Talk:Edward IV/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Tim riley (talk · contribs) 12:18, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Beginning first read-through. More soonest.  Tim riley  talk    12:18, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This article is interesting and enjoyable, but it is a long way short of GA standard.


 * Lead
 * The lead falls down on two counts: it is not a comprensive overview of all the main points of the text, and it contains information not given in the main text. See WP:LEAD.
 * Citations
 * What makes this a certain Immediate Fail, I'm afraid, is the inadequacy throughout of the referencing. In paragraph after paragraph there are important statements that should be verifiable but are not, because no citations are given for them. A few examples (out of many more):
 * However, even though St. Albans is only 22 miles from London, the Lancastrians did not retake the capital city. Thus they forfeited to the Yorkists, in the eyes of the public, all their remaining legitimacy to the throne of England.
 * After spending a year in hiding Henry VI was finally caught and imprisoned in the Tower of London.
 * Since the marriage of Edward IV's sister, Margaret of York, to Charles, Duke of Burgundy on 3 July 1468, the Duke of Burgundy had been Edward's brother-in-law. Despite the fact that Charles was initially unwilling to help Edward, the French declared war on Burgundy. This prompted Charles to give his aid to Edward, and from Burgundy he raised an army to win back his kingdom.
 * and as he marched southwards he began to gather support, including Clarence (who had realised that his fortunes would be better off as brother to a king than under Henry VI). Edward entered London unopposed, where he took Henry VI prisoner. Edward and his brothers then defeated Warwick at the Battle of Barnet, and with Warwick dead he eliminated the remaining Lancastrian resistance at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. The Lancastrian heir, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, was killed on the battlefield. A few days later, on the night that Edward re-entered London, Henry VI died. One contemporary chronicle claimed that his death was due to "melancholy," but it is widely suspected that Edward ordered Henry's murder to remove the Lancastrian opposition completely.
 * Edward's two younger brothers George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III of England), were married to Isabel Neville and Anne Neville. They were both daughters of Warwick by Anne Beauchamp and rival heirs to the considerable inheritance of their still-living mother, leading to a dispute between the brothers. In 1478, George was eventually found guilty of plotting against Edward, imprisoned in the Tower of London and privately executed on 18 February 1478: according to a long-standing tradition he was "drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine".
 * He also backed an attempt by Alexander Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland, to take the Scottish throne in 1482. Gloucester led an invasion of Scotland that resulted in the capture of Edinburgh and the king of Scots himself, but Albany reneged on his agreement with Edward. Gloucester decided to withdraw from his position of strength in Edinburgh. However, Gloucester did recover Berwick-upon-Tweed.
 * York was a direct descendant of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, the fourth surviving son of Edward III. The House of Lancaster was descended from John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of Edward III, and as such had a superior claim over the House of York. However, Richard Plantagenet's mother was Anne de Mortimer, the most senior descendant of Edward III's second surviving son, Lionel of Antwerp. Lionel had been the eldest son of Edward III to leave a surviving line of descent; as such, by modern standards, his line had an indisputably superior claim over that of his younger brother, John of Gaunt. By contemporary standards, this was by no means so certain; nonetheless, it allowed Richard and then Edward a good title to the throne.
 * Referencing
 * On top of that, such references as there are are inadequately presented. The four mentions of Desmond Seward are of no use without the details of his book. The Peerage is a self-published site and is not accepted as a WP:RS, page numbers are given in various forms (p. 168 -v- p146), the reference to the Guinness Book of Records takes us to a Wikipedia page, ref 59 is a long bare URL and so on.
 * Duplicate and triplicate links
 * The article is riddled with WP:OVERLINK. There should be no more than one link from the main text to any one article.

This article looks to me to have the potential to get to GA on a further attempt, but it needs a good deal of work first to address the points raised above. –  Tim riley  talk    12:59, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks Tim. funnily enough I just said something similar on your TP. Wel, see you soon eh! (But not that soon...). Cheers! Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi  13:02, 6 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I've always thought that Wikipedia's idea of a lead is stupid. It makes you regurgitate itself with a few more chunks. I don't want to read the same stuff twice. It's annoying.
 * There should be no more than one link from the main text to any one article. Say what? Since when does that apply to lovely fat history books with 100s of pgs? Confused as reviewer is contradictory in also saying there aren't ENOUGH refs. Now need nap. ScarletRibbons (talk) 17:57, 4 May 2015 (UTC)