Talk:Winter War/GA2

GA Reassessment
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.''

Article is the opposite of well written. It tediously cites from several sources almost page by page. Such a piece of bloat does not come close to professional encyclopedic style; this leads to violation of a second criterion, "staying focused, not going into unnecessary detail".

The entire conception of the structure of the article violates WP:WEIGHT because this war is too minor (except to Finns) to rate such a long article. It was a three month series of skirmishes with a foreordained outcome.


 * The minority of the event in historical battles of WWII does not violate the WP:WEIGHT. If I read the definition correctly, the weight of individual sections should be in balance within the article's subject matter. There is nothing there to state that the length of a article should be based on the importance of the topic. Qite a few things learned from the Winter war are still taught at west point so a minor squirmish maybe, but one that has taught many lessons to others as well as the parties involved. Nasula (talk) 14:20, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

The approach to citation is nothing less than foolish. There are so many things wrong with the citations that it would take an hour to explain them all, which I hope to do in days to come. Some of the flaws are sui generis.
 * The main author(s) give distinct names to different page sets from the SAME SOURCE.
 * The account keeping is cumbersome instead of labor saving (for example, assigning reference names that are two dozen characters long).
 * The job is half done: e.g., did not finish removing full bibliographic entries from citations.

As for the bibliography, the main authors are ignorant of academic conventions.

As for the lead, it misses several key points of the story.

I have started to clean up the footnotes and bibliography. Most of the text deserves to be deleted. (Useful link for future editing and reassessment: Category:Wikipedia_maintenance_templates) Hurmata (talk) 21:41, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Plans to "resettle" the entire population of Finland to Siberia
From the book "Stalin" by Edvard Radzinsky, page 447: Marshal Konev noted in his memories that Stalin said in the presence of Isakov and Voroshilov during planning of Winter War:

This should be mentioned somewhere. Important, is not it?Biophys (talk) 06:09, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Updated Aftermath of the Winter War. Peltimikko (talk) 08:51, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * All western reviews on Radzinsky's books seriously question the reliability of the latter. According to these reviews, Radzinsky is a "playwright", not "historian", and his books are "potboiler". Therefore, I would treat the facts taken from Radzinsky's books with great cautions.--Paul Siebert (talk) 01:55, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Radzinsky makes a reference to Konev's memoirs there, which should be verifiable. Then again, these memoirs (full text in Russian available here and here) concern the years 1943-1945 and don't mention the Winter war at all. This stems from the fact that during those times Konev commanded the 2nd Red Banner Army, which was deployed in the Far East. Perhaps mention Radzinsky explicitly? --Illythr (talk) 03:10, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Progress?
Is someone monitoring this reassessment? Surely, it can't go on forever? In the meantime, the article's reference system is better than in the featured articles I've seen (compare). --Illythr (talk) 03:22, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Seems the user who started the reasseessment has lost its interest. I already left a note over month ago. Peltimikko (talk) 05:11, 29 March 2010 (UTC)