Talk:Falaise pocket

Lede too long
I know this is a featured article, but I estimate the lede to be about four times longer than it should be, relative to the length of the main article. Is it permissible to re-draft the lede in its entirety? Valetude (talk) 23:24, 17 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Me again. Looking closer, I see many points of reporting that could usefully be corrected. Let me propose this new version of the lede, and take your comments and critiques:


 * The Battle of the Falaise Pocket (German: Kessel von Falaise; 12–21 August 1944) was the final engagement in the Allied invasion of Normandy, Operation Overlord, in World War II, which drove the German defenders from the beachheads and opened the way to Paris.


 * After the initial landings on 6 June (D-Day), the British, Canadian and American armies had met heavy resistance which delayed by more than a month the liberation of their immediate objectives, Caen and St. Lô. But the enemy had expended manpower and supplies that could not be replaced, and there was dissension between their generals, especially after the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July.


 * The Allies had succeeded in establishing air superiority, and after extensive carpet-bombing, they started a pincer movement around Falaise, with the British and Canadians under Montgomery to the north and the American Third Army under Patton to the south. The local German commander, General Kluge, asked permission to retreat; Hitler’s refusal greatly improved the Allies’ chances of encircling the enemy.


 * On 19 August, the Allies linked up at Chambois, and the ‘pincer’ had effectively closed, though many Germans had been able to escape, cheating the Allies of the decisive victory they had hoped for. Patton insisted that he could have closed the gap earlier by taking Argentan, but Bradley claimed that this would have left his lines too thinly defended. It would also have put him on the wrong side of a line laid down by Montgomery, separating British and American operations.Valetude (talk) 16:41, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Lurking while mobile... Mathglot (talk) 23:59, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Concur on the length concern. On the principle of 'first define your terms', though, I'd like to retain both a mention of 'encirclement' in the opening para (to mitigate any possible 'pocket, wha'?' issue), and the Falaise Gap alt-title, and a very brief gloss of that.  Otherwise this seems to me to hit the key points and the (huge!) amount of other detail in the present lede can be refactored into later sections, which at the moment seem to work almost like footnotes to this vast monolith of text.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 03:17, 29 April 2021 (UTC)


