If you know..." ends.
 * I just went ahead and fixed this. I need to double check against Owings though, and make sure the transcript used quotation marks.  I might have to change this again, but at least now it makes sense.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Something should be done with "Cabrinović though began placing some blame on people in Serbia and". A comma after Serbia, perhaps. Or two sentences?


 * Thanks for catching this. I went ahead and broke up the sentence.  Splicing these two thoughts together was an especially bad idea as the causal relationship is not that firm.  Its better to just use the juxtaposition to imply partial causality.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for considering the above. Loren.wilton (talk) 06:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * This was very helpful. As you may have already concluded, this article is very dear to me and I have put much effort into researching, writing, and footnoting it.  I appreciate your help.  Let me make an additional explanation.  Details of the assassination were and continues to be highly controversial and the witnesses to the events often lied.  The authors with the most access to the primary documents tend to be biased.  For these reasons, in many places, it was not possible to write the article in as straight forward a manner as I would have liked (if you read this section in Albertini, for example regarding the newspaper clipping, you will find he was a bit roundabout too), and this sometimes led to complicated prose.Werchovsky (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * This is very interesting information. As you have probably deduced, this is not an area where I have any great familiarity, merely an interest.  So I am not inherently aware of details like this, and they are important.  I think I would be inclined to use this as an introductory paragraph very early in the article.  If you had not written this, I was going to suggest that many places in the article could be simplified by changing "According to Xxx, Joe then had lunch" to simply "Joe had lunch" on the basis that after 100 years none of this could be contentious, and exactly where the information came from is uninteresting.  It appears though that that may not be the case.  Knowing that details are contentious and why they are contentious is I think a very important part of the story, and makes much of the rest of the article style much more understandable. Loren.wilton (talk) 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Image removed
From the patch history: Deleted image removed:

It looks like someone removed the image of the original plaque, and then the bot removed the dead link. I don't know if this was another 'fair use' thing or some random vandal removed the image, but it did contribute to the article. Maybe the origial uploader can figure out what happened. Loren.wilton (talk) 17:38, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

When did Sophie die?
Prior to today, the article read, "Sophie died ten minutes later," citing pages 36-37 of the Albertini text. Today, the article was edited by to instead say "Sophie died instantly," with no change to the reference. I am reluctant to undo an edit when I cannot confirm the error, but I suspect that the source does not support the changes. Does anyone have access to check? TJRC (talk) 01:21, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Just closing the loop here; I see this was reverted by User:Werchovsky on February 10. TJRC (talk) 22:38, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Vandalism?
"Baba Jan | 40 years of smoking weed until his death in San Fransisco" this is placed in the table for the second trial, is this vandalism? 216.15.91.253 (talk) 16:55, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Black Hand and responsibility for the assassination
The key question about responsibility for the assassination is, was the plot planned at court in Belgrade or were the elements of Serbian Military Intelligence acting on their own. The answer to this question lies somewhere in the triangle between Dragutin Dimitrijević, Nikola Pašić and House of Karađorđević.

Black Hand was much more then mere tool to counter Bulgarian activity in Macedonia. At one time Dragutin Dimitrijević acted as a king maker, a possition which put him at odds with many elements within Serbia, and a role with which even the royal house was not comfortable with. Stane (talk) 09:14, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Gay Lover?
Sexual orientation of Aleksandar I Karađorđević and Colonel Živković have no implications on their roles in Salonika Trial or Sarajevo Assassination. These are historical curiosities which belong to Wikipedia articles on these persons but have no place in this text.
 * Exactly so, its not their sexual orientation but the fact that they were sleeping with each other that heavily influenced Serbian political events in 1914-1917. (Well actually, it is possible that some of the bad feelings between the Black Hand and the Regent was due to the Regent's bisexuality but that is getting deep in the weeds).  If the Chief Judge of a Trial is sleeping with the man who ordered the trial there are serious implications...the regent put his most trusted man in charge of both the trial and the mission to negotiate a seperate peace...trust with a special basis which cannot be accurately described without giving away their orientation unfortunately.  Beyond that, General Zivkovic participated in the 1903 murders as the "inside man" in the palace guard and later switched sides and became head of the white hand because of his special relationship with the Regent.  Its OK to be gay, or in the Regents case Bi, don't you think?Werchovsky (talk) 03:57, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Stane (talk) 09:14, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Further reading section
an anon error changed the publication date of one of the books from 2002 to 2009. I suspected vandalism, and checked it out on worldcat to make sure s/he wasn't just suggesting a later edition.

In the process, I updated all the cited sources in this section to use, so that interested readers can locate information about a referenced book, and maybe find a library that may carry it.

However, I can't find anything on the Treusch source. Is this a book, or something different? If it's something different, there may be a better cite template to use, e.g.,. Anyone know? TJRC (talk) 18:53, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Picture moves
Just a few words about the article and the recent picture moves:

This Wiki article was very intresting; I came across it while reading up on the history of East European countries after visiting Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro recently. It was full of facts, with good pictures, and the structure made it easy to follow- obviously the result of much hard work.

Here are some thoughts about the recent four pic moves:

''(12:34, 4 November 2009 CPES (talk | contribs) (65,418 bytes) (move strong pics of killer & killed to top (they didn't seem to fit in 'Background') Move car pic to 'Royal Visit'. Move bridge pic to 'Bombing')''

The Latin bridge pic is excellent, but it doesn't show the actual scene of the assassination and there is little human interest. All the same, with it's colour it made a nice opening impression.

The juxtaposition of FF (the killed), on the left and GP (the killer) on the right creates a strong image full of human interest. The pictures also show the subject of the article and the assassin. This image seemed 'wasted' in the 'Background' section; the pics didn't seem to fit either. Also, the pictures, being B&W and one sepia gives a feeling of 1914 rather than 2009.

The other two pics were moved to appropriate positions in the article.

A pic including Sophie would be good as would pics of the 6 assassins + Danilo Ilić (in a rouges gallery) and also pics of the other characters, Apis for example. A pic of the gun and perhaps the bomb may be worth considering too.

The pic of the map showing the positions of the bombing and shooting is fine, but if the positions of the 7 conspiritors on the route could also be shown (as the fig in Ponting pp. 12). That would enhance this article (I think). CPES (talk) 13:49, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

'Bombing' comment moved here
This comment is from the 'Bombing' sub section. It is probably more visible here:

''Note: One witness stated that the Archduke blocked it [the bomb] with his hand and this was picked up by the New York Times despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As it was a percussion bomb (you must strike it against something to set off the timer), Čabrinović struck it against a lamp post. The sound of this attracted the attention of Franz Ferdinand, who saw an object flying at him and reflexively put his arm up in a failed effort to block the detached detonator cap which ultimately scratched the arch duchess' cheek or neck on its way by.''    CPES (talk) 17:55, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Further reading section
an anon error changed the publication date of one of the books from 2002 to 2009. I suspected vandalism, and checked it out on worldcat to make sure s/he wasn't just suggesting a later edition.

In the process, I updated all the cited sources in this section to use, so that interested readers can locate information about a referenced book, and maybe find a library that may carry it.

