Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Battle of Opis

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Battle of Opis[edit]

I recently expanded this article from a stub to cover this crucial ancient battle and campaign in more detail, and have created a couple of maps to illustrate it. It has passed a B-class review. I would be interested to know what other editors think of it, as I would like to have a go at getting it up to A-class in due course. Suggestions for improvements would be very welcome. -- ChrisO (talk) 01:51, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cam[edit]

Overall, a well developed article. That said, there are several things that you could do to prepare it for an in-project ACR:

  • Increase the Citation density. I know all of the MoS stuff says "one per paragraph", but an article that sticks to that bare minimum would, quite frankly, be eaten alive at FAC.
  • I would suggest the expansion of "the battle" section. The background and aftermath of the battle are both quite detailed (which is nice, since you don't see those sections these thorough in many articles), but if there aren't enough details about the battle itself, it sort of becomes irrelevant.
  • It would be nice to find statistics for the strength and casualties of both forces. I've got a few books on the Ancient World, so I might be able to find a statistic for that myself.
  • The refs need reformatting. Generally (per MilHist MoS), the information about the book (author, title, year of publication, publisher, ISBN #) should go in a section titled "References" below a section titled "Footnotes", in which should be the webcites, and then the pg. #s of the book (usually formatted 'last name, p. x')
  • Figure out how to get rid of those non-neutrality tags - an unbalanced military history article is not a fun thing to have to deal with down the road.
  • "Sources" should be moved down and combined with the "Historical Assessment", which should likely be renamed "Historiography" for MoS purposes.

That's all I can see at the moment. I wish you the best of luck in taking this article forward. All the best, Cam (Chat) 05:04, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback!
  • "The battle" section can't really be expanded any further - there is next to no information about what actually happened, other than that the Babylonians were defeated.
  • There aren't any statistics for the same reason. No figures are recorded in any of the ancient sources.
  • The neutrality tags are a