Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/USS Liberty incident

USS Liberty incident
Reason for recommendation:

Article is a real mess as it tends to attract attention from a variety of POV pushers, fringe/conspiracy theories etc. I'd like to fix the article but would like some guidance as to where to start. Justin talk 20:49, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Narson

 * I am involved with the article (indeed, I am accused of having a 'Personal stake' in it for some reason), but one thing that strikes me about the article is that it has developed into two seperate articles within the same one. Rather than present a point and rebuttle, we seperate out the two versions. I know this was done for NPOV reasons but the result is clunky and simply allows the stories to stand alone (Making selectic reading and thus undue weight very easy) -- Narson ~  Talk  • 23:19, 5 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree with Narson. Also, the article has lots of unsourced material. I would consider demoting it to Start-class. -- Nudve (talk) 12:08, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Skinny87

 * The lead seems filled with peacock words - 'neutral' vessel, for example
 * The caption on the first article is similarly POV
 * 'The attack on the Liberty' - This is a huge section. Might I suggest dividing it into 'Background' and 'Attack on the Liberty'?
 * Lots of areas need citations - take this random example: 'Unfortunately, due to inadequate message handling and routing, the CPA change messages were not received until after the attack.'

That's about it - it's a huge article and obviously has POV issues, but good luck sorting it out! Skinny87 (talk) 15:19, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Hawkeye7
Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:22, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * The USS Liberty cannot be both a "neutral" ship and a victim of "friendly fire" (ie an ally) in the same context. Either unlink "attack on the armed forces of a friendly nation" - the text is correct but not the link to "friendly fire" - or remove "neutral". (Recommend the former.)
 * The link to "Israeli" in the first sentence links to "Israeli Air Force" but the motor torpedo boats belonged to the navy. Suggest "Israeli Defence Force (IDF)" instead.
 * "The IDF air and naval forces, respectively, misidentified ". Delete "respectively".
 * Link "CIA Director" and "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff"
 * Is "technical research ship" weasel words for "spy ship"? Suggest spy ship in the intro.
 * "Unfortunately, due to inadequate message handling and routing, the CPA change messages were not received until after the attack." Reference required here.
 * "ibid" Change to a named reference, or move the previous reference.
 * "As war broke out Captain William L. McGonagle of the Liberty immediately asked Vice Admiral William I. Martin at the U.S. 6th Fleet headquarters to send a destroyer to accompany the Liberty and serve as its armed escort and as an auxiliary communications center." Reference required.
 * "United States Ambassador Goldberg" Link to Arthur Goldberg. I would insert "UN" before ambassador.
 * There's a pile of "citations required" to be filled in.
 * Can you move the page numbers into the footnotes? Gee, they're annoying.
 * Change "Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd" to "Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Jr" (My first thought was "couldn't be.")
 * The whole of the "American Government Investigations" and "NSA tapes and recent developments" sections need citations.

PalestineRemembered
This is a terrible article that fails to deal with the Reliable Sources available properly. While RSs are edit-warred out, sources of profoundly dubious character are used extensively. The latest abuse going on right now is the re-inclusion of a statement that is clearly a lie, over a consensus of a five six to two at the TalkPage a month ago. (This discussion has been pointlessly if not disruptively archived by a partisan). In addition to numerous such RS faults, the article is rife with unsupported statements sufficiently "surprising" to need citations. I counted 60 of these and tagged them (as others have done). Most of these tags were summararily removed (sometimes with threats, calling them disruptive), while no attempt has ever been made to fix the faults. (I've checked the entire TalkPage archives for any discussion of these statements or any suggestion that some could be allowed stand on their own, there seems to have been no such AGF interplay ever). Similar edit-warring conduct has been applied to the overall "This article has uncited statements" tag. I would be keen to expand on or correct any statement I've made here, but I'm pretty sure I've already added all the details of these incidents (and much more) to the TalkPage. PRtalk 15:36, 16 December 2008 (UTC)