However, I can't find anything on the Treusch source. Is this a book, or something different? If it's something different, there may be a better cite template to use, e.g.,. Anyone know? TJRC (talk) 18:53, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Picture moves
Just a few words about the article and the recent picture moves:

This Wiki article was very intresting; I came across it while reading up on the history of East European countries after visiting Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro recently. It was full of facts, with good pictures, and the structure made it easy to follow- obviously the result of much hard work.

Here are some thoughts about the recent four pic moves:

''(12:34, 4 November 2009 CPES (talk | contribs) (65,418 bytes) (move strong pics of killer & killed to top (they didn't seem to fit in 'Background') Move car pic to 'Royal Visit'. Move bridge pic to 'Bombing')''

The Latin bridge pic is excellent, but it doesn't show the actual scene of the assassination and there is little human interest. All the same, with it's colour it made a nice opening impression.

The juxtaposition of FF (the killed), on the left and GP (the killer) on the right creates a strong image full of human interest. The pictures also show the subject of the article and the assassin. This image seemed 'wasted' in the 'Background' section; the pics didn't seem to fit either. Also, the pictures, being B&W and one sepia gives a feeling of 1914 rather than 2009.

The other two pics were moved to appropriate positions in the article.

A pic including Sophie would be good as would pics of the 6 assassins + Danilo Ilić (in a rouges gallery) and also pics of the other characters, Apis for example. A pic of the gun and perhaps the bomb may be worth considering too.

The pic of the map showing the positions of the bombing and shooting is fine, but if the positions of the 7 conspiritors on the route could also be shown (as the fig in Ponting pp. 12). That would enhance this article (I think). CPES (talk) 13:49, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

'Bombing' comment moved here
This comment is from the 'Bombing' sub section. It is probably more visible here:

''Note: One witness stated that the Archduke blocked it [the bomb] with his hand and this was picked up by the New York Times despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As it was a percussion bomb (you must strike it against something to set off the timer), Čabrinović struck it against a lamp post. The sound of this attracted the attention of Franz Ferdinand, who saw an object flying at him and reflexively put his arm up in a failed effort to block the detached detonator cap which ultimately scratched the arch duchess' cheek or neck on its way by.''    CPES (talk) 17:55, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

'Reception' picture comment moved here
This comment is from the 'Reception' sub section. It is probably more visible here:

''Image with unknown copyright status removed: Image:Princip arrested.jpg. This picture is still widely identified as showing Gavrilo Princip's arrest. However, the figure under detention does not resemble Princip and is perhaps another member of the group of assassins. It has also been suggested that he is a German passerby who saved Princip from being lynched and was seized in the confusion of the moment.'' CPES (talk) 18:18, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

file:Gabro Princip captured in Sarayevo 1914.jpg which is similar is now in article (caption says 'not Princip'). CPES (talk) 14:48, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Trialism Disambiguation
Please be advised of a possible need to disambiguate the word "trialism" as used in the Nationalism section of this article and discussed at Talk:Trialism. Squideshi (talk) 20:05, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

GA Review corrective measures.
I address the request for improvement by the GA reviewer by editing the February 10, 2009 (cleanest version). Below is the point by point response to the reviewer raised issues.

"On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead (while traveling in an open-topped car) in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins coordinated by Danilo Ilić" -> a bit of a run-on sentence Shortened
 * "At the top of these Serbian military conspirators..." - Serbian military conspirators have not previously been referred to, unless you mean the assassins, in which case this should be made clear This was the result of bad edits after February 10, 2009 and is corrected.
 * "underground railroad" - two issues here. First, it is referred to both as a railroad and a railway - should be consistent. Second, the term is unclear and should be explained on its first occurence - it's not an actual underground railroad, but a network of people that operate secretly for some purpose. OK, switched to clandestine tunnel and described.
 * "French Occupied Salonika" -> "French-occupied Salonika" with Salonika linked OK
 * An evidential approach must be taken to weed through the various claims and counter-claims concerning responsibility. - this phrase is unencyclopedic, in my opinion

OK. An author had asked that an explanation for why the article didn’t just come out and say what happened rather than presenting evidence of what happened. But I delete it.

as a fully sovereign state, as the Kingdom of Serbia - remove second "as" Yes, that was bad sentence from someone I did not feel like arguing with.
 * "These disputes OK included a customs dispute (parallelism) with Austria-Hungary beginning in 1906 (commonly referred to as the "Pig War" as pigs were Serbia's major export to Austria-Hungary), OK the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 where Serbia assumed an attitude of protest over Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ending in a Serbian climb-down (meaning?) (they backed down, this is common diplomatic language, here is a modern article sentence: “The Czech Republic offered Poland an opportunity to climb down in talks on a new European Union treaty on Monday but it was unclear whether Warsaw was interested in a face-saving compromise.”  in March 1909), and finally the two Balkan wars of 1912–1913 where Serbia conquered Macedonia and Kosovo, taking these provinces from the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria."
 * Even if it's common diplomatic language, readers lacking your background will probably be unfamiliar with it. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:51, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * There are many run-on sentences throughout the article that need to be fixed The specific sentence you mentioned as run-on was vetted and found not to be a run-on sentence, although I did shorten it.  Most of the long sentences as present in 2008 were previously challenged as run-on but were subsequently vetted by well published history professors and found not to be run-on sentences but simply complex sentences.
 * Okay, although I would promote clarity over complexity.
 * The chronology in "Background" and "Preliminaries" is scrambled at times Yes, when I read the source material on this subject it too does not follow chronological order precisely as there are various threads that must be woven together and these authors don’t want to jump around from one thread to another saying “meanwhile, in Belgrade”, “meanwhile in Vienna”, etc.
 * Locations should be linked on first appearance (Belgrade OK, Toulouse,)OK etc)
 * "Agreement in principle" - what does this mean? (modalities not all settled, problems might come up to cause cancelation of the operation or change of personel, etc.)
 * under the grounds" -> "on the grounds" Not present in earlier versions.
 * ”a war against Serbia" - isn't the Black Hand on the same side as Serbia? Not present in earlier version, but the Radical Government led by Pasic was “at daggers drawn” with the “Black Hand”.
 * Inline citations should be after punctuation
 * "continue with plan for the assassination" - grammar Not present in earlier versions.
 * "grossly amateurs" - grammar Not present in earlier versions.
 * "the intention was provide for" - grammar Not present in earlier versions.
 * "The Serbian Prime Minister Pasic at the beginning of June 1914" - switch Not present in earlier versions.
 * "they handed the small card to Captain Popović" - what card? The small card mentioned earlier in the article.
 * Be consistent in the way dates are formatted - either "28 May" or "May 28", not both

Dates are generally not linked unless the topic of the page being linked to is germane to the topic at hand Our Wikipedia military history evaluator insisted on the linked dates. The February 10, 2009 was pretty consistent. I fixed the two inconsistencies I found.
 * "and link back up" - meaning?  Somehow they would meet up in Tuzla and travel together on to Sarajevo from there.  “Link back up” seems to me to be a fairly common expression for an operation of this kind where assassination team members split up and then rejoin each other.
 * Again, readers may be unfamiliar with this background, so I would clarify.
 * "On the morning of 30 May Prvanović's revenue sergeants assembled and Sergeant Budivoj Grbić accepted the task and led Princip and Grabež with the weapons by foot to Isaković’s Island, a small island in the middle of the Drina River that separated Serbia from Bosnia." - grammar + clarity Deleted “with the weapons”
 * Austro-Hungarian Redbook - what is this? Each of the belligerents issued what became known as the colored books. The Austrian book laying out its side of the story of the July Crisis was red.  Serbia’s was blue.  Russia’s was Orange.  Frances’ was yellow.  Etc.  This was the only source I could find explaining who this guy was.

