Talk:Neville–Neville feud/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Seraphimsystem (talk · contribs) 16:52, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Good, problem with Italics in Aftermath section
There is a problem with the quotation style in the last paragraph.

The article is well-written and compliant with WP:MOS. It has sufficient inline citations and adheres to WP:RS. The sources are primarily Oxford and secondary source scholarship by historians. There is no original research. It avoid unnecessary detail but gives a clear and full description of the main aspects of the topic. It is written in neutral encyclopedic tone and has been stable for over a year. In my opinion, once the quotation is fixed, this article meets the good article criteria. Seraphimsystem (talk) 16:52, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Other comments
While there is much to commend it, I don't believe that the article meets the GA requirement (1b) that it complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections. While the expected size is one to two paragraphs, it should at least touch on material in all the major sections, and I would have expected information about when the feud started and ended. More important, though, is the failure to name the two contesting heirs in the lead: with all the uses of "he" and "his", it was hard to disentangle just who was being referred to in a few places.

When I read the article, I find myself having to stop and re-read sentences and phrases to keep clear in my mind what's going on, and who is being referred to. I do not believe it does meet the clear and concise GA criterion. One example is His widow, Joan, immediately took possession of Middleham Castle Penrith Castle, and Sheriff Hutton for her son Richard. I read this as some other person, Sheriff Hutton, doing something (though what it is isn't clear) for Richard. Looking back, I see there was a mention of a "Sheriff Hutton Castle" earlier; for clarity, the sentence would be better as "His widow, Joan, immediately took possession of Middleham Castle Penrith Castle and Sheriff Hutton Castle for her son Richard." There are a number of sentences that suffer from extra or missing commas and are less clear than they should be. I also think the wording could be less clipped in places. For example, Almost immediately Ralph came of age (24 February 1430) he attempted to regain his estates;. Ralph was born (according to his article, which admittedly has problems) on 6 April 1406; he would have reached his majority in 1427, not 1430, which is hardly "almost immediately" if he didn't take action until 1430. There's also a problem with "his estates", since they weren't his; they were bequeathed to Richard. I would also add "after" before "Ralph" for clarity, assuming the sentence isn't recast. (I would also suggest not using "came of age", or at least not the wikilink, since the article at the other end isn't very helpful.

There is also one missing piece of the puzzle: how a younger son became the 5th Earl of Salisbury when the title wasn't even in the family. The answer is that Richard got the title by marrying the daughter of the 4th Earl, who had no male heirs and died in 1428. This should be incorporated into the article text; it increased Richard's influence and power at a time around when grandson Ralph came of age.

The use of hyphens and dashes needs to be standardized. The name of the feud, "Neville–Neville" (with an en dash), is not reproduced correctly in the article text, and "Percy–Neville", which is linked to, should also use the en dash. The unspaced em dashes for asides are used correctly in the final paragraph of Course of the dispute, and off and on in the Aftermath and consequences section.

Finally, the references need to be fixed. Cites 5, 8, and 10 are bare URLs, which are not allowed for GAs, and cites 3 and 6 are tagged with "full citation needed". These will have to be fixed. (I believe cites 3 and 10 are to the same document; if so, they should be combined.) I did fix the quotation that Seraphimsystem mentioned, but this article has not yet met the GA criteria, and could use a more thorough going-over to note the remaining instances of issues I've noted above. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Review
I will defer to BlueMoonset's review above. This is my first good article review - would the proper thing be to close the review now or can I do some work on it to see if we can bring it up to standard first? Seraphimsystem (talk) 15:29, 7 April 2017 (UTC)


 * As a note, I did open the review but I did not nominate this article and I have had no involvement with it until now. Seraphimsystem (talk) 15:30, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
 * And thanks very much for letting me know: this has been sitting herefor three weeks. I have replied with some asperity on the article talk page. &mdash;  O Fortuna   semper crescis, aut decrescis  14:34, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * You can't really do too much work yourself without becoming involved. There is some leeway given and no one is going to quibble over copyedits and other minor edits. The usual practice is for the reviewer to list the areas they think can be improved so the article meets the criteria. You can then give as much time as you feel is reasonable for the nominator to bring it up to standard. Thank you for volunteering to review articles and feel free to ask me any specific questions you may have regarding the process. AIR corn (talk) 07:28, 30 April 2017 (UTC)