Wikipedia:Peer review/British Army/archive2

British Army

Previous peer review

I've listed this article for peer review because I want to make it into a Featured Article, but I am not sure if it meets all of the criteria. I need feedback on how I can improve this article.

Thanks, Cheers, FriyMan ^talk 09:21, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi FriyMan, the article is in reasonable shape at the minute, but I'm afraid the GA review didn't go into the sort of depth necessary for an article like this. I'm afraid as things stand, an FAC would have no hope of success. What's here is mostly good, though it lacks depth in some places and it gives undue weight to recent history (this is a common problem on Wikipedia—anything that happened since the advent of 24-hour news channels and constantly updated websites gets blown massively out of proportion). My main concern is that it seems to built around websites and news sources, some of them of doubtful reliability, when an article like this needs to be based on books. There are plenty of good, solid histories of the British Army and of of British military history. Some of them are cited here, but not as much as they need to be, and just by glancing at my bookshelf and glancing at the bibliography here, I can see obvious gaps—for example (and these are just examples), no works by Lord Carver or William Jackson (both former army officers and distinguished military historians) are cited.

The other dealbreaker is that the references are a mess. You've got a mix of shortened footnotes (some using {{sfn}}, some not) and full citations in the references section, and a mix of books and web sources in the bibliography. Before you do anything else, I would suggest you gather all the books and multi-page sources into the bibliography and use Harvard-style shortened citations (with or without the template but be consistent) to cite individual pages and page ranges; then gather all your web/single-page sources into the main references section; then gather all your unused sources into another place (a further reading section, the talk page, or this review are all good places) until you can figure out whether you want to cite them or not. Then make sure they're all formatted consistently and contain all the necessary information. Once you've done that, it'll be much easier to figure out what you've got and where the gaps are, and you have a system you can easily follow for any citations added in future ([an example]). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 11:00, 22 March 2017 (UTC)