Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Roza Shanina/archive2


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by User:Ian Rose 10:02, 9 February 2014 (UTC).

Roza Shanina

 * Nominator(s): Brandmeistertalk  16:07, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm giving it a second try. The article saw further considerable work since the first nomination and achieved an A-class at WP:MILHIST. Meanwhile I managed to obtain a reference whose print run is just 150 copies (previously the Russian Arkhangelsk Library had generously emailed me for free some scanned refs), all those sources are now there. I feel that the article has now reached a point where the vast majority of reliable English and Russian sources about her are involved. Brandmeistertalk  16:07, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Image review
 * Captions that aren't complete sentences shouldn't end in periods
 * File:Roza_Shanina.jpg: when/where was this first published
 * File:Roza_Shanina,_1944.jpg: not seeing a strong enough rationale for inclusion of such a non-free image
 * File:Roza_Shanina's_diary.jpg: the information in the "Permission" field seems more logical than the current licensing tag
 * File:Roza_Shanina_with_badge.jpg: when/where was this first published? Nikkimaria (talk) 16:43, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * File:Roza_Shanina.jpg was published between April and September 1944, likely in the local Soviet press. The license of File:Roza_Shanina's_diary.jpg has been clarified. File:Roza_Shanina_with_badge.jpg was published between September 1944 and January 1945, also likely in the local press. As for File:Roza_Shanina,_1944.jpg, this is the only available photo, showing her standing in full height and I think the caption provides useful information (contextual significance per WP:NFCCP 8). Brandmeistertalk  20:35, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Feedback from Curly Turkey
Feel free to disagree with anything here:


 * The lead's pretty short—at 20kb of readable prose, two paragraphs doesn't violate WP:LEADLENGTH, but those are awful short paragraphs, I think.
 * Alt text for the images would be nice, though apparently not an FAC requirement
 * Generally it's not a good idea to set image sizes—the sizes may look great on your screen, but screen sizes, dimensions, and orientations vary widely; also, logged-in users can set their own default image sizes in their preferences, but apparently this is overridden when image sizes are set by article editors.
 * MOS:IMAGELOCATION says there are problems with left-aligned images at the beginning of a section

Early life

 * "five brothers; Mikhail, Fyodor, Sergei, Pavel and Marat.": is this a normal way to use a semicolon?
 * "apparently walked": is there doubt?
 * " (the trek was later attested by Shanina's school teacher Alexander Makaryin)": is there any reason for the parentheses?
 * "kindergarten №2": per MOS:NUMERO: "Do not use the symbol №."
 * "(lately known as Beryozka)": maybe an "as of" would be better than "lately"

Tour of duty

 * " was bombed ": WP:EGG tells s to avoid this sort of linking
 * "She first learned to shoot at a shooting range.": was this at this point in the chronology?
 * " (Yekimova would later die in the war)": this seems like an awkard place to put this.
 * "from the academy with honours": what variety of English is this written in?
 * "between 6–11": "between 6 and 11", per
 * "When the Operation Bagration commenced": is the "the" normal?

Diary

 * I'd break this off into a separate section, rather than subsection—it comes off as a tangent from the main narrative. Maybe even put it in the "Character and personal life" section?
 * "and would often send letters": "often sent"?
 * "She started writing a combat diary;": "she wrote" or "she kept"?
 * "(such as The Front Diary of Izrael Kukuyev and The Chronicle of War of Muzagit Hayrutdinov).": I don't thik the parentheses are necessary.
 * "Shanina kept the diary from 6 October 1944 to 24 January 1945.": I might merge this with the "She started writing a combat diary;" sentence

East Prussia

 * "his death the latter day.": What latter day?
 * "from Germans by the troops": "from Germany"? Or was it just a bunch of Germans?
 * "felt the pain; "the shoulder was": should that semicolon not be a colon?
 * "the Book of Memory of Arkhangelsk Oblast": What's "the Book of Memory of Arkhangelsk Oblast"?  If it's the name of a book, it should be in italics.  Either way, could we get a quick explanation as to what it is?

Death

 * "the Germans tried to strengthen the localities they controlled against great odds.": Was the control or the strengthening against great odds?
 * "near the Richau estate (later a Soviet settlement of Telmanovka), 3 km southeast of the East Prussian village of Ilmsdorf (Novobobruysk)": Are there links for any of these places?

Posthumous honours

 * "the open shooting sports championship in her memory": "an"?
 * " (which would have made her a Full Cavalier of that order)": I don't think the parentheses are called for.
 * "In 2013, a wall of memory, featuring graffiti portraits of six Russian war honorees, including Roza Shanina, was opened in Arkhangelsk.": Genereally one-sentence paragraphs are frowned upon. Merge with the one above?

Character and personal life

 * "typified her own character as like that of the Romantic poet, painter and writer Mikhail Lermontov": in what way?
 * "with sombre tones, Shanina would write that": or "wrote"?

———Curly Turkey (gobble) 05:32, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok, mostly fixed. The reason for the parentheses in "the trek was later attested..." is that the sentence doesn't look to me like a mandatory follow-up of the previous part, but rather an auxiliary tidbit. As for the shooting range, yes, she learned to shoot at that point. "From the academy with honours" is British English (if you mean "honour", but I don't mind swapping to American "honor"). "Started writing" looks like correct English to me. "from Germans by the troops..." means that Schlossberg was once occupied by Germans, but on that moment it was retaken by the Soviet troops. The Book of Memory of Arkhangelsk Oblast is a website, I added "online". In "the Germans tried to strengthen the localities they controlled against great odds" "against great odds" is related to control, but relation to "strengthen" also looks correct to me. What I hesitate to change are some image sizes (as otherwise they look too large in my Mozilla browser by default, but I don't mind if all sizes are removed). Thanks. Brandmeistertalk  15:26, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry it took me a while to return to this. Image sizes are not a make-or-break issue, but it's best to keep in mind—what looks good on your own screen often looks terrible on another's, and it's the "others" you're writing for, no?  A couple more things:
 * "Shanina's indomitable bravery": "indomitable" is unnecessary
 * "but came at odds with the Soviet policy of sparing snipers." Sparing from what?
 * "Her preserved combat diary was first published in 1965." If it was published, then of course it was preserved
 * Curly Turkey (gobble) 03:15, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok, all done, thanks once more. Brandmeistertalk  16:08, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks fine to me now, and I'm happy to support on prose. Curly Turkey (gobble) 08:12, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Closing comment -- Unfortunately this hasn't attracted sufficient commentary over the month or so it's been open to form any consensus for promotion, and with no activity for two weeks it doesn't look like that will happen any time soon, so I'll be archiving it shortly. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:14, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 13:15, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.