Nikola Pašić - is this the same person referred to earlier as "Pasic"? These errors were introduced after February 10, 2009 Need consistency in names - Pasic vs Pašić, Grabež vs Grabez, Franz Ferdinand vs Franz-Ferdinand, etc Corrected Grabezes and Franz-Ferdinands "encouraging them to bravery" - grammar Revised, cited "After mass" -> "After Mass" Delete " - that the assassination had been unsuccessful - " - use en-dashes instead of hyphens Simplified "Conspiracy to commit high treason carried a maximum sentence of death which conspiracy to commit simple murder did not" - grammar Re-reviewed and again found grammatically correct.
 * Perhaps it would be slightly clearer if worded as "Conspiracy to commit high treason carried a maximum sentence of death, whereas conspiracy to commit simple murder did not."

In the table of sentences, why do some use curly brackets and others parantheses? No curly brackets on February 10, 2009
 * The paragraph under the table says that only two died of TB in prison, while the table claims three No such conflict on February 10, 2009 article.
 * "denies that Russia had one single agent in Serbia at the time" - does that mean that they had no agents or many agents? Not one single agent means emphatically none. I’ve deleted it as I worked off a verbal translation from Russian to English and I can’t cite pages as a result.
 * Do you mean a recorded translation? If so, you can cite that using the time in the recording.
 * "high words" - meaning? Common diplomatic way of saying a heated and rude exchange; I’ve read this phrase many times and its meaning has always been the same.
 * Again, assume that your reader lacks this kind of background knowledge.
 * "accepting points #8 and #10" - since the points are not enumerated here, you should describe the points referred to instead of simply numbering them OK

Choose either "20th century" or "twentieth century", not both These paragraphs seem to go beyond the proper scope of the article and are speculative not factual. I am deleting them. According to WP:LAYOUT, External Links go after Further Reading Was correct on February 10, 2009.
 * Accuracy and verifiability
 * All existing "citations needed" tags must be addressed before the article can achieve GA status
 * Is Alexander a Prince or a Prince Regent? The King retired on June 24th 1914 and Alexander was appointed Regent.  Let’s go with Regent.
 * Who is Kaiser Karl? Wasn't Wilhelm the Kaiser during World War I?  Karl Franz Joseph Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Marie von Habsburg-Lothringen.  No, not “the” Kaiser, simply a Kaiser.  Kaiser and Czar are just words that mean Emperor or Caesar.  The Austrians spoke German, hence Kaiser.
 * Citations needed for:
 * Initially Serbia was content to live within its small borders, which encompassed only a fraction of the ethnic Serbian population OK
 * The attackers threw the corpses of King Alexander and Queen Draga out of a palace window, ending any threat that loyalists would mount a counter attack It’s the same page as the previous sentence.  I’ve done it but this seems overfootnoted, which was a previous complaint against the article.
 * You've now got a quotation mark at the end, but no the beginning, of that sentence. Is it a direct quote? Also, on the issue of overfootnoting - at WP:FAC, the average successful candidate has a footnote for almost every sentence. So long as you're not bloating the reference section by using a different source for each sentence (different pages are fine), I would say it's not overfootnoted. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:51, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The new dynasty was more nationalistic, more friendly to Russia and less friendly to Austria-Hungary Footnoted
 * Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened nationalistic elements in Serbia and Serbs in Austria-Hungary who chafed under Magyar rule and whose nationalist sentiments were stirred by Serbian "cultural" organizations Footnoted
 * In the five years prior to 1914, lone assassins – mostly Serbian citizens of Austria-Hungary – made a series of unsuccessful assassination attempts in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian officials Footnoted
 * The 14th anniversary of the morganatic oath fell on 28 June and they were happy to celebrate it far from Vienna Deleted “and they were happy…”
 * With the death of its President, Apis and his fellow military conspirators (drawn heavily from the ranks of the May 1903 coup) had come to dominate the remnants of the "Black Hand" Footnoted
 * However, the participants decided only to dispatch Mehmed Mehmedbašić to Sarajevo, to kill the Governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek. Footnoted.
 * Thinking the police might be after him, he threw his weapons (a dagger and a bottle of poison) out the train window Footnoted
 * testified at the Sarajevo trial that at about the same time, (a little after Easter) they were eager to carry out an assassination and approached a fellow Bosnian and former guerrilla fighter known to be well connected and with access to arms, Milan Ciganović, and through him Major Tankosić and reached an agreement to transport arms to Sarajevo and participate in the assassination. …footnotes are already there after each defendants name.  It seemed the right way to do it for trial transcripts.
 * Princip and Grabež had a falling out with Čabrinović over Čabrinović's repeated violations of operational security. Footnoted
 * This trip is a point of unresolved controversy. Deleted
 * The three sent a postcard to "Black Hand" Provincial Director for Bosnia-Herzegovina Vladimir Gaćinović in France. Footnoted
 * The following morning, 28 June, Ilić walked on the street from assassin to assassin encouraging them to bravery. Footnoted
 * Due to a mistake, three local police officers got into the first car with the chief officer of special security; the special security officers who were supposed to accompany their chief got left behind. Footnoted
 * The procession sped away towards the Town Hall leaving the disabled car behind. Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip and Trifun Grabež failed to act as the motorcade passed them at high speed. Footnoted
 * The only obvious measure taken was for Count Harrach to take up a protective position on the left hand running board of the car. This is confirmed by photographs of the scene outside the Town Hall. Edit and Footnoted
 * Pushing forward to the right hand side of the car, Princip fired two shots from a Belgian-made 9x17mm (380 ACP) Fabrique Nationale model 1910 semi-automatic pistol. Deleted “pushing forward to the right hand side of the car.
 * Princip later claimed that his intention was to kill Governor Potiorek, not Sophie. Footnoted
 * As reported by Count Harrach, Franz-Ferdinand's last words were "Sophie, Sophie! Don't die! Live for our children!" followed by six or seven utterances of "It is nothing..." in response to Harrachs' inquiry as to Franz-Ferdinand's injury Footnoted
 * Under questioning by defense counsel Cubrilović described in more detail the basis of the fears that he said had compelled him to cooperate with Princip and Grabez. Footnote Owings approx 159
 * In the case of Veljko Cubrilović the court was not persuaded that his acting out of fear justified acquittal or a lighter sentence, but the acting out of fear argument may have contributed to the acquittal of several peasants with minor roles. Delete. The verdicts are enough.
 * Cabrinović, though, began placing some blame on people in Serbia. Footnoted
 * The court did not buy the defendant's stories attempting to hold official Serbia blameless. OK, this was just a segue to the verdict.
 * The court heard arguments regarding Princip's age, as there was some doubt as to the prompt and accurate registration of his birth but concluded that Princip was under 20 at the time of the assassination. Footnoted
 * In late 1916 and early 1917 secret peace talks took place between Austria-Hungary and France. There is circumstantial evidence that parallel discussions were held between Austria-Hungary and Serbia Footnoted Mackenzie
 * Kaiser Karl laid out Austria-Hungary's key demand for returning Serbia to the control of the Serbian Government in exile: that Serbia should provide guarantees that there be no further political agitation emanating from Serbia against Austria-Hungary. Footnoted Mackenzie
 * For some time Prince Alexander had planned to do away with Dragutin Dimitrijević and the officers loyal to him as they represented a political threat to his power. Footnote Mackenzie
 * Prince Alexander commuted six of the death sentences Footnoted Mackenzie
 * On 18 June a telegram completely lacking in specifics ordered... Footnoted Albertini
 * According to Serbian Military Attaché to Vienna... Footnoted Albertini
 * In 1924 J. Jovanović went public stating... Footnoted Albertini
 * J. Jovanović's account changed back and forth over the years and never adequately addressed Colonel Lesanin's statement Footnoted Albertini
 * By choosing a military loyalist to convey the message, and by not including any of the specifics such as the conspirators' names and weapons, Pašić, a survivor, hedged his political bets against the various possible outcomes and consequences of the impending assassination. Footnoted Albertini
 * Apis' confession, however, states... Footnoted Dedijer
 * it was forbidden to speak of the Sarajevo attack during the trial Deleted
 * This meshes with Dedijer's theory... Dedijer’s theory was already footnoted earlier in the article.
 * The overlap in membership between the Serbian Military and the "Black Hand" makes most evidence ambiguous for the purpose of determining which organization was responsible for the Sarajevo attack. Deleted as stating the obvious.
 * The entire paragraph beginning with "Apis' confession to ordering the operation..." Most of the key points in these two sentences were footnoted earlier in the article so this comment is overly broad.
 * The information was received by Pašić early enough, according to Education Minister Ljuba Jovanović, for the government to order the border guards to prevent the assassins from crossing. Footnoted
 * The circumstantial evidence against Ciganović includes... Footnote Albertini
 * Apis' confession to ordering the assassination of Franz Ferdinand states... Footnote Dedijer
 * The article, "Rossiiskaia Kontrrazvedka I Tainaia Serbskaia Organizatsii'Chernaia Ruka'" which may be thought of as Russia's current official position on the subject, denies that Werchovsky ever worked for the Military Attaché's Office and denies that Russia had one single agent in Serbia at the time. Deleted
 * At the time of publication, Entente apologists argued that "out of the way" might not necessarily mean assassinated. Deleted
 * Most of the "Consequences" section Delete some, footnote some.
 * And the tsar in his great Winter Palace has called for the foreign news/ "An archduke was shot down in Bosnia, but nothing much." Delete
 * Urban, take the Appel Quay. It's June the 28th, the seventh bullet's for... Delete
 * Need to be consistent in referencing format. If you're going to use the short note-long ref format, it needs to be used for all references
 * If dates are used in the notes for some, they should be used for all Albertini recently came back into print but the new version has new accidental errors introduced and the page numbering is different so Albertini had to have the 1953 publication date included to avoid confusion with the new degraded version. The others did not.
 * Notes 61, 99, 100 need expansion
 * Notes 58 and 63 are the same but use a different page format
 * Notes 28 and 29, 30 and 31, 93 and 43 and 32-34 are the same and should use the multiple reference format
 * Be consistent in whether you use "p" or "pg" for pages in Notes OK
 * Need ISBN numbers for all books Added one ISBN number, all others published in 1966 or earlier and therefore had no ISBN number assigned.
 * Some of them will have OCLC numbers, which can be used instead.
 * [edit] Broad