 * I disagree with the proposed changes:
 * The proposed first paragraph is wrong; it was not the final engagement of the Allied invasion of Normandy, as the original correctly points out. Most of the proposed corrections are :errors.
 * Recommend keeping the first paragraph as it is, as it also provides additional names, and a description of the forces involved.
 * For the second paragraph, which provides background, I would suggest removing the details about the Eastern front and Bomb plot, but no more.
 * The proposed third paragraph is wrong, whereas the original is correct; Montgomery was in charge of both the forces to the north and those to the south. Also, von Kluge was :a field marshal.
 * The original third paragraph is better, but I would suggest moving the sentence about Goodwood into the Second paragraph; there is some repetition here.
 * The final two paragraphs could be merged.
 * Bottom line: The original lead could be trimmed a bit, but the proposal is too far short. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  04:08, 29 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, 'decisive' but not 'final', fair point. I think the 'description of the forces involved' is a case in point of the problem.  We learn not just the name of the German formation involved (arguably already too specific and detailed at this point -- is this really one of the very first things we need to grasp about this topic?), but of all of its subordinate units (uh-huh...) and a former designation of one of those.  The second paragraph does indeed provide background -- an excessive quantity of it.  We do after all have a 'Background' section.  Certainly the original (lengthy) third paragraph contains no error about Montgomery's role...  because he's not even mentioned until the (not especially short) fifth.  If one were looking for a snappy summary of the command structure here, it'd be pretty much lost in the step-by-step chronological narrative we currently have (perhaps indeed leading that error on the part of the redrafter).  But hopefully this is iteratively approximatable to something that addresses both sets of concerns.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 05:13, 29 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Accuracy is the most important thing, but I agree the current lead is too long, lacking focus on the most important points in the article. (t · c)  buidhe  21:17, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It also contains details that are not in the article at all (but should be). The lead is too long, and the article is too short. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  21:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * A very good summary (as it were), I think. There's information that appears only in the lede, but would better appear briefly there, and in more detail later.  On one such case, as I mentioned a little earlier, I think the force composition information is much too detailed, much too soon, and I'm very much inclined to trim it from the first paragraph.  I'm not 100% sure where it best should be, though.  Later in the lead section?  In the 'background' section timeline?  (Yes, I'm probably being excessively WP:TIMID here, but I don't want to antagonise editors by even temporarily 'losing' information from the article.)  109.255.211.6 (talk) 03:30, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Why the capitals?
The pocket was lowercase for many years, and was capitalized (but only in the lead) in this 2009 copyedit on the leadup to FA; the article title followed about 6 years later. The text is still not case-consistent. You can see the effect of the over-capitalization in recent sources. It's still not close to the threshold suggested by MOS:CAPS though. We should fix this. To lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 05:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I might be a bit slow, but can you clarify which 'threshold' you're referring to specifically? Isn't this the 'accepted name of a battle' which is 'usually capitalized in sources'?  It's a fascinating ngram though -- the Title Case uptick really kicks in rather dramatically in the very early 1990s.  This article and Wikipedia as a whole have a pretty good alibi for being to blame for that.  I think one can perhaps overdo consistency on this:  'battle' and 'pocket' are still perfectly serviceable common nouns one might have cause to use in an article like this -- juxtaposed with 'Falaise' or otherwise.  But that doesn't mean that the Battle of Falaise Pocket -- battle of the Falaise Pocket!? -- Battle of the Falaise pocket?! -- isn't viable as a proper noun phrase.  If anything I think there might be a case (as it were) for retitling as tBotFP, but using Fp internally when referring to the geographical envelopment, rather than the engagement as a whole.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 06:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * From the MOS:CAPS lead: "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are are capitalized in Wikipedia."  In my experience, "Battle of" is most often capped in sources, while many other terms are not.  So "Battle of Falais Pocket" would possibly make more sense as a proper name (though sources seem to more often say "battle of the Falais pocket", so maybe not), but "Falais pocket" is clearly not used that way in sources.  Dicklyon (talk) 17:16, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * There was indeed a big blip up of caps in the mid 1990s, but after that settled back, the next prominent steps up seem to be synchronized to our 2009 lead capitalization and 2015 title capitalization. See here.  Dicklyon (talk) 17:46, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, the eternal fuzziness of terms like 'accepted', 'substantial', 'consistent', 'usually' -- just throw in 'reasonable' and you have the full suite of lawyer's delights! (But their joy might be contingent on their fee for navigating them, it must be said.)  I'm not sure if we consistently applied 'consistent', we'd ever capitalise anything ever again, but I'll grant you that this isn't one of the...  consistenter ones.  (Battle of the) Falaise Gap seems similarly mixed, leaning capsed.  Yes, there's certainly another large uptick in 2016-8, but at that point it's merely 'running up the score' of an existing lead, by that graph.  The change in 2009 is much less dramatic.  As I say, I think it's somewhat inherent to the nature of the phrase, as it's doing double duty as a proper name, and a descriptive composition of common nouns.  It's a gap (and was a pocket) near Falaise and there was a battle there, so no law against juxtaposing those attributively and possessively on that basis!  109.255.211.6 (talk) 18:44, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * That runup in 2016–18 is exactly what I mean by the reaction to the 2015 title capitalization. Wikipedia is unreasonably effective at influencing such things.  And yes "consistently" is not a consistently interpreted threshold, but it as least means a sustained substantial super-majority.  If you correct the n-gram counts for the frequent appearance of capped terms in titles, references to titles, headings, captions, and such things that many styles cap a lot, you'll find that it's not close. Dicklyon (talk) 19:08, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

On my question of why?, the original capping in the lead was justified by edit summary "ce", which left the case in the article inconsistent to this day; not a good reason. The title move was justifed by edit summary "standardize title with lead", a bad reason to compound the error. I will work on a fix. Dicklyon (talk) 19:12, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, fixed. If someone finds a consistently capped accepted name for this event, we can consider it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:01, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * 'ce' is the edit summary of last resort, I think. Covers anything from actual copy-editing -- a broad church at the best of times! -- to 'messing around with the format of infoboxes for no transparent reason'.  Not really insightful as to either 'what my edit did' much less 'why it did it'.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 22:48, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Though on the subject of edit summaries: I think there very much is a 'suggestion of a source-based or guideline-based reason to cap these words here.'  I thought I'd already explicitly cited WP:MILTERMS, but apparently I only alluded to it.  "Accepted names of wars, battles, revolts, revolutions, rebellions, mutinies, skirmishes, fronts, raids, actions, operations and so forth are capitalized if they are usually capitalized in sources."  This is I think a (couple of different) accepted name(s) of a battle which is indeed usually capitalized in sources.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 23:42, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I read "if they are usually capitalized in sources" as meaning usually, which is a lot more than we're seeing in sources, which I'd call "sometimes". Dicklyon (talk) 00:02, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Sourcing + article organization
It's not typical for articles to have both a lead section and a subsection called "overview". The lead is only 1 paragraph, so I believe the "overview" section should be trimmed and incorporated into the lead. As it is, the article does not meet the FA criteria because of this weird organization and because every non-lead paragraph is required to have an inline citation. (t · c)  buidhe  09:24, 29 March 2023 (UTC)