Template:Did you know nominations/Magnates of Poland and Lithuania

Magnates of Poland and Lithuania

 * ... that the Magnates of Poland and Lithuania often had private armies, and exerted significant political influence on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
 * Reviewed: Maurice Le Glay

Created/expanded by Staszek Lem (talk), Piotrus (talk). Nominated by Piotrus (talk) at 15:45, 9 December 2012 (UTC)




 * Symbol confirmed.svg Date, size, hook, are fine --User:Chienlit User talk:Chienlit 22:05, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol possible vote.svg The article started with 1122 prose characters that were extracted from Magnate and used with minor additions to start this article, of which 941 seem to survive. When an article starts with prose from an existing article, the rule is that the existing material must be expanded 5x with new material, as stated in WP:DYKSG: "If some of the text was copied from another Wikipedia article, then it must be expanded fivefold as if the copied text had been a separate article." 5x of 941 is 4705 prose characters, and the article is currently at 3936 prose characters according to DYKcheck. By my calculations, another 769 prose characters need to be added for the article to achieve 5x expansion. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:45, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * This type of bureaucratic meddling is really killing my joy of writing DYKs. I almost got to 500, but you are doing your damn best to make me give up. Anyway, I removed an unreferenced paragraph, feel free to recalculate the numbers now. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  16:10, 12 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm really not trying to: I went to promote this and discovered the original start, at which point my hands were tied. If DYK is about new articles and new material, the bulk of the article needs to be new. (I personally think the 5x is a pretty tall order—80% new—when it comes to established articles, but it's not my call.) It's not much fun from my end either, especially when I have to give bad news like this: the paragraph you removed was almost entirely a list, which isn't counted at all by DYKcheck as prose, so all you gain is the 70-character initial sentence: 871 original characters remain making a 4355 requirement, current total is 3866, with 489 still needed. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:41, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * If you want to wikilawyer, consider this: all original content was unreferenced, so removable per WP:V. I referenced all of it, but if it makes you feel better, consider that it could have been deleted and then rewritten in a similar way (I do believe that I indeed c/e the text too so it is not exact as it was in the old version). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:06, 12 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Symbol delete vote.svg A 4 5 of the supplementary guidelines clearly states that we do not consider the condition the article was in before expansion began, except for character count. That is meant to avoid subjective calls (amongst other reasons). I agree that it has cost us some good expansions, such as St Marys Church, Clophill, but it makes the DYK process much more streamlined and objective. This has been questioned, like at WT:DYK, but consensus is that we stick with A 4 5. As such, although I must congratulate the two editors on doing good work with the article, we must go with the letter of the guidelines and refuse this article. Sorry. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:53, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree completely with Crisco's and BlueMoonset's reasoning, and I want to refer you to another re-iteration of that guideline: F8: ""a 'new' article is no more than five days old. This does not include articles split from older articles", although an article sufficiently expanded from a section of an older article can be a fivefold expansion. The word "fork" is sometimes used to mean Wikipedia:Splitting." A4, A5 and F8 are there exactly to make sure we don't have to make these subjective assessments. Yazan (talk) 16:54, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Meh. Anyway, I've exxpanded the article further, do let me know if this is enough now. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:13, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * By my count you need another 1k characters almost. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:19, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Then can you rule experts get your act together, because before my latest expansion Blue was saying I need just 450 or so characters. Thanks. PS. Perhaps you are not seeing that I've removed about half of the original text as unreferenced. I don't think such discarded text should count towards my expansion requirements. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:42, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * You started the article with 1167 characters from the original article (as clearly specified in your edit summary and the history on the Magnates article). A 5x expansion would have you at 5,835. The article now is at 5395 characters; that's an extra 440 characters. Yazan (talk) 18:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * NB: The text you removed is already not being counted into the original size because it was in a bullet list. Yazan (talk) 18:54, 14 December 2012 (UTC)