 * The "major political developments of the twentieth century" are beyond the purview of this article, IMO YES! Deleted
 * The early part of "Background" could be shortened, as most of that information is provided in the "Further information" articles Shortened a little, but a lot of it really needs to be there…the cult of assassination, the confluence of June 28, the utter ruthlessness of Apis and the Black Hand, the perception of FF as a federalist,etc.
 * [edit] Neutrality


 * Take a look at WP:WTA - the use of certain words is discouraged because they add an editorial bias to the article
 * The following statements need to be edited to conform to WP:NPOV
 * false charges as we discussed, the evidence that the charges were false charges is overwhelming, and this view was held by the Yugoslav Supreme Court.
 * An evidential approach must be taken to weed through the various claims and counter-claims concerning responsibility. OK, deleted, but others felt this was needed to explain why in many parts of the article evidence was given rather than simply saying what happened.
 * at last recognized Serbia had sought to be recognized as an independent state for a long time. If “at last recognized” was not meant in the diplomatic sense then it might be a questionable phrase, but it does not seem to be so here.
 * Serbia was content Changed this.
 * The new dynasty was more nationalistic, more friendly to Russia and less friendly to Austria-Hungary I don’t see how this shows NPOV.
 * the most famous of these failed efforts Deleted.
 * particularly hated figure Deleted
 * inspiration to future Serbian assassins They said he was. I quoted Princip verbatim basically saying that.  What is the NPOV concern?  Is inspiration too positive a word?  Perhaps in general it might be, but in this context I don’t think so.
 * If that's quoting verbatim, then put it in quotations and it'll be fine.
 * they were happy to celebrate it far from Vienna OK, deleted.
 * an ideal bridge Not there February 10, 2009
 * restive Serbian youth willing to commit revolutionary or terrorist acts Not there February 10, 2009
 * ill-armed and grossly amateurs Not there February 10, 2009
 * ever talkative Čabrinović Deleted
 * without coming to any coherent conclusion Deleted
 * The court did not buy the defendant's stories Deleted
 * Bosnia's unique status Spelled out the status instead of using “unique status”
 * The truth, however, lies elsewhere Deleted…it is obvious anyway
 * a telegram completely lacking in specifics Deleted “completely” and footnoted
 * vague and misleading remarks Deleted, it’s clear enough that the remarks were vague and misleading so there is no need to state it directly.
 * J. Jovanović's account changed back and forth over the years and never adequately addressed Colonel Lesanin's statement Footnoted.
 * Pašić, a survivor, hedged his political bets Footnoted.
 * moribund The remnants of the Central Committee of the Black Hand testified that by 1914 the Black Hand was at death’s door or already dead. What is wrong with the word moribund in this context.
 * It's an organization, it can't literally be dead, so therefore it can't be moribund.
 * makes most evidence ambiguous Deleted
 * denied the involvement of his office unconvincingly Revised to quote Albertini
 * may be thought of as Russia's current official position on the subject Deleted
 * skeptical Hungarian Count …this is NPOV. Tizsa was skeptical of going to war against Serbia and had to be won over.
 * Then say that
 * accepting, finessing, disingenuously answering or politely rejecting Finessing:  failing to respond to a portion of an enumerated demand as though it was not there.  Disingenuously answering:  The chief of police telling Ciganovic to get out of town and then telling Austria-Hungary he could not be found.  What is wrong with the characterization?
 * A characterization is by definition subjective
 * apparently accidentally deleted
 * blown out of proportion edited
 * It could be argued that this assassination set in motion most of the major events of the 20th century, with its reverberations lingering into the 21st deleted
 * generally linked deleted
 * This, in turn, led to many of the major political developments deleted

