Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Armed Forces of Liberia/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by Ian Rose 02:07, 22 June 2012 [1].

Armed Forces of Liberia[edit]

Featured article candidates/Armed Forces of Liberia/archive1

Nominator(s): Buckshot06 (talk) 03:57, 17 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because it has passed a Milhist A-Class Review and I believe it is ready to be considered for FA status. All comments welcomed. Buckshot06 (talk) 03:57, 17 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, leaning oppose

Citations: There are numerous problems with the citations. Ref 62 is dead, others may be. Various other citations are incompletely or incorrectly formatted, far too many to list here but I see lots of bare urls, publisher information lacking, inconsistencies in retrieval date use and formats, and many other issues. The article itself may be excellent for all I know, but this aspect is nowhere near FAC requirements, and needs to be sorted out, top to bottom
"Legal standing": Why is it necessary to preface the article with this slab of legalese? It's a massive turnoff to the reader, and the gist of information, so far as we need to know it, could be paraphrased into a couple of brief sentences. Brianboulton (talk) 18:13, 17 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your thoughts Brianboulton. I obviously need to work on the refs, and thankyou, that's exactly the sort of comments I was looking for. On Legal standing, the convention, following on from another FA, Australian Defence Force, is to have the legal basis of the force up-front. As this is the only place on the entire Web where extracts from the Liberian NDA 2008 are available, I choose to add the full text. Buckshot06 (talk) 20:56, 17 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: When an issue presents itself, "I saw it in another FA" is not a valid argument for keeping the article as is. All it does is highlight a way in which the the other article can be improved further. In this case, it is also worth noting that the Legal standing section of this article is not at all similar to that of the Australian Defence Force article. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:51, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose at this time, open to revisiting. One of the major differences between A-Class and FAC is the focus on MOS, referencing and images, and it's here that this article needs polishing. In addition to the issues noted by Brian, I also found the following:

File:Coat_of_arms_of_Liberia.svg: should indicate the date of creation and copyright status of the coat of arms itself
Captions that are complete sentences should end in periods
Copy-editing needed for clarity and flow. For example, "The LFF in its early years was frequently recruited by inducing men from the interior forcibly" - "recruited" doesn't fit (would either be "forcibly recruited men" or "frequently staffed"), and "forcibly" should be combined with a verb
Spell out "%" in article text
Check for consistency in details like US vs U.S.
Don't abbreviate dates in article text
WP:OVERLINK: Monrovia twice in as many paragraphs, check for others. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:43, 18 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Leaning oppose. Not your fault, you were attentive at the A-class review 2 years ago, but I don't think you were served well by that review. The frequent quotes are not appropriate for FAC; one way to understand this is that we're trying to avoid the feel of a "brochure". Agreed with Brian about the Legal standing section. I'm leaning oppose because I think it's far enough away from FA that it would be an inefficient use of manpower to fix everything at FAC ... but feel free to prove me wrong. I don't really know where to begin; I'm a copyeditor, and it's not time for copyediting yet, it needs a shift in focus. If this one isn't promoted, you might try WP:GAN, or you may pick up enough helpful comments before this closes to be ready next time around. Sorry I can't be more helpful. - Dank (push to talk) 00:10, 18 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. In addition to the Legal standing issues I commented on above, here are some other problems:

Why is there a navbox in the middle of the article?
The "Organization of the Liberian Militia" box is not useful and should be removed.
Captions are not punctuated correctly. Those that are full sentences should end with periods, those that are not full sentences should end without periods.
One- and two-sentence paragraphs should be expanded, merged, or deleted.
The block quotes in Rebuilding the AFL are almost completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.
"On January 11, 2008 a total 485 soldiers graduated from Initial Entry Training class 08-01. The addition of this third class of soldiers, consisting of 468 men and 17 women, raised the total strength of the AFL from 639 to 1,124." First off, the fact that this is 4 years out of date makes it not useful. However, even if it were up to date, I don't think this level of detail is necessary in this context.
"Recruits had to pass a literacy test, an aptitude test, a drug test and an HIV test, and their names and faces are put on posters which are distributed to try to make sure none have a history of war crimes or other human rights violations." Past tense or present tense? Like toothpaste and orange juice, the two should not be mixed!
Good detail: "The Liberian Air Force was established from the Aviation Unit by an Act of Legislature on August 12, 1987." A succinct summary of an important event in the history of the AFL. Yay!
Bad detail: "The LAF was to be headed by a colonel in his capacity as Assistant Chief of Defense Staff for the Air Force and was mandated to do the following: to train personnel and develop doctrine; advise the Chief of Staff of the AFL on matters relating to the Air Force." Clunkily worded bureaucratic shenaniganry that literally no one would ever need to know ever in the history of forever.
Much of the article is underlinked; there are entire paragraphs without any wikilinks at all. Don't be afraid to redlink the shit out of this article -- Wikipedia desperately needs to develop more Africa-related articles, and redlinks should be used to facilitate that process.

While I don't think this article is ready, I do hope that you continue to work on it. Your efforts are greatly appreciated; do not allow a failed FAC to convince you otherwise. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:51, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delegate note -- Yes, as Cryptic says, pls continue to develop this, taking on board the above comments. Per Dank, GAN (and/or Peer Review) may be the appropriate next step before another try at FAC, for which, in any case, a minimum of two weeks must pass before another nom. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 02:00, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.