Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Vasa (ship)

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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 promoted 16:46, 23 December 2007.

Vasa (ship)[edit]

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The Vasa is one of the oldest preserved warships in the world, and me and User:Peter Isotalo have been working on it to bring it up to FA standards. Feedback from the experts here would be much appreciated on how to improve it further. Selfnom. henrik•talk 13:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Improving this article has been pretty much shared equally by myself and Henrik, and I believe it has been a very fruitful collaboration. Working part time at the gift shop at the Vasa Museum, I have been able to get plenty of inside information and, despite being a rather half-assed photographer, views of the ship that are inaccesable to normal visitors. I have also consulted with employees of the museum about various aspects of the ship and its history. A few weeks ago, I asked Fred Hocker, a researcher employed by the museum, to look through the article. His review of the article rendered some comments to me via e-mail which I have used to tweak the article further, but overall I can report that he was pleased with the contents.
Peter Isotalo 13:59, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Very thorough and a good read. I know the Vasa Museum has its own article, but a few sentences on the relocation would be good and perhaps a photo if you can squeeze it in. The linking could do with reviewing - there are probably articles for some of the nautical terms that aren't linked or should exist if they don't already. Also the dates aren't consistently formatted, there are some metric/imperial conversions missing and you need to add   to stop them wrapping (I'm sure somebody must have a script to sort that out). Yomanganitalk 14:21, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • What looks like the confusing of imperial and metric conversions is because the original specifications for the ship were in feet, and the sources we've used state the length in feet, not meters. Peter Isotalo 14:30, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • I realised that (and it is completely valid in my opinion), but when you use metric units there are places where the units are converted and other places where they are shown only in metric (have pity on us poor Imperialists!) Yomanganitalk 14:37, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
        • Is it American or Swedish feet? The ship is from before SI, so they would still use old units. Narayanese (talk) 12:53, 21 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thank you for some very helpful suggestions. I believe most of them have been addressed, let me know if you concur. A paragraph about the museum at the end of The Vasa project has been added, The nautical terms in Maiden voyage linked, The dates are now formatted according to American custom, Imperial conversions added (let me know if any have been missed) henrik•talk 21:40, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support A very interesting article. I recently nominated an article that I worked on for FA [1] so I know a little about FAC's. Suggest the following improvements:
Fixing references. 59: ny teknik is not familiar to all, 62 versus 63: fix italics so they are the same, 66 is almost right, not quite. I know from my own experience that reference fixing is boring.
2nd and 3rd paragraphs need a reference? Use the Hocker book?
Good luck! Archtransit (talk) 20:33, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comments! I'm actually surprised Ny Teknik doesn't have an article here, it is a fairly well-known technical paper in Sweden. I might write a stub and wikilink the ref. 62 and 63 have been tweaked and 66 has been fixed to look more like the cite web template.
I'm a bit reluctant to introduce more references in the lead, as the casual reader probably won't be interested in refs (and the lead might be the only thing he or she reads). The lead doesn't really introduce new information not sourced elsewhere, and Vasa isn't so controversial every little bit of info needs referencing. This seems to comply with WP:LEAD#Citations in the lead section, but I'd be happy to source specific claims that are challenged. henrik•talk 21:06, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - I can not find any issues that haven't been addressed and fixed. Great article! -MBK004 22:45, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support An interesting tale well-told. A member of the League of Copyeditors, I worked on this article about a week ago, and I see no remaining problems except perhaps the no-break-space codes mentioned above by Yomangani. I usually enter these one-by-one, but an easier way may exist. In any case, I think Vasa should go sailing along to FA without much trouble. Finetooth (talk) 03:23, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: The article is well-written but is yet to meet FA quality because of:
  1. Lack of citations. Many sentences in the article are without citations. I would expect an FA article should have significant amount of citations to prevent users from questioning the authenticity.
  2. MoS issues. Usage of words like arguably, prestigious, believed to be, some of and PoV phrases like with great certainty be identified in a considerable percentage, "a crowd of hundreds, if not thousands", "Among the ablest and probably most militarily", "perhaps most inopportunely", "among the heaviest and most splendid of their time", "it must be assumed" -- ¿Amar៛Talk to me/My edits 08:45, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Citations are mostly done by the paragraph in this article, not per sentence. It's more a question of a different style of writing than a lack of references.
  2. I don't think it's fair to characterize these phrases as POV since they are all pulled out of their proper contexts. Here we're talking about either simple editorial embellishment or the conclusions in the sources. If these example are biased, then what POV are they representing? Which POV is being ignored? What's controversial about them? And surely you can't mean that every single instance of certain phrases and adjectives by themselves disqualify an article as an FA. I searched for the sentences that contained "some of", and I couldn't really find anything that was unnecessarily vague about them. Statements like "a firing platform in boarding actions for some of the 300 soldiers" or "Reproductions of some of the sculptures that adorned Vasa" don't exactly qualify as weasel wording. Peter Isotalo 09:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Lets look at it sentence by sentence:
  • "Among the ablest and probably most militarily successful of Swedish rulers was Gustavus Adolphus.": Words like probably are better to be avoided in an FA, he either is successful or he is not, he cannot be probably successful. Moreover, that he was able and militarily successful has no bearing on the ship, we are talking of the ship in the article and not about Gustavus Adolphus.
  • "What made her arguably the most powerful warship": Why is there an argument about her being a powerful warship, was there any other ship comparable to her? What is the other viewpoint?
  • "perhaps most inopportunely, Vasa foundered and sank on her maiden voyage"; according to whom was this most inopportune?, that the ship sank is a fact, that the event was inopportune is a POV.
  • "No record exists of what happened to Fahnehjelm's request after it was filed, and it must be assumed that no major attempt at recovery was actually made": This is a POV. Just because no record exists of what happened to Fahnehjelm's request, does not mean that no attempt of recovery was actually made. This can be written without POV as: "No record mentioning a major attempt at recovery of the ship exists".
  • This would be especially unfortunate if it happened to objects made by skilled craftsmen, such as household items or some of the hundreds of carved sculptures: There is no need of this sentence in the article.
There may be other sentences like these in the article but I am mentioning only few of them as an example. The original sentences are good if we are writing a book on the ship but not in an encyclopedia. -- ¿Amar៛Talk to me/My edits 07:09, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I made some adjustments[2] to three of the examples given, but I don't feel that the other two are problematic unless they are taken out of context.
  • The "arguably"-statement is preceded by the following sentence "She was neither the largest ship ever built, nor did she have the greatest number of guns." That's the counter-argument and the other perspective. If you look at the history of sailing warships, the size of the ship and especially the number of guns have been very important measurements of success.
  • That Vasa sank on her maiden voyage was a financial disaster and a public humiliation for the Swedish crown. From what perspective would such a debacle not be described as anything other than "inopportune" for the Swedish monarchy at that time?
I think it's better if you actually specify problematic sentences since we seem to have somewhat different perspectives on how to interpret 1a of the FA criteria.
Peter Isotalo 07:58, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've clarified that the event was "inopportune" from a Swedish context. It was obviously implied, but not quite spelled out before. henrik•talk 08:16, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments Overall, I thought this was a very informative and well-written article. There are a few WP:MOS issues that need to be fixed before I can support.
    • Need conversions from standard to metric measurements (mile in lead may be the only one).
  • slightly rephrased and mile linked to "nautical mile" henrik•talk 19:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Two instances of two em dashes removed by User:Finetooth. In other aspects I agree with Peter below. henrik•talk 19:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Need non-breaking spaces between numbers and their units. Use either & nbsp; or {{{1}}}
  • I'm having trouble locating those remaining, could you please point out the ones you've uncovered? henrik•talk 19:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • The article must have a citation after each quotation, even if that means the citation is duplicated in successigve sentences. I've marked a few of these with citation needed tags.
    • I wonder if the Causes of Sinking section should be up above, perhaps after Inquest? It makes more sense to me that Conservation should come directly after archaelogy