[edit] Stable No issue noted [edit] Images
 * The caption to the first picture needs to be edited for grammar
 * The two pictures at the beginning of "Background" should be placed later in the article
 * The images are compliant with fair use policy —Preceding unsigned comment added by Werchovsky (talk • contribs) 21:15, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, this is looking much better. Once you think the article is ready, I would suggest renominating at GA. Because of the review drive this month, it will probably be reviewed quite quickly. Cheers, Nikkimaria (talk) 13:51, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Automate archiving?
Does anyone object to me setting up automatic archiving for this page using MiszaBot? Unless otherwise agreed, I would set it to archive threads that have been inactive for 30 days and keep ten threads.--Oneiros (talk) 23:27, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅--Oneiros (talk) 21:42, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Automate archiving?
Does anyone object to me setting up automatic archiving for this page using MiszaBot? Unless otherwise agreed, I would set it to archive threads that have been inactive for 30 days and keep ten threads.--Oneiros (talk) 23:27, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅--Oneiros (talk) 21:42, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Article is awful
The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's south-Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia.

There is no attribution for this. This would describe the long term goals of the conspirators in general, but the assassination wasn't supposed to directly cause this.

Assignment of responsibility for the bombing and murders of 28 June is highly controversial because the attack led to the outbreak of World War I one month later.

That in itself is a highly controvertial statement given that many have seen it as merely a pretext. Why the total vagueness? Why no mention of the ultimatum? And why bring up the bombing as if that is a seperate event?

The new dynasty was increasingly nationalistic and favoured Russia over Austria-Hungary.

Why is there no mention of the 1881 agreement that was highly favorable to Austria?

As Serbia moved to build its power and gradually reclaimed its 14th century empire

Where is the evidence that they wanted to reclaim a 14th century empire?

''conflicts with its neighbors erupted over the next decade. They included a customs dispute with Austria-Hungary beginning in 1906 (commonly referred to as the "Pig War")''

Started by Austria...

the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 where Serbia protested Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ending in Serbian acquiescence without compensation in March 1909), 

Also started by Austria.

''Ilić recommended an end to the period of revolutionary organization building and a move to direct action against Austria-Hungary. Popović passed Danilo Ilić on to Belgrade to discuss this matter with Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known more commonly as Apis.''

Wait your telling me you had sex with my girlfriend.

''Ilić informed Mehmedbašić that Belgrade had scrapped the mission to kill the governor. ''

Who exactly is "Belgrade"? Is this implying that the entire government was in on it?

Serbia's "warning" to Austria-Hungary

Why the quotes?

Bogiĉević made a more forceful case.

Well what is it?

Apis stated that Russian Military Attaché Artamonov promised Russia's protection from Austria-Hungary if Serbia's intelligence operations became exposed and that Russia had funded the assassination.

Source?

Artamonov denied the involvement of his office in an interview with Albertini, stating that he went on holiday to Italy leaving his assistant Alexander Werchovsky in charge and though he was in daily contact with Apis he did not learn of Apis' role until after the war had ended.

Who's Albertini?

Albertini writes that he “remained unconvinced by the behaviour of this officer.”

Why?

Werchovsky admitted the involvement of his office and then fell silent on the subject.

How so?

There is evidence that Russia was at least aware of the plot prior to 14 June.

No there isn't. There is only one sentence that some guy wrote back in 1918.

''On 1 June 1914 (14 June new calendar), Emperor Nicholas had an interview with King Charles I of Roumania, at Constanza. I was there at the time … yet as far as I could judge from my conversation with members of his (Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov’s) entourage, he (Sazonov) was convinced that if the Archduke (Franz Ferdinand) were out of the way, the peace of Europe would not be endangered.''

Who is "De Schelking"? How do we know this is not being taken out of context? Why would the Russian foreign minister be mentioning something that important to "De Schelking"? What is the beginning of the second sentence? Does "De Schelking" believe that Russia knew about the plot?

After conducting a criminal investigation, verifying that Germany would honor its military alliance, and persuading the skeptical Hungarian Count Tisza

The dual alliance had absolutely nothing to do with the situation toward Serbia. The Austrians wanted to consult Germany to see if they agreed to cover Austrian actions since they might have implications with Russia.

Austria-Hungary issued a formal letter to the government of Serbia.

Calling the ultimatum a mere "letter" is a deliberate mischaracterization.

The letter reminded Serbia of its commitment to respect the Great Powers' decision regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to maintain good neighborly relations with Austria-Hungary.

Relevance?

The letter contained specific demands aimed at preventing the publication of propaganda advocating the violent destruction of Austria-Hungary,

The ultimatum said that propaganda that was directed against the monarchy or the territorial integrity of Austria should be suppressed, not propaganda that called for the "violent destruction of Austria-Hungary".

removing the people behind this propaganda from the Serbian Military, arresting the people on Serbian soil who were involved in the assassination plot and preventing the clandestine shipment of arms and explosives from Serbia to Austria-Hungary.

Serbia responded to the letter by completely accepting all the points except point #6, demanding a criminal investigation against those participants in the conspiracy that were present in Serbia, and to allow an Austrian delegation to participate in the investigation.

The Serbian reply wasn't rejecting an investigation, it was rejecting the involvement of Austrian officials which it deemed a violation of it's sovereignity.

''The shortcomings of Serbia's response were published by Austria-Hungary and can be seen beginning on page 364 of Origins of the War, Vol. II by Albertini, with the Austrian complaints placed side-by-side against Serbia's response. Austria-Hungary responded by breaking diplomatic relations.''

Blatant bias. This in encyclopedia article, not an ad for someone's book. If it has something important to say it sould be said, if not then it should be removed.

''The next day, Serbian reservists being transported on tramp steamers on the Danube crossed onto the Austro-Hungarian side of the river at Temes-Kubin and Austro-Hungarian soldiers fired into the air to warn them off. The report of this incident was initially sketchy and reported to Emperor Franz-Joseph as “a considerable skirmish”. Austria-Hungary then declared war and mobilized the portion of its army that would face the (already mobilized) Serbian Army on 28 July 1914.''

Oh, so Serbia started the war? What a pile of crap. The Austrians attacked because their demands were not fully accepted, not because of some minor skirmish.

''Under the Secret Treaty of 1892 Russia and France were obliged to mobilize their armies if any of the Triple Alliance mobilized. Russia's mobilization set-off full Austro-Hungarian and German mobilizations. Soon all the Great Powers except Italy had chosen sides and gone to war.''

That is a severe distortion of the actual events that occured.

