Wikipedia:Featured article review/Invasion of Poland (1939)/archive1


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

The article was removed by YellowAssessmentMonkey 05:54, 29 September 2009.

Review commentary

 * Notified: Piotrus, Halibutt, Drichter53, Dapi89, Lysy, WikiProject Military history, WikiProject Poland, WikiProject Germany

This article was promoted in 2005 and it doesn't seem that a review has been conducted since then. Although generally well cited and well written the article has some elements that give me concern. The entire aftermath section is poorly cited (1c) and the inclusion of a myths section seems rather inappropriate (1d). In terms of referencing, it would be beneficial to employ notes when supplementary information needs to be included rather than employing long winded footnotes. The article also suffers from a bit of image overload (3) Labattblueboy (talk) 02:33, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Comment. Images need alt text as per WP:ALT. I agree that there are too many images; 38 of them need either alt text or " ". Eubulides (talk) 02:38, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Question. Would the Invasion_of_Poland_(1939) section be considered appropriate for an FA level article? I think not but I would like some support before deleting it and attempting to incorporate the content elsewhere in the article.--Labattblueboy (talk) 19:38, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
 * At this point, most editors (including me) at Talk:Invasion_of_Poland_(1939) seem to think it is acceptable. Comments appreciated. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 19:44, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Comments I agree that this article needs work to stay at FA status. My concerns are:
 * The lead is much too short (2a)
 * The 'Description' section seems unnecessary, though it could be reworked to form the expanded lead section
 * A lot of material is uncited (1c)
 * The article isn't as comprehensive as it should be (1b). For instance, the discussion of the State of the German Army in the 'Opposing forces' section doesn't note that it was largely unmotorised (meaning that most infantry units weren't much more technically advanced than their Polish equivalents). The coverage of the German invasion seems surprisingly short and there could also be more on the German war crimes during the war.
 * I'm not convinced that the article is neutral (1d); its early sections seem to devote much more space to Poland's experiences than those of Germany or the USSR and are written from a Polish perspective. For example, the 'Opposing forces' section provides much greater detail on the Polish military than the German, and nothing at all on the Soviet military. Pinning the blame on the western Allies for Poland's deployments in the 'Polish defence plan' section also seems unwarranted; Steven J. Zaloga states that the French advised the Poles against spreading their Army along the border, and that the decision to do this was driven by political rather than military considerations (the Polish government wanted to be seen as willing to defend the border regions to guarantee that the British and French would honour their commitments).
 * There's some imprecise wording. For instance:
 * I don't think that the various British dominions were Poland's 'Allies', even if Britain was
 * The 'Prelude to the campaign' section states that 70% of the Polish military was mobilised prior to war breaking out while the 'Opposing forces' section gives a figure of 50%
 * The statement that "the Poles played a major part" in the Battle of Britain seems questionable - the Polish squadrons only made up a small part of the RAF's strength
 * I agree that the 'Nazi propaganda' section should be removed - most of its material is already in the article, there's no need to rebut propaganda distributed by Nazis in 2009 and it's a NPOV violation as it's basically devoted to defending Poland's reputation against unfounded claims (an accurate article does the same, so there's no need for a point by point rebuttal). Nick-D (talk) 11:17, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
 * As further comments, the 'See also' section includes links to articles which are already linked in the prose or which could be linked and several of the external links don't appear to be reliable sources (eg, and  plus a few others) or provide any extra value (eg, the Nazi radio broadcasts). Nick-D (talk) 02:01, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Suggested FA criteria concern are citations, POV, structure. Also note the recent change to WP:WIAFA (1c) requiring "high-quality" sources.  YellowMonkey  ( bananabucket '') 06:34, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Delist Per concerns raised by Nick-D. Dabomb87 (talk) 00:40, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Delist Clearly not an FA anymore. I hope that someone improves it in the future though, as this is a very important topic. Nick-D (talk) 07:22, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Delist Per Nick-D. The article is strongly unreferenced. --Eurocopter (talk) 18:20, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.