Karanacs (talk) 18:13, 21 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • The lead in the mile is supposed to be a very rough measurement, and since it's a maritime article, a nautical mile is the rather obvious choice. I don't think it's worth translating to either land miles or kilometers.
  • I think something like four different editors (including heavyweights like Sandy and Tony) have made edits and comments concerning where dashes should or should not be used in this article. I frankly have no idea what the "correct" interpretation of the MoS is supposed to be. I can only point out that the article was written by Henrik and myself without a single em dash without us being smitten by thunderbolts or loud complaints about poor legibility.
  • The article has citations after every quotation, just not at end of the same sentence as the quote. Considering that no substantial quotes are sticking out without footnotes just a few sentences down, I don't think that duplicate footnotes will serve any purpose other than to distract readers who aren't going to read Vasa I or The Power and the Glory anyway. The only quotes that aren't included to merely spice up the text are those from Soop where he comments on the style of the wood carvers, but those are quite directly cited.
  • I've moved up "Causes of sinking" just below "History", but I don't think it should be inserted into the chronology since it's really about a modern scholarly discussion. That means "Conservation" comes right after "Archaeology".
Peter Isotalo 07:49, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I first read this a few months ago; it was good then, and it's great now. I changed a couple of abbreviations of the word 'circa' from 'ca' to 'ca.' per MOS. I would also suggest interwiki linking poop and orlop as most people won't be familiar with those terms. Well done. Maralia (talk) 02:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.
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