Overall, this article is a disaster. It is incredibly difficult to follow and certainly is not written in an encyclopedic manner. The sole intention of whoever wrote it is to blame one side for World War I and to exonerate the other side. It has to be one of the worst articles of Wikipedia. 71.65.71.145 (talk) 17:28, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Cool down man. IMHO it was worse before I started editing here and removed some blatant Anti-Serbian POV. The work is not yet finished - you're invited to improve it further. --Alfons2 (talk) 17:57, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * What bothers me more is the fact that the Czech and Esperanto version of this article, both obviously based on the English, have been awarded as "good articles". Unfortunately I can't change here anytthing. --Alfons2 (talk) 15:40, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Dear 71.65.71.145: I would like to ask you to withdraw your neutrality marker until you have read the full article as it stood in early May (many of your questions regarding the introduction are answered in the body), footnotes, and the cited pages themselves. Hopefully, once you have read all of the cited passages in the original works (making a well cited article that holds together takes a lot of work) you won't refer to portions of it as "crap" or to it as a whole as "awful". One question I will answer now, Albertini was a journalist, Anti-fascist Italian Senator, and Historian. He and his comrade Magrini interviewed many of the key witnesses to the events surrounding Sarajevo. Albertini died before publication of "Origins of the War" and Magrini completed it leaving all credit to Albertini. Albertini and Magrini are indispensable. There is a Wikipedia article on him. The article mentioned the pages on the Austrian critique of the response to the July Ultimatum in Albertini because without that kind of clear side by side comparison people can easily be confused by the soothing language of the Serbian response and fooled into believing most of the points were fully accepted. It is a really nice treatment.Werchovsky (talk) 03:38, 13 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Stop distorting reality. The Austrians started World War I, didn't they. Why did you delete the references to the July Crisis? --Alfons2 (talk) 05:52, 14 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Dear 71.65.71.145:

Who started World War 1 is beyond the scope of this article and is a point of some contention. If your point is that Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against Serbia took place before the other declarations then that is a point easy to agree with. The July Crisis article seems beyond repair to me. If you want this article to tilt in favor of the assassins and their backers, a good section on land reform or the lack thereof in Bosnia would be most helpful. Could you contribute such a well footnoted section?Werchovsky (talk) 00:00, 15 August 2010 (UTC)


 * We seem to agree that Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, but I don't really get your point about the land reform. Do you think it's within the scope of this article? --Alfons2 (talk) 07:02, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Motives are within the scope of the article. Lack of the promised land reform may have motivated some of the assassins.  An Wikipedia article on that subject to link to would be a good approach.Werchovsky (talk) 08:08, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * See here, for starters. No matter how the July Crisis article is written, a link still seems imperative in the historical context. --Alfons2 (talk) 08:42, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Factual Errors and Other Problems with recent edits by Alfons2
In June 2010 Alfons2 made 97 edits to the article which included the introduction of factual errors, reduced the amount of footnoted material, played down the importance of the higher ups in the conspiracy, reduced the descriptive precision of the text and section headings and so on with the net effect of tilting the article in a way consistent with his stated political views on Austria-Hungary starting World War 1. These edits had to be and were corrected as factual errors in particular are unacceptable, but the other problems are also undesirable. Please discuss the changes you want to make to long standing portions of the article before making them. But first, check the discussion archive. The section titles and much of the contents and language have been debated and ultimately agreed on. This is a serious article. The footnotes to the footnotes have been checked. Since many of the witnesses were killed before making full statements information is imperfect. In this situation making even a small change in the interest of simplification or readability can cause a sentence to move from being a verifiable fact to an unverifiable assertion.

I cannot go into all of the factual errors produced in June but today I see the article says for example:"The three adult defendants at the Sarajevo trial were executed; the top conspirators, being minor at the time of the assassination, were sentenced to prison terms." This is wrong on many levels. There were many adult defendants, not 3. Three got executed, some got prison time, some were acquitted. The top ranked conspirators at the Sarajevo trial were Danilo Ilic, Mihaijlo Jovanović, and Veljko Cubrilovic. They were all executed. No source is listed stating that young men over 18 and under 20 years of age were minors in Austria-Hungary in 1914; in California and many other states and countries they would be majors (but you might be right, in AH they might be minors at that age AH having a liberal judicial system), so this needs clarification. The next sentence: "The other conspirators were arrested and tried on unrelated false charges before a Serbian kangaroo court in French-occupied Salonika in 1916-1917, during which Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Dragutin Dimitrijević testified that he had organized the conspiracy, assisted by his right hand man Major Vojislav Tankosić, and Rade Malobabić." has similar factual errors. The confession was actually a side letter given to the chief judge, not admitted into evidence and then sequestered in the Serbian Royal Archives until its capture by the Nazis, so the verb "testified" [during the trial] is misleading. Further, his confession did not mention Tankosic! Please, whoever edits here, read the source material first, then discuss, then with agreement edit.Werchovsky (talk) 21:33, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

I've reverted the two edits that created the factual errors and fuzzed up the section titles.Werchovsky (talk) 21:56, 15 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Any third opinion? --Alfons2 (talk) 19:53, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Alfons2, please just open up the cited books and read Apis' confession and read the verdicts and read the defendants' statements regarding their age and you will see your modifications to the article created factual errors. If you don't like those sources, then find other credible texts that include Apis' full confession and more or less complete records of the trial and you will find they are in agreement.  Regarding section titles, you can see third opinions in the talk archives.  The Military History Reviewer and I and I think another person talked our way through the section headings...we compromised and reached consensus.  There is no reason to destabilize the article by arbitrarily changing section headings now.  Is there a connection betwen Ares33 and Alfons2?Werchovsky (talk) 21:15, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
 * It was nice to meet you. The article is yours. --Alfons2 (talk) 06:25, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Eugene de Schelking
As this is the only page to metion E de S, will mention that in The Times on 16 July 1920 p 8 there is an entry by John Murray Publishers that they are reissuing a Diplomatic Reminiscences by A Nekludoff without the pages about Schelking to which the latter had objected. Jackiespeel (talk) 18:03, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

As I recall reading, De Schelking's passage regarding Franz Ferdinand being out of the way in advance of his assassination created a storm at the time of publication and he refused to back down leaving Entente appologists to excuse the incident by saying being put "out of the way" might not necessarily mean assassinated. Well, the key sentence was a little complicated and weird mixing the old calendar and new calendar together in the same sentence, and in order to be sure of the meaning you have to read several pages, so he is difficult to quote.Werchovsky (talk) 21:15, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Is this from the Nekludoff book? Both he and De Schelking are presently too marginal for WP articles - but the reference is worth mentioning for 'the proverbial someone researching the subjects further' to pursue. Jackiespeel (talk) 14:40, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I think it is from Fey, but Fey is not on my bookshelf any more and I lost the page citation so I am quoting directly from Schel'king in this article. I think Die Kriegschuldfrage may have an article on it. I have never read Nekludoff.Werchovsky (talk) 15:57, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Fragments for further use if either get an article - Nekludoff was involved in the 1905 North Sea/Dogger Bank incident discussions, while Schelking wrote 'Suicide of a monarchy'. Jackiespeel (talk) 16:10, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

