Wikipedia:Peer review/Winter War/archive1

Winter War
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because I’m hoping to get the article to GA or even FA status for 30 November 2009, the 70th anniversary of the start of the war. Bold edits and commentaries are welcomed! And a good old copy-editing is also much needed.

Thanks, Peltimikko (talk) 20:13, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is fascinating, seems comprehensive, and is well-illustrated. It certainly has potential for GA and eventually FA. Although the prose is mostly fine, it stumbles in places, and it will need to be polished here and there. I fixed a few things, but it would be good if a copyeditor took another crack at it. Here are some other suggestions for improvement.

Proofreading
 * Odd errors, perhaps second-language errors, occur here and there as well as ungrammatical constructions like this from the very last paragraph of the main text: "There has been also speculations did the Soviets really tried to occupate all Finland, or just strategic areas near Leningrad?" I fixed a few things like this as I went, but the whole article would be improved by a line-by-line proofing.

Lead
 * "The Winter War (Finnish: talvisota, Russian: Зимняя война[14][15]," - Citations should come after the punctuation, not before, thus: "The Winter War (Finnish: talvisota, Russian: Зимняя война,[14][15]". I see others like this elsewhere in the article.
 * "Because the attack was deemed illegal, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations on 14 December." - Generally, it's a good idea to either merge one-sentence orphan paragraphs like this with another paragraph or to expand them. In this case, I'd suggest merging with the one above the orphan. I see half-a-dozen orphans elsewhere in the article that probably should be expanded or merged.

War preparations
 * "On October 5, the Soviet Union invited Finland... " - Dates like October 5 are not normally linked. They should be unlinked throughout the article.
 * "moved westward to a point only 30 kilometers east of Viipuri and that the Finns destroy... " - Metric measurements should also be expressed in imperial units; i.e., 30 km. The convert template is a handy way to do these. I did several of these as I went, but there are more that need conversions.

Soviet order of battle


 * "The Soviet forces were positioned as follows:" - Rather than making lists, it's often better to use straight prose. That would be easy to do with this list. The Seventh and Eighth could be one paragraph, and the Ninth and Fourteenth another if you'd rather not have just one giant paragraph.

Finnish order of battle
 * "The Finnish forces were positioned as follows:" - I'd suggest turning this short list into straight prose.

First battles on the Karelian Isthmus
 * "located on the Karelian Isthmus about 20-60 miles distant" - This range needs to be expressed in kilometres also, and, for internal consistency, the metric units should come first; i.e., x to y kilometres (20 to 60 mi). The convention is to spell out the primary units and abbreviate the secondary units.
 * "After a forty hour barrage, the Red infantry attacked, but was repulsed with heavy casualties from the open ground." - Generally, numbers from one to nine are spelled out, and bigger numbers are expressed as digits. Thus "40-hour barrage" would be better.
 * "but left 1,000 dead and twenty-seven tanks strewn on the ice" - This should be "but left 1,000 dead and 27 tanks strewn on the ice". Ditto for other numbers from 10 up in the article.

Weather conditions
 * "The winter of 1939-1940 was exceptionally cold." - Date ranges like this take an en dash rather than a hyphen; thus: 1939–1940.
 * "negative 43 Celsius degrees on 16 January 1940" - Temperatures need to be expressed in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius, thus: "-43 C". The convert template is good for doing these. You can see in edit mode how I did this one. The |0 at the end is the rounding number; 0 produces the nearest whole number; 1 would round to the nearest tenth, and so on.

Defense of the Mannerheim Line
 * "The Finns had built 41 reinforced concrete bunkers in the Summa area, making the defensive line in this area was stronger than anywhere else on the Karelian Isthmus." - Delete "was"?

"Soviet all-out offensive on the Karelian Isthmus''
 * "Finnish artillery emplacements were under order to fire only against directly threatening ground." - Ground attacks, maybe?

Last days of war
 * "at 11:00 a.m. Helsinki time" - Constructions like this one need to be held together with an nbsp code to prevent 11 and a.m. from being separated on computer screens by line break, thus: 11 a.m. WP:NBSP has details. Any digits and units that you do not want to be separated can be held together with an nbsp.

Small Finnish Air Force
 * "In spite of losses the number of planes in the Finnish Air Force climbed to over 50 percent by the end of the war." - "Climbed by" rather than "climbed to over"?

Coastal artillery
 * A good rule of thumb is to provide a source for every claim that might reasonably be questioned, every direct quote, every set of statistics and also for every paragraph. Two of the three paragraphs in this section are unsourced even though they include information that is not common knowledge. Ditto for any other unsourced paragraphs in the article.

Peace of Moscow
 * "over 10% of pre-war Finland" - Generally, "percent" is preferable to % in simple cases like this. I'd suggest going through the article and changing all instances of "%" to "percent".

References
 * Page ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens.
 * In something like Kilin & Raunio, the word "and" is preferred to the ampersand unless the ampersand is part of an official title or company name.

Images
 * Captions that are merely sentence fragments do not take terminal periods.
 * Images should not overlap sections. You might have to make some of the images smaller, or perhaps you can move them so that each stays within a single section. Or you might reduce the total number of images.
 * To become FA, the article's images will need alt text for readers who are vision-impaired. WP:ALT explains how to do these. They are not especially easy to do, but they become easier with practice.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 03:03, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much indeed. Most issues improved per your comments. Peltimikko (talk) 21:00, 9 September 2009 (UTC)