Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Luftwaffe/archive1

Luftwaffe
This article is a good strong article with lots of information and good picturers. Rentastrawberry 19:38, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. There are several things I see that ought to be fixed up. Lead should be longer, inline references should be added. Copyright status of pictures should be assertained. Has this article been thru a peer review? If not, that might be a good place to start for comments on how to imprive an already good article. WegianWarrior 20:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Oppose Ya, I agree with WegianWarrior: the lead is underdeveloped. -- Jerry Crimson Mann 20:33, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. The lead has, I noticed, been developed. Christopher Crossley 01:18, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Object.
 * The images Image:MaxImmelmann.gif, Image:Fokker Dr.I.jpg need information on their copyright status. They're old enough that they're almost certainly in the public domain, but that needs to be verified.
 * The image Image:Luftwaffe major collar insignia.jpg is claimed as public domain "since the rank insignia of a government air force are not considered to be copyrightable". I'd like a source for this claim.  Also, the photograph may be copyrighted even if the subject of the photo isn't.
 * The image Image:Euro luftwaffe.jpg has no source or copyright information.
 * The images Image:Model of Canadair CL-13 Sabre in Luftwaffe markings.jpg, Image:Wolfram von Richthofen.jpg, Image:Ju287.jpg, Image:Ju 87D Stukas over Russia.jpg, Image:Gernika-bombardeo.jpg are claimed as public domain. I'd like source information or other evidence that they are indeed in the public domain.
 * The images Image:Luftwaffe logo.jpg, Image:Me262 bw 01.jpg are claimed under fair use. Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, it is a free content encyclopedia, and as such, "fair use" images should be avoided if at all possible.  If fair use images are used, the image source or current copyright holder must be listed on the image description page, and an explanation as to why "fair use" is justified must be provided for each page that the image is used on.
 * --Carnildo 21:34, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment on copyright for images Some of the photos appearing in this article had already appeared in other related (hence, linked) Wikipedia articles, such as the Max Immelmann, the Baron von Richthofen and all the other black-and-white photos. I should know, because I started to make contributions to what had been an extremely small article back in February and searched for photos already in Wikipedia to support it. Hence, I suppose, one could say that original copyright information as regards as the sources of the images, claimed as public domain, including the colour one featuring the Eurofighter Typhoon in the postwar section, should be supplied by the persons who put them into "their" articles in the first place. (By the way, I am very happy to see that this article is a feature article candidate. I have greatly enjoyed contributing much of the present text, since the history of the Luftwaffe used to be such an intense interest of mine.) Christopher Crossley 01:26, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Refer to Peer Review. Promising article, but a PR is needed. A minor pointer about references, though: since this is most likely a fairly uncontroversial subject, inline references are not going to be needed. Everyone seems to have become so excited about the fact that references are one of the FA criteria that it has been forgotten that footnotes are anything but a critiera in themselves. A proper reference section is a must, though. A (rather large) bibliography won't do. /Peter Isotalo 14:33, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment The "rather large" bibliography came mostly from my memory when I wrote it, although I did search the internet for the publishers' names, dates and ISBN numbers. Most of the article's text was also from my memory, since I have been interested in the history of the Luftwaffe since 1974! I refrained, as much as possible, from resorting to looking at books and at internet articles (including related Wikipedia articles), but I did so when I deemed it necessary to check up on a few facts just to make sure that they were correct. My choice of bibliography might seem "rather large" by "normal" Wikipedia standards when a few references are the norm, but, as I said, there have been literally hundreds of books and articles written about the history of the Luftwaffe and they continue to be written even now (as this article proves!). Hence, in my opinion, just two or three external references will not do this subject justice, considering what an interest the Luftwaffe has garnered amongst countless aviation enthusiasts over the decades since the end of the Second World War. Christopher Crossley 01:32, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm definetly a friend of slimmed down reference sections. If you can do it without adding notes (these are heavily overused and for some reason thought to be identical to "inline citations") I'll support you just for that. My point, though, is that even if we have many editors who can recall most details from memory (correctly so, even) we still need to actually claim sources. If you could find a handful of books that are both general in scope, well-written, unbiased and contain all the information found in the article there isn't much stopping the article from getting through the next FAC. / Peter Isotalo 10:09, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I can assure you that any external printed source I quoted would have been somewhere that I got some information from, including my memory, rather than my just rattling off a list of any old sources, but because that is not the idea of a bibliography! Imagine if I had just rattled off any old source for my MBA dissertation, I don't think that I would have got away with it! My list does include the two part-works, "Wings" and "World War II", even if they had been published (by Orbis, London) way back in the 1970s and 1980s, since they were my introduction to military aviation, and I absorbed a lot of facts from them at the time; hence, I believe in being justified in citing them, even if there have been absolutely tons of stuff published on the Luftwaffe since then, of which many are verifiable, provided that they are still in print or else available to buy even if they are not. I believe those sources to be authoritative and unbiased, since they ("Wings" especially) was a collection of articles produced by very many authors, not just one or a few, some of whom have been in the aviation history business for decades. I therefore included them because of both their generality and of their neutrality, not merely because I "had" them in my collection many moons ago. Thank you for your continued support for the article, it is much appreciated. Christopher Crossley 03:50, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, I will certainly trust your judgement in choosing sources, then. There is a technical issue at hand here. The standard practice is to place all sources that have been referenced (or should be referenced) in a section called "References". "Bibliography" could be interpreted as "further reading", which is never bad to have, but anything in this kind of section doesn't need to be claimed as an actual source. So what's needed is simply to sort through the literature list and decide which of them should be claimed by the article as actual sources and what is merely recommended reading. You can always use inline citations and/or footnotes, but only if it's really needed, like with facts that are controversial or perhaps need a note to explain some sort of complexity that doesn't fit in the actual article text. / Peter Isotalo 10:12, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment 2. I just looked at the article and realized that there is virtually no information about the organization of the current Luftwaffe. Since German Air Force is a redirect to this article, there needs to a minimum of information about the current operations, units and equipment of the modern Luftwaffe. Perhaps some information about policies as well. No long lists of individual squadrons and such, though. A summary with perhaps a link to a separate List of modern Luftwaffe units or something like it will do fine. / Peter Isotalo 10:22, 8 August 2005 (UTC)