Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Keelung Campaign

Keelung Campaign
This is one of about a dozen articles on campaigns and battles of the Sino-French War that I have created or expanded in the past six months, and is the nearest of my articles to completion (though it probably needs an infobox). I have said in this article just about everything I would like to say about the Keelung campaign, and as the article is representative of my writing style, approach to sourcing and approach to illustration, I would appreciate comments from other users at this point so that I can adjust my approach, if necessary, when I try to complete all the other articles. One issue that I would particularly welcome advice on is whether my S-F War articles assume too much background knowledge of French and Chinese history on the part of readers.

Djwilms (talk) 08:41, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Parsecboy
Hi. A few things that jump out at me:


 * the lead is a bit short (per WP:LEAD, the intro should be able to stand on its own, like an abstract in a journal), and you've got too many pictures in the same sections.


 * Per MOS:IMAGE, text sandwiching should always be avoided; you can always make a gallery of extra images at the bottom.


 * Much of the article doesn't have inline citations. In the footnotes, you've got citations at the end of paragraphs/sections with 20 or 30 page ranges; you need to break them up into at most 2 or 3 page ranges, and spread them out, so the reader can tell exactly where you got each piece of information.


 * Another thing you might consider is cleaning up the references: you've got the full titles in the References section, so you don't need the book title in the footnotes. Also, you have two footnotes that are just text, you may want to put those in a different section with the function (an example can be found here).


 * This sentence: "In the wake of the Battle of Fuzhou, which inaugurated the nine-month Sino-French War, the French decided to put pressure on China by landing an expeditionary corps in northern Formosa to seize Keelung, redeeming the failure of 6 August and finally winning the ‘pledge’ they sought", seems overly complex. If you split it in half, it would make the paragraph flow better.


 * In the same paragraph as the above, it says that Admiral Courbet and Patenôtre were overruled, but doesn't say by whom. If one were to assume that they were overruled by the inability to support an invasion of mainland China, the sentence stating that they were overruled becomes redundant and unnecessary.


 * "The decision to attack Keelung was taken by the French cabinet..." shouldn't that be "made", instead of "taken"?


 * "80-millimetre mountain guns" should have a standard conversion.


 * French words, such as "La Table", and "Le Cirque" should be italicized.

Most of these are small issues, but the expansion of the lead section and reworking of the references are fairly major. Overall, it's a pretty good article, and with more work, can eventually reach FA status. Parsecboy (talk) 18:08, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Dear Parsecboy,

Thanks very much for such a detailed response. Those were very helpful comments, and I'll start working on them.

Djwilms (talk) 00:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

YellowMonkey
It appears that you are only wikilinking when the target article exists and will appear blue, because I see in your articles there are a lot of officers and military forts and places etc that are wikilinked and only blue and no redlinks. It's acutally encouraged for people to link to articles that don't exist to remind and encourage people to create the articles. So you should link them. Also I see you said on your page that you bolded articles on Sino-French War that you intend to create earlier, but I changed this to redlinks per the WP:MOS. I see you have done this in Hong Kong Morris also, although I think that if you created articles on the club members they will be deleted per WP:N.  YellowMonkey  ( click here to choose Australia's next top model! ) 04:46, 13 November 2008 (UTC)