Wikipedia:Peer review/Yeomanry/archive1

Yeomanry

Note: This PR relates to the article Yeomanry Cavalry

Looking for fresh eyes to help get this article into shape for a run at FAC. It's pretty much a 1st draft at the moment, and has not been subjected to my usual obsessive copy-editing process, so I'm not looking for any issues of prose right now. The article obviously lacks images, but I will be sourcing these in due course. What I am interested to learn is how well it all hangs together. Does it flow reasonably well? Have I missed anything? Any issues of clarity or ambiguity? Have I gone into too much detail anywhere? I'm more than happy for a cursory PR and a simple list of "this doesn't work, that could be better..." - there's no requirement to offer solutions with the critique. Thanks, Factotem (talk) 15:09, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Well, first of all, to this Australian military historian, "yeomanry" immediately brings to mind the yeomanry regiments in the Sinai and Palestine in the Great War. But this is wound up relatively quickly in the last section. Australian accounts note the yeomanry at this stage as being composed of the landed gentry, and its preference for clean table cloths and silverware. You say that "in 1913, re-united with their swords" but never mention their being parted from them. Did all regiments volunteer for overseas service in the Great War? Actually, there is a whole article on British yeomanry during the First World War, but it isn't referenced in the article, even in the "See also" section.

• Becke and Perry are listed in the bibliography, but not used. His volume on the AIF was so riddled with errors that I created my own OrBat. I hope his British volumes are better.
• The images seem fine. Although they look all odd sizes on my screen.
• Suggest swapping the second and third paragraphs of the lead around

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:50, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

• Very good point. I thought long and hard about the scope of this article, and at one stage it had a lot more content on the actions of the yeomanry regiments in the First and Second World Wars. However, there's a very distinct cut-off in 1908 with the Territorial Force. At this point the discrete "Yeomanry Cavalry" became, alongside their infantry equivalent the Volunteer Force, components of an altogether different, unified auxiliary organisation. Given the length of the article, that seemed to be a quite logical end-point, with the quick winding-up in the last section acting as an aftermath-type section. I've also proposed changing the article name to "Yeomanry Cavalry" to reflect the very specific organisation this article is about. Does this look like a significant issue to you?

  The cut-off seems fine, although you could make it more explicit. Especially given existence of the other article, which can take the story from there. As for the name change, "Yeomanry cavalry" seems to have been a popular term in the 19th century, but its use rapidly declined in the early 20th. That's why I hadn't seen it.[1] "Yeomanry" has always been by far the more common term. [2] Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:19, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Good point about making it more explicit, and precisely the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Thank you. I'm working now on a more detailed narrative relating to the Territorial Force, and the continued debate about the role of auxiliary forces in general and the yeomanry in particular that led up to that flawed solution. Factotem (talk) 11:37, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

• Did not know about that other yeomanry article. I've added it to the see also section, but I'll look into integrating that better into the last section.
• The swords were prised from the yeomanry in 1901, when the govt tried to shoe-horn a reluctant and still very exclusive yeomanry into a mounted infantry role. That's already covered in the "Imperial Yeomanry" section.
• I'll look into the pics. I use various different sizes according to how they look on my screen and, if I'm honest, to disguise the fact that until very recently there were hardly any. Maybe I can just reset them all to default thumbs now.
• As an aside, this is the first in a series of articles I'm hoping to work on, all based around British auxiliary forces. The next will be the Territorial Force, as that has a nice cut-off when it became the Territorial Army after WWII Factotem (talk) 22:42, 30 January 2018 (UTC)