Talk:Loyalist (American Revolution)/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Robinvp11 (talk · contribs) 17:35, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Good article criteria

As a general point, I'm not clear what the focus of this article is supposed to be; I assume it's about the roots of Loyalism but there's a lot of detail that doesn't tie into that. I'm genuinely unclear how this fits into the Conservatism in the US project.

Well written: ie the prose should be clear and concise, spelling and grammar are correct. Fail

Many of the sentences are confusing;

Likely the earliest formal meeting, and use of the term "royalist" and the source of the United Empire Loyalist ("UEL") acronym, took place in Boston on October 28, 1775.

Or; ''After 1783 some former Loyalists (especially Germans from Pennsylvania) emigrated to Canada to take advantage of the British government's offer of free land. Many departed because they faced continuing hostility (in another migration more than 20,000 perhaps as many as 30,000 "Late Loyalists" arrived from the United States in the 1790s lured by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe's policy of land and low taxes, one-fifth those in the US and swearing an oath of allegiance to the King). They came mainly for economic, not political reasons, The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Loyalists,;" and Liberty's Exiles, Maya Jasanoff, pp. 206–208.''

Or; ''But 90% of the colonial population lived outside the cities, with the effective result being that the Congress controlled 80–90% of the population. The British removed their governors from colonies where the Patriots were in control, but Loyalist civilian government was re-established in coastal Georgia[21] from 1779 to 1782, despite presence of Patriot forces in the northern part of Georgia. Essentially, the British were only able to maintain power in areas where they had a strong military presence.''

This could be restated as 'Loyalist civilian administration was restricted to areas like coastal Georgia where the British had a strong military presence while the remaining 90% of the population was administered by the Continental Congress.'

The Motives section is simply a list and not a neutral POV eg procrastinators who realized that independence was bound to come someday, but wanted to postpone the moment, cautious and afraid that chaos and mob rule would result, pessimists who lacked the confidence in the future displayed by the Patriots.

Verifiable Fail

There are a number of Citation required tags that have yet to be reviewed.

Broad in coverage Fail

There omits two external issues which had a major impact on whether people identified themselves as Loyalist or Patriot. The first is that a significant section of the British Parliament led by Charles Fox supported the Patriots (no coercion) since limiting the power of the Crown were the same; the second was the impact of French intervention which turned a 'domestic dispute' into a foreign war. In addition, there is no mention of the impact of religion on this division.

On the other hand, there is too much detail elsewhere - especially the lists of Loyalists which could usefully be excluded or moved to a different page.

I realise a lot of work has gone into this and I'm happy to help with the editing but it's seems unfocused.

Robinvp11 (talk) 16:35, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

List of notable Loyalists
Normally list such as this are restricted to entries that have wikiarticles showing the subjects' notability. Meters (talk) 19:35, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Additional comments by Lingzhi
Yeah, get rid of the huge list. Move it of to a...what's that called? .. oh yeah, a "List".

To check as many errors as possible in the references and/or notes, I recommend using User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck in conjunction with two other scripts. You can install them as follows: When you've added all those, go to an article to check for various messages in its notes and references. (You may need to clear your browser's cache first). The output of User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck is not foolproof and can be verbose. Use common sense when interpreting output (especially with respect to sorting errors). Reading the explanatory page will help more than a little. The least urgent message of all is probably Missing archive link; archiving weblinks is good practice but lack of archiving will probably not be mentioned in any content review. Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:37, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
 * First, copy/paste  to Special:MyPage/common.js.
 * On the same page and below that script add . Save that page.
 * Finally go to to Special:MyPage/common.css and add.

Outside comment
Robinvp11, there hasn't been any response to this review in over seven weeks, and the person who nominated it—a drive-by nominator making their second-ever edit on Wikipedia—last edited here two days after you posted your review and a notice of that was posted on their talk page. I think it's time to close this as clearly having failed to meet the GA criteria; a typical initial wait time for a response after a review is posted is seven days, and this is seven times that. Thank you for spending so much time and effort on your review. BlueMoonset (talk) 13:50, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

No worries - if I can ever battle my way out of the Nine Years War, I'll have a go at improving this :). Robinvp11 (talk) 17:39, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Final note
The review was closed and the nomination failed by Robinvp11 earlier today. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:41, 17 April 2018 (UTC)