Talk:First Silesian War

Why have the earlier discussions here been deleted?
Having read a Wikipedia article, I often like to browse through its Talk page. That is a way to learn something more about the topic from earlier discussions, but also to learn about good practice in writing articles. So I was disappointed to read nothing like that on this Talk page, nor any archive of earlier discussions. Looking through the history, there was once upon a time interesting material here, for instance in the version dated 17:20 July 6 2019, from the GA review, but the next edit removed it. I am not sure of the Wikipedia etiquette about this, but I find it a shame. Jmchutchinson (talk) 11:26, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * If you're interested in seeing the discussions surrounding the various quality reviews this article has gone through, they're all accessible through the corresponding links in the Article History template at the top, keeping in mind that, of course, the discussions refer to the article as it was at those points in the past rather than as it is today. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 14:47, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tip. The heading "article milestones" had not given me the clue that there was interesting discussion hidden away there. After writing my earlier comment, I did find the relevant recommendation: "Article talk page discussions should be archived – not blanked" (WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE). Perhaps that is what effectively has been done in this somewhat non-transparent way, if it is really the case that the only talk-page entries have been those associated with formal reviews. Jmchutchinson (talk) 20:19, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The talk page content you referred to (the version on 6 July 2019) was a transcluded GA review, and it is linked in the GA nomination portion of the Article History template above; looking at this page's history, I'm not seeing any discussions that have been written here prior to the one we're having right now. The Article History template you see here is a standard template for condensing all of the "content milestone"-related templates into one, so as to reduce clutter on talk pages. It is likely to be seen on the talk page of any article that has gone through more than about two content milestones. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 21:00, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks again for replying and for the reassurance about the situation. Good! So it turns out that the issue is my own ignorance about how these things are routinely organised on Wikipedia. I can't be the only one caught out by this, but I don't have the ambition to try to change the rules about how it is done. Nice article, by the way! Jmchutchinson (talk) 13:04, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

September 2021 edits
Hey, thanks for your efforts to improve our coverage of this topic! Let me point out that this is a Featured Article, which means that the version of it you currently see is the product of lengthy discussion among a large group of editors during its Featured Article Candidacy; please go a little slowly in making any big changes, since you may be undoing the work of many other editors. As to your specific proposals:

If you read the section of the article next to the painting of Maria Theresa's coronation, you'll find this text: "On 25 June she [Maria Theresa] received her formal coronation as Queen of Hungary in Pressburg and began trying to recruit a new army from her eastern lands." The painting depicts a key event in the story being told. Maria Theresa's accession to her father's titles and lands was heavily contested (that's what this whole article is about, really), so it's a big deal that she was able to convince the Hungarian estates to crown her and recognize her as queen regnant, in part because it enabled her to then raise a mass conscription of fresh troops from Hungary and counterattack. The image is more than "only vaguely related" to the events described in the section it accompanies.

As for the "Crown of Bohemia", it's simply not correct that "all 'crowns' in history ... were group of lands". At the risk of stating the obvious, the Wikipedia article Crown is not about a group of lands; it's about a kind of fancy hat, because that's the primary topic associated with that word in contemporary English. At Wikipedia we try to write articles that follow the principle of least astonishment, which, as that explanatory supplement spells out, means "avoid[ing] Easter egg links, which require the reader to open them before understanding what's going on". Anyone not already very familiar with the language of early modern European history, on seeing the wikilink Crown of Bohemia, is going to expect it to lead to Bohemian Crown Jewels, and, while you might feel that it would be nice if all readers of this article were already experts in its content area, there's really no need to use such an obscure term, without definition, when an equivalent term accessible to far more readers is easily available.

Finally, your repeated addition of the "88%" figure has no citation to support it, so it doesn't belong in this Featured Article. If you want to locate a reputable source of quality comparable to those currently cited in the article that says that the lands ceded to Prussia at the end of the war made up ca. 88% of historical Silesia, then we can include that factoid in an appropriate place (which is going to be deep in the body of the article, not in an image caption).

Hope this clarifies some things! -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 13:52, 4 September 2021 (UTC)