 * This is really not quite accurate, and I'm surprised that you're basing the expansion on 1167, when only 1122 prose characters were removed from the original article (as I was careful to explain above). The new article had a different first sentence as part of that 1167, if only to address the new title of the article. Furthermore, the list text removed included—as I was also careful to note above—a 70-character introductory sentence to that list, which does count as prose (as correctly done by DYKcheck), even as the rest does not. So: 1122 − 70 = 1052; 5 × 1052 = 5260. Why is the article not 5× expanded now, if it has 5397 prose characters? Was more pulled from the existing article at a later date? BlueMoonset (talk) 22:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * This gives 1167, excluding the list. If some of this text was removed afterwards, that's not pertinent per A 4 5. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 22:50, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm puzzled as to why A4 is being applied here rather than A5. This is a new article—there is no preexisting article, which is what A4 refers to—but it uses text from an existing article as in A5: "If some of the text was copied from another Wikipedia article, then it must be expanded fivefold as if the copied text had been a separate article." In this case, the 1167 characters started with 1122 copied from another article, which I interpret to mean that the copied 1122, minus subsequent deletions, must be expanded. I'm pretty sure I've seen articles broken off from larger articles in the past have to meet A5 rather than A4. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:12, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Doh, you're right about that. A4 does apply too, however, as it precludes us from excluding the content deleted subsequently, in my opinion. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 01:15, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * How is it fair to saddle the expander (me) with substandard crap written many years ago that is next to impossible to reference and which I removed (incidentally, the author of that substandard crap might me me as well, from mid-2000s :>). The original author did not realize that some content he copied from the original article is not worth retaining; his mistake should not prevent the article from being DYKed. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:39, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * If you can expand it a bit more, it won't. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:14, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Why? I see two other users here (BM and Yazan) commenting it has been expanded sufficiently. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:20, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol redirect vote4.png I think BM's reasoning could be more relevant in this case (although it does stretch A5 quite a bit, as we can't possibly follow every edit made and evaluate it with the text at the original article; for every such submission). The article is certainly an improvement and would's probably passed with only new content anyway, so I think we should just move on. Yazan (talk) 06:23, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok - bottomline - how many characters does the thing need total? Volunteer Marek 20:40, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol redirect vote4.png The highest number given on this page was by Crisco 1492, which is 5x 1167, or 5835. I thought 5260 (5x 1052). As the article is currently 5918 prose characters according to DYKcheck, I don't think it matters any longer whose base number you use; the article would appear now to exceed them all. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:53, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Given the amount of time that has passed, the nom's truculent attitude does not seem appropriate since there is clearly a missing word in the first line & gross typos in the first two picture captions. The definition of what the article subject comprises is also poor, with apparently contradictory statements at different points in the text. I'd say drop it if it isn't cleaned up sharpish. Johnbod (talk) 16:29, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol delete vote.svg Copyediting request above not actioned in two weeks. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:34, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I was not notified about it and missed it on my watchlist. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:19, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Fixed. You know, it would take you less time to fix the issue then to complain about it :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:19, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Final review needed to see whether issues have been addressed, and also a full recheck against DYK criteria. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:33, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Symbol confirmed.svg Final review. Article created by Staszek Lem 6 December 2012 with 1,098 characters of readable prose with additional 924 characters of buletted text. The article was split from Magnate on that date. As of now the article is 6,029 characters long (per Microsoft Word bare text statistics), which meets the 5x guideline with room to maneuver. I corrected the spelling: latifundiums (plural: latifundia), and did touchups in reference formatting. Main source: Encyklopedia PWN with no GFDL issues as far as I can see. The hook is 155 characters long, supported by inline reference (above). I corrected the grammar: significance (influence) → significant (influence). The color illustration painted before 1893 by Matejko is in the Public Domain. Good to go. Thanks, Poeticbent  talk  17:18, 1 February 2013 (UTC)