Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Battle of Marion/archive1

Battle of Marion
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like this article to become an A-class article, and I need to see what to work on.

Thanks, Redmarkviolinist Drop me a line 19:55, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Carom
A few comments: Hopefully these thoughts are helpful. Carom (talk) 23:09, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
 * You may find it useful to break up the "background" section. At the moment, it is a little difficult to parse, and might benefit from subheadings such as "tactical situation," "political situation," etc.
 * Make sure you follow the citation guidelines throughout. The "first day of battle" section is very sparse.
 * In the "aftermath" section, it may be useful to discuss the larger consequences of the battle, if any.
 * In many places, a slightly more encyclopedic tone is necessary.
 * A copyedit would be useful, as the prose is occasionally choppy and difficult to read.

Oberiko

 * I'd take the pictures out of the infobox, it's not something I've seen anywhere else.
 * I don't think you need the header on the "Outcome" sub-section
 * The Chronology, having three points, really isn't all the useful and is basically summarized in the introduction
 * There are to many infoboxes on the bottom, most of which are barely related to this event. I'd recommend scrapping them and putting a campaign box under the main info box. Oberiko (talk) 21:21, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Automated
Here's some automated suggestions I got using User:AndyZ's script. The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question. You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Nousernamesleft copper, not wood 02:57, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Consider adding more links to the article; per Manual of Style (links) and Build the web, create links to relevant articles.[?]
 * Per What is a featured article?, Images should have concise captions.[?]
 * Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -  between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 16 km, use 16 km, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 16&amp;nbsp;km.[?]
 * Per Wikipedia:Context and Build the web, years with full dates should be linked; for example, if January 15, 2006 appeared in the article, link it as January 15, 2006.[?]
 * As per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), dates shouldn't use th; for example, instead of (if such appeared in the article) using January 30th was a great day, use January 30 was a great day.[?]
 * Per Manual of Style (headings), headings generally do not start with articles ('the', 'a(n)'). For example, if there was a section called  ==The Biography== , it should be changed to  ==Biography== .[?]
 * Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
 * Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “ All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
 * As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2][?]
 * Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.[?]

Cam

 * The "Territorial Changes" part in the infobox needs some fleshing out. "Southwest Virginia" is a fairly general term.  Personally, I would simply add more detail to that one element of the infobox, without making it overly long.
 * Considering the size of the article, there are very few citations. When I have more time, I'll add the "Citation Needed" clips to the article.  Density of citations is also very low in some of the sections
 * I'm going to have to agree with Carom. the "Aftermath" Section needs a lot of fleshing out.
 * In the infobox, you need to find a statistic for "strength". The casualty figures tell me that this was a relatively small battle.  however, I would prefer to have an actual figure for the strength of the opposing armies.
 * There are places, especially in the "first day of the battle section", that are very difficult to fluently read.
 * There are other places, mainly the opening of the "Second day of the battle" that read too much like a historical novel. I would suggest reformatting this to fit the prose of an encyclopedia, rather than a historical novel.
 * I checked the history of the page, and it was once 20,000 bytes in size. Now, it's only 16,000.  I would investigate why this is, and consider adding back in some of the stuff which was cut from earlier versions, so as to flesh out many aspects of the article.
 * Lastly, the "outcome" section is almost contradictory at times. The Union forces achieved a tactical victory, and yet the rebels had inflicted heavy casualties against the Union Army.  This is further contradicted by the casualty figure in the infobox.  A tactical victory usually means that one side inflicted more casualties on the other.  I, personally, would qualify this as a Tactical Confederate Victory, Strategic Union Victory.

Good luck carrying the article forward. All the best
 * Cam (complaints) 04:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)