User:Hon102awu12/sandbox

Article Evalutation
My assigned article for this Wikipedia project is the July Days article.

Initial evaluation of the page showed that the article was in strong need of citations for the details provided, particularly those regarding casualties. The article did not have a good balance of information; some was too detailed, while other areas of the July Days summary was too vague. The article lacked a clear sense of chronology of events and needed to be restructured for clarity. Many of the citations that initially existed were improperly formatted and did not appear totally reliable. The article did not provide context for the players of the events and was missing information that would provide readers with a crucial sense of the moods and motives that contributed toward the July Days.

Intended Contributions
Having reviewed the state of "July Days" prior to editing, it is clear that using our knowledge of the period, we can contribute frequent, more reliable citations, and add a clearer and more detailed account of the chronology of events, as well information the parties involved. We also intend to add a "background" section to the article to set the scene for what happened and provide some context to events.

I have already begun working on providing context for the events through a new "Background" section. My plan is to provide a summary of the players involved in the events of the July days, and provide, in the most neutral way possible, some explanation for their actions. I also plan to revise existing content for the article, and provide citations, as well as corroborate existing information with possibly more reliable citations.

Contributions to Draft #1
For the first draft submission, the contributions I made to the article were primarily citation edits/additions, reviewing/revising existing material, creating the "Background" subsection, and revising the "Aftermath" (formerly "Consequences") section. I began making edits on the "Aftermath" section but did not get to finishing revisions. Moving forward, I plan to restructure this section for clarity and focus on the aftermath of the July Days in regards to the Provisional Government and its reordering, as well as the shift in attitudes toward and the power (or lack thereof) of the Bolsheviks.

Peer Review Assignment
I left a peer review for the April Crisis article in the Talk section(link to my specific feedback). The main criticisms I had concerned the organization of the article in terms of information of sentence structure.

Working Toward Final Draft
For the final draft of the the article, I will be expanding the "Background" section to illustrate the attitude of discontent that led to the outbreak of the July Day demonstrations. I will be adding information about growing Bolshevik support and how they capitalized on the discontent of the workers and soldiers in face of the inaction of the Provisional Government, the April Crisis, and the Kerensky Offensive. My goal is to add around 500 words to the this section.

I will also be expanding the "Aftermath" section to include details about how the Provisional Government went about enacting more conservative policies following the July Days.

Continuing Contributions
As I work on my contributions toward the final article, I will note that so far I have contributed 856 words to the "Background" section of the article, adding to the initial 95 written for the first draft. A problem I encountered while writing this section was trying to summarize the complicated network of reasons and causes for the feelings of discontent that led to the Bolsheviks gaining support in the weeks between the April Crisis and the July Days. As I mentioned in my previous sandbox update, I decided to focus on the backlash created from the April Crisis and the Kerensky Offensive as primary contributing factors to the resentment that led to the July Days.

I attempted to summarize other aspects in the the end of my paragraphs on "Growing Support For the Bolshevik Party" with the following statements:"'Growing unhappiness with the Provisional Government's inaction regarding land reform, industrial reform, ceasing the war, and food shortages led to a growing demand for an all-socialist government. Demands from April for 'All Power to the Soviets', a popular slogan, increased, supported by the Bolshevik Party and Lenin's April Theses.'"Looking at the state of the article at the current time, one thing that I am still very conflicted on is the infobox. I am uncertain about the information stated in the "strength" and "casualties and losses" sections, and I don't like the setup of the infobox with the military conflict template.

First of all, the information in "strength" and "casualties and losses" was present before we were assigned the article. Every attempt to corroborate the numbers, especially for the casualties, has been unsuccessful. Websites with identical information don't provide citations, which makes me wonder if their source is just the earlier Wikipedia article. The "strength" numbers come from marxists.org, which is clearly a biased source and also does not cite information. I am considering removing the casualties and losses portion from the infobox at the very least, as I haven't seen those numbers literally anywhere else. My group members and I have scratched our heads over these random statistics for some time, but I think we might just have to take action and remove the numbers, replacing it in the "Aftermath" or "demonstrations" section with a more general statement about an ambiguous number of direct and indirect casualties. We know there were casualties from the bursts of street violence during the demonstrations, at the very least.

Tomorrow is the last day to make edits before grading. Looking over the article right now, I notice some things I need to discuss with/remind my other group members of:
 * Citations heavily needed for the "Bolshevik Involvement" section, whoever worked on that. The last two paragraphs are completely void of citations.
 * Why are there so many dead-end internal links?
 * Have we internally linked everything on the first mention as we should have?
 * Is formatting and citation information uniform?

Summary of Contributions to the Final Draft

 * Sole group contributor of the "background" section, about 950 words
 * Expanded upon the "aftermath" section, revising pre-existing "consequences" section, adding citations and re-organizing information provided by previous contributors, adding about 130 words
 * Along with group members, added many citations existing information, changed all dates to Julian calendar

Final Edits
For the final meeting on November 8, the group met to peer review contributions we made on our own time. We made several revisions throughout the article to clean up language and make the writing more concise. Some details were added to sections based on group discussion on what would be necessary. We turned in our final article at 12:40PM.