Wikipedia:Peer review/Battle of Gaixia/archive1

Battle of Gaixia


I hope to get this article to a GA, as it is an interesting bit of history. I've cleaned up the text and added some citations, but I still need some help with these.

Thanks, Hipponias (talk) 17:40, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Comments from Kavyansh.Singh
Hi, I have read the article and found the following points which needs to be worked out. Rest seems to be fine, but I strongly recommend the article to be copy-edited to resolve the gramatical errors before GAN. Good Luck! Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 12:21, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
 * The articles has multiple issues dealing with less inline citations and need for additional citations. It may be a quick fail for GA as according to GA criteria, it has cleanup banners that are unquestionably still valid. These include,, or large numbers of , , or similar tags.
 * The lead section of article is not long enough to summarize the article. It needs to comply with Wikipedia Lead MOS.

Comments from Extraordinary Writ
Thanks for your work on this article! I definitely agree with Kavyansh.Singh that citations are the main issue here. Having one citation per paragraph is probably the minimum; more may be required in when contentious or disputed details are presented. I'd really encourage you to look for a few more sources. You rely pretty heavily on just a couple of works, so adding several more would likely improve the article. With ancient topics like this one, you'll likely find that scholars have a lot of disagreements about the details, and being neutral requires giving each of those perspectives due weight. The "Annals of Xiang Yu" appears to be a primary source; while this isn't prohibited, it's generally a bad idea to use these very often. Google Books, Google Scholar, and the Internet Archive can be good places to find sources, and the reference exchange desk can help you get copies of paywalled books/articles. At the moment, this article probably wouldn't get too far at GAN, but with some work it has the potential to meet the standards. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:34, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

Comments from Nizolan
Kavyansh and EW above have picked up on the lack of inline citations and secondary sources already so I just wanted to add some observations about the content of the article: The useful World History Encyclopedia article, already cited, might give some pointers on possible ways to contextualise the battle—note that the narrative of the battle itself makes up only a relatively small part of their article! For example, have a look at the the WHE piece's discussion of the differences between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang as commanders (the part that begins "Tanner describes the differences in the two men").
 * The "Background" section could use more contextualisation. Kicking off with "The Han forces had won many major victories against the Chu, but they still only controlled part of China." comes across as pretty in medias res to me. At minimum it would be good to start with a paragraph introducing the context of the Chu–Han Contention and discussing the broader political importance of the battle.
 * This comment needs elaboration: (The fact is disputed, as it is absent from certain Chinese historiographies, and most historians believe it to be fictional.) Aside from citations, what are the arguments in this dispute? What is the evidence that they rely on?
 * More generally, there's far too little analysis compared to the narrative account of the battle. The narrative discussion of stratagems needs to be balanced by some kind of broader discussion of causes, context, and implications: why were certain stratagems important? What are the unstated implications of the sources? How do Han Xin's stratagems relate to broader history of Chinese strategic thinking? Etc. (These are just examples of potential topics—the content would have to depend on the topics that are actually discussed in secondary sources.)
 * Like the "Background" section, the "Aftermath" section is far too short and, as written, potentially POV ("the Han Dynasty, one of the greatest Chinese dynasties"—perhaps "most significant" rather than "greatest"). More details on the disintegration of Chu, the broader historical implications of the battle, and the battle's legacy in Chinese thought and historiography would be very welcome here.

Finding good English-language sources might be difficult; I had a look in the relevant volume of the Cambridge History of China and it devotes only a few lines to this battle, and military history of this sort is not a very common focus in itself among English-speaking historians of ancient China. You might need to look for (other) older sources under the Wade–Giles name "Kai-hsia". Since you're a native Chinese speaker, though, you have a much larger range of literature available to you, and I would definitely encourage researching Chinese-language academic sources that could be cited in the article. —Nizolan (talk · c.) 23:21, 2 June 2021 (UTC)