There is a quote from "Recollections of a Russian Diplomat: The Suicide of Monarchies" also in the Bosnian Crisis article. I thought it would make a good ending to the article when I wrote it, but it is a bit of fluff compared to de Schel'king's statement in this article implicating Russia of foreknowledge of FF's assassination.Werchovsky (talk) 18:35, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Caption edit?
In the article's first picture's caption, it states that The Latin Bridge was the site of the assasination. However, please correct me if I am wrong, this is incorrect because the assassination did not take place at the bridge, however it was the first attempt at an assassination. The real assassination happened elsewhere. --Michaelzeng7 (talk) 21:36, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The caption as it stands is correct. The bombing was by the Cumurja Bridge.  The fatal shooting was near the Latin Bridge.Werchovsky (talk) 01:46, 28 January 2011 (UTC)Werchovsky (talk) 00:39, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Information box is not going to work
The information box added yesterday is wrong that no one was injured. There were 20 wounded. On other points, the information box simplifies things that cannot be simplified. The target is listed as only Franz Ferdinand. Some would argue that when you throw bombs at a man in a motorcade your target is the motorcade because of the inprecise nature of this kind of an attack. Principe said he fired his second bullet at Potiorek. Mehmedbasic originally targeted Potiorek. So, it is something of an oversimplification to just say Franz Ferdinand was "the" target. To try to sum up the belligerants as Bosnian Serbs is a terrible oversimplification. Serbian Military Intelligence, the Serbian Frontiers Service,the Serbian Narodna Odbrana, and the Serbian "Black Hand" were all behind the attack. Belligerants are more than just the tip of the spear. So, this topic is too complex and controversial to use this inaccurate information box. I am deleting it.Werchovsky (talk) 18:53, 29 January 2011 (UTC)Werchovsky (talk) 18:54, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
 * All the fields in the infobox do NOT have to be included. The only thing required is the title, location and date; all other information is optional. Will that suffice instead of removing it completely? The infobox is recommended so the article is listed into the microformats systems. Thanks. Zzyzx11 (talk) 23:00, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Untitled
Article references a person named "Albertini" as if he/she has already been introduced in the article and his/her importance already apparent. It isn't. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.100.97.104 (talk) 00:35, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

Princip acting on the orders of Walt Whitman?
This says that Princip believed he was acting on the orders of the American poet Walt Whitman. Is this corroborated anywhere? --  Jack of Oz   [your turn]  09:14, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

sandwiched text
WP:MOSIMAGE says: Avoid sandwiching text between two images that face each other.. There are portions of text sandwiched between two images. I propose to follow the rules and avoid that.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 20:01, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Helen of Sarajevo
Princip has had a girlfriend Jelena. Jelena on Serbian means Helen. --Свифт (talk) 12:35, 25 March 2011 (UTC)


 * The text recently added relating to Jelena Milisivic spurning Princip is problematic. The magazine article quotes a 97-year-old woman who became friends with Milisic 32 years after the Sarajevo Outrage.  If this is the best source we have that Princip had added impetus to attack Franz Ferdinand's motorcade because he was spurned the night before then we should not include it in the article; it would be wrong to turn Princip into John Hinkley Junior on weak evidence.  Beyond that, the article does not state directly how this 97-year-old woman knew that Milisivic had spurned Princip.  Did Milisic tell her, or did Milisivic tell Mihacevic and Mihacevic tell our 97 year-old, or was it just office-cooler talk?  Can the author provide a more credible source? A historic book quoting a diary, a deposition, or taking evidence directly from Milisivic or Princip? The Pity of War link to Amazon did not have any reference to Princip on the page.  The Serbian on-line article is just based on the Smithsonian Magazine article as near as I can tell so I am not sure why it is cited.Werchovsky (talk) 23:02, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Kinglawly's edit request
Another editor deleted Kinglawly's edit request. Kinglawly's requested edit was factually inaccurate stating that the assassins were members of the Black Hand. Only two of the assassins were members of the Black Hand, Ilic and Mehmedbasic. The Black Hand did not admit children.Werchovsky (talk) 07:28, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Citation for Weapon?
Looked like someone tagged a citation needed on the weapon used. I found the following links after a web search: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1465206/Found-the-gun-that-shook-the-world.html on the FN Model 1910 page -> says model 1910, serial number 19074 http://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.asp?smallarms_id=282 -> says model 1910 http://oldguns.net/q&a2_98.htm#1052 -> says model 1900 http://unblinkingeye.com/Guns/1900FNB/1900fnb.html -> says model 1910 (although fasely reported in the press at the time as a model 1900) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.105.46.68 (talk) 16:49, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Petar Živković gay lover of Regent Alexander
Several times various people have deleted the fact that Petar Živković was the gay lover of Regent Alexander usually without comment, this last time saying it has nothing to do with the assassination. The main purpose of the statement is to show the special degree of trust that Alexander placed in his emissary in Peace Talks with France and Austria-Hungary. There are other threads of the story that tie into this relationship too but which are not developed in the article. Živković had a bad relationship with the Black Handers probably in part due to his sexual orientation. The Black Handers snickered at him when he fumbled the keys to the palace during the assassination of the King and Queen of Serbia. Živković was appointed Chief Judge of the Salonika trial of the Black Hand by Alexander to make sure the Black Handers were convicted. The execution of the military men behind the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is part of the story of the assassination and the homosexual relationship between Regent Alexander and Živković played a role in that execution.Werchovsky (talk) 18:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 9 February 2013
In the "Franz Ferdinand chosen" section, I find:

"(Apis confessed to the Serbian Court that he ordered the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in his position as head of the Intelligence Department)."

OK, but please put the period INSIDE the right parenthesis.

72.94.52.3 (talk) 23:00, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done RudolfRed (talk) 03:26, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

What happened to von Wiesner investigation?
I recall looking at this a year or two ago and being interested in the Baron von Wiesner investigation (reporting July 13 1914). IIRC he telegramed something non-committal from Serbia but had more frank views when he was physically back in Austria. Now I can find no mention of him or the initial Austrian investigation on Wikipedia. 76.126.215.43 (talk) 23:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Was Sophie pregnant?
The information that Sophie was pregnant can be found on lot of web sites on the internet. Maybe I did not read the text carefully enough, but I did not find this information in the article. If it can be supported with RS it should be added to the text of the article.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 23:09, 20 March 2011 (UTC)


 * This topic is very controversial as pro-Serb readers feel it is a sympathy play to include this information ...so naturally it has been debated several times here on the talk page. At one time, this article stated she was pregnant; I wrote it based on an internet article quoting a portion of a book written by (as the on-line article stated at least) Sophie's Doctor.  The pregnancy reference was challenged a year or two later.  When I then looked for the on-line article it was gone.  I can't find the doctors memoirs.  No history book I have searched refered to her being pregnant.  I gave up.  In my opinion, we cannot put it in the article unless we find a credible source that can be traced back to its primary source.Werchovsky (talk) 23:15, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Urban Legend?
"After learning that the assassination had been unsuccessful Princip went to a nearby food shop (Schiller's delicatessen)." Anyone have a source for this? It seems that this might be an urban legend, as seen here: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/09/gavrilo-princips-sandwich/

