Wikipedia:Featured article review/Battle of Normandy/archive1

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

The article was removed 15:01, 24 September 2007.

---

Battle of Normandy

Review commentary

Messages left at Sverdrup, MilHist, Caranorn and DJ Clayworth

Several issues plague this article.

• External links and further reading sections are far too long, making it hard to find good items further reading. The authoritative works should be noted.
• "Dramatizations" is but a "... in popular culture" section, something I believe there is a consensus against. It is a list of loosely associated topics, and should be prose, not a list. A list can never hope to include all dramatizations of this battle - prose can highlight the most notable ones.
• Several tags are in place: a neutrality tag, some citation needed tags, and a complex one - "when?". These indicate not a passerby wanting a citation, but rather an ongoing dispute, failing 1e.
• The article is too long, failing 4, and related, the table of contents can be called overwhelming with some certainty, failing 2c.
• It lacks inline citations, containing only nineteen for a great length of prose.

A good review and some editing would greatly help this article, and I am quite confident it can be kept featured then. But, without the necessary maintenance, it should be demoted. User:Krator (t c) 01:10, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

• Some of these tags make no sense: "in the spring of 1944.[when?]" is pretty absurd. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:19, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
• Looking further, the external links section could use trimming but the further reading section seems excellent, it is well structured and provides a nice range of works. It's not clear what distinction is being made between "Sources" and "Bibliography". Christopher Parham (talk) 01:26, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

The when tag is just a few days old and is indeed absurd, I was considering removing it right away, but wanted to give the editor who added it another chance to explain his reasoning (the entire article deals about the Northern Hemisphere, so there should be no doubt of when spring 1944 was). At least the Eastern Front section is disputed right now, but not so much that it couldn't be solved in the near future if a few editors take a look.--Caranorn 10:48, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Largely concur with Krator. The TOC has a total of 49 sections and readable prose is 78k. While the topic has broad enough scope to justify a long article, 78k is too long. To shorten it, I would suggest splitting the section on the landings themselves out to be a new article (D-Day landings currently redirects to D-Day, which seems odd!). I would also agree that stripping out or condensing the long list of computer games would be a good idea. Another potential new article would be Impact of the Battle of Normandy with material from the current Section 9. Perhaps if these sections were split out then the work of providing citations for the material would be manageable, rather than insurmountable. The Land 13:49, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Look at the version originally promoted - [1] - it is far shorter and is essentially about the invasion, not the battle. All the more reason to split off one or more articles. The Land 21:40, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

• oh, my. Certainly feels insurmountable. Krator, pls follow the instructions at WP:FAR and notify relevant WikiProjects and involved editors. If anyone is going to take on this gigantic task, deficiencies can be detailed further. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:04, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

I had notified the three main contributors as suggested in the guidelines. I will notify the Wikiprojects as well. --User:Krator (t c) 20:08, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

The only WikiProject to be notified, military history, has a banner at the top that lists all articles undergoing FAR. --User:Krator (t c) 20:10, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Top editors and original nominator should be notified (check article stats and the original FAC), and a note posted here at the top about notifications (see other FARs). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:46, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

• Just noticed this now. It looks like there is an over-abundance of images, the entire right side of the article on my monitor. Oberiko 14:11, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
• Second point, the article should, IMO, be structured better, into the major phases of the BoN, right now, it's far to focused on Operation Neptune which should be summarized here instead. Oberiko 14:17, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns EL and MoS issues (2), citations (1c), trivia and length (4). Marskell 13:44, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I've addressed the missing citations problem, the when tag problem has been addressed (I'm awaiting resolution from BD mills). Caranorn did some good work sorting out the external links citation. Regarding the length, we could split the Normandy/Dramatizations section as per WP:Summary, but I don't want to create WP:POV fork/WP:CRUFT. --Oshah 13:27, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Comments, please review section headings per WP:MSH; there is a lot of capitalization of words that I'm not sure are proper nouns. Why the listed point in "Army Group B Reserve" instead of prose? The appendices are a wreck; I can't sort out Further reading, it has no publishers, and don't know why all that bolding is there, pls see WP:MOSBOLD. Ditto for Bibliography, and websources need to be correctly formatted (see WP:CITE/ES). What is the difference between Sources and Bibliography and Further reading? Is Bibliography part of Sources or Further reading? External links need pruning per WP:EL, WP:RS, WP:NOT. Footnotes are not all completely and correctly formatted. More significantly, the article is still massively undercited; at minimum, hard data needs citation. Dramatizations is extended trivia. And there are external jumps. Also see WP:MOS#Captions regarding punctuation on image captions. 64KB readable prose exceeds WP:SIZE guidelines, trivia at minimum could be lost. Then there's the neutrality tag. This one doesn't look salvageable. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:40, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

• Remove—1a, 1c, 2.
  • MOS breach: spacing for ellipsis dots.
  • "the Red Army had done the majority of the fighting against Germany on the European mainland." Ambiguous, "done" is ungainly, and "the majority of" means more than 50%. Bombsite.
  • "Prime Minister Winston Churchill had announced the "full understanding" was reached"—word missing?
  • MOS breach: caption periods.
  • "In addition to fresh units, von Rundstedt also received a new subordinate,"—In addition to and also?
  • ise or ize: be consistent. Tony 12:35, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
• Remove. Besides prose issues analyzed by Tony, there are external jumps, POV tags, the referencing is poor, the structure "overwhelming", and the sources-further reading etc. not properly presented. It needs an editor who will commit himself to the article.--Yannismarou 16:10, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
• Remove This article needs a lot more inline citations to be considered FA quality and seems overly focused on the landing. The 'Further reading' section needs to be integrated into the bibliography and then be removed - at present it looks like somebody's list of favourite books on the battle, and seems very US-centric (eg, why are the US official histories listed but not the British official histories?) --Nick Dowling 08:22, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
• Remove as above. Buckshot06 19:20, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
• Remove per 1c. LuciferMorgan 20:54, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.