Also, Wikipedia's own page on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo quotes an except from the killer's trial in which he describes the events after the failed assassination and the successful one, and he never mentions a food shop. NHammen (talk) 09:16, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I decided to be bold and make the edit myself using the same reference from the Latin Bridge page. NHammen (talk) 19:46, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

You did not check what was written by Owens before citing Owens? I'll check my copy of Owens when I get home tonight. My recollection is that Princip had more or less given up after the motorcade had passed him at high speed, and the shooting was a chance opportunity...although obviously he had not given up all hope of committing a terrorist act as he was not ditching the gun or the bomb like his compatriots were busy doing with their guns and bombs.Werchovsky (talk) 23:06, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

The Funeral
The posthumous attacks on the Archduke and his wife wasn't mentioned. This was a scandal at the time and in fact may have actually let to the start of the warEricl (talk) 14:35, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

In her death Sophie was being treated in accord with her morganatic status rather than as the wife of the former heir apparent. Although I share your opinion that this was not good, I think your edit should be more confined to what actually happened rather than characterizing it and ascribing motives. You might think about reediting.Werchovsky (talk) 23:32, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

No Evidence that Cyanide was Degraded
==And Rebuttal on the Subject, and Citation for Article==

This article once before said the cyanide was degraded but the only evidence of this was its failure to kill. The cyanide could have been adulterated or mixed with a chemical that induced vomiting. No chemical testing data has been introduced. I am editing out the statement that the cyanide was degraded as this statement cannot be traced to a primary source, only to speculation.Werchovsky (talk) 00:54, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Not to banter words, but if the cyanide was adulterated or mixed with other chemicals, that would qualify as degraded. As for citations, it would be impossible for anyone to have definitive proof on the subject, as the two assassins, Princip and Cabrinovic, destroyed their capsules in their separate suicide attempts. (Please see the Wikipedia article on Gavrilo Princip at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip) However, while their is no definitive scientific evidence on the subject, since neither capsule worked, it is a reasonable assertion that the cyanide probably was degraded, and should remain in the text. As for the rather embarrassing attempt by Cabrinovic to drown himself, Lavender Cassels notes in the Archduke and the Assassin that the water in the river was so low that Cabrinovic wound up being arrested by the police on the far bank opposite from the spot where he had thrown his grenade. (Cassels, p175) Citation: Cassels, L. (1984). The Archduke and the assassin. New York, NY: Dorset Press. Kuk1910 (talk) 17:59, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Request for edit re: bombing
Respectfully request that topic "The Bombing" be changed as follows.

The Grenade Attack

The motorcade passed the first assassin, Mehmedbašić. Danilo Ilić had placed him in front of the garden of the Mostar Cafe and armed him with a grenade.[60] Mehmedbašić failed to act. Ilić placed Vaso Čubrilović next to Mehmedbašić, arming him with a pistol and a grenade. He too failed to act. Further along the route, Ilić placed Nedeljko Čabrinović on the opposite side of the street near the Miljacka River arming him with a bomb.

At 10:10 am,[61] Franz Ferdinand's car approached and Čabrinović withdrew his Serbian Army issue, Vasic/Kragujevka, hand grenade, model M12 (for 1912, the year of adoption) from his pocket, struck the percussion fuse against a nearby tramway mast and threw his hand grenade. )

The pop of the percussion fuse being ignited, sounded much like a gunshot, and caused Franz Ferdinand's chauffeur to accelerate. The grenade bounced off the folded back convertible cover into the street.[62] The grenade's timed detonator caused it to explode under the next car, putting that car out of action, leaving a 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m), 6.5-inch-deep (170 mm) crater,[61] and wounding a total of 20 people according to Reuters.[63]

Regarding the Serbian Vasic/Kragujevka hand grenade, used by Čabrinović and carried by other conspirators, it was shaped much like a whiskey flask, being flat, rather than being symmetrical, and thus was unlike almost every other hand grenade design in history The Serbian government, in manufacturing this distinctively designed grenade, accepted the partial loss of explosive and shrapnel producing efficiency, to gain substantially greater concealment of the grenade by the user. Thus, these weapons were far more effective for use by assassins, rather than infantry soldiers. As the Serbian Army had been manufacturing these grenades for over 10 years, and they were extensively employed in the 1st and 2nd Balkan Wars, Austrian military officials would have easily identified these grenades as Serbian Army munitions on sight, and their presence and usage in Sarajevo would strongly tend to implicate the Serbian Government in the assassination plot.

Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the Miljacka river. Čabrinović's suicide attempt failed, as the cyanide only induced vomiting, and the Miljacka was only 13 cm deep due to the hot, dry summer. Police dragged Čabrinović out of the river, and he was severely beaten by the crowd before being taken into custody.

The procession sped away towards the Town Hall leaving the disabled car behind. Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip, and Trifun Grabež failed to act as the motorcade passed them at high speed.[64]

New Citations 1 Wikipedia, (2013) Hand Grenade, Retrieved Dec 22, 2013 2 Cassels, L. (1984). The archduke and the assassin. New York, NY: Dorset Press. p174 3 Cassels, p174 4 William Weir (2005) 50 Weapons that changed the world. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books. 5 Michiel, A. (2012, February 16) Grenades, mines and boobytraps.Retrieved January 18, 2013 from http://www.lexpev.nl/grenades/sovietbalkan/sfryugoslavia/kragujevac.html 6 Wikipedia, (2013) Hand Grenade, Retrieved Dec 22, 2013 7 Cassels, p175 Kuk1910 (talk) 19:47, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 February 2014
I believe that we should mention that the Archduke and Sophie's car registration number was A111 1118 the date the armistace was signed.

Chris alcock1984 (talk) 16:06, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the template. — &#123;&#123;U&#124;Technical 13&#125;&#125; (t • e • c) 17:05, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Contesting the move
The article about Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was moved to Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. I am opposed to such renaming because the new name is less common and less correspond to WP:CRITERIA.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 23:37, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree, and have moved it back, as this one is more precise and seems to be more in line with WP:AT. - Aoidh (talk) 04:00, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Protić=
It is not Stephan Protić, it is Stojan Protić, and it should be added that Serbian Supr. Court in 195666 was under the control of communist regime.

Photo of Princip arrested
The photo that is used to illustrate the arrestation of Princip does not represent Princip: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sandwich-sabotaged-civilisation.


 * The photo depicts Ferdo Behr being arrested due to his attack on one of the policemen: he hit him in the stomach to allow Princip to escape which option was not used by the latter.

Peter Mulacz (talk) 00:12, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Request for edit re: bombing
to follow

An important link
In the section ″Background″ nothing is written about the mysterious death of Serbian Patriarch Lukijan Bogdanovic in early September on 1913, in the Austrian spa Bad Gastein. His headless body was found in a nearby river. Austrian police have never solved this case.--Свифт (talk) 17:10, 5 June 2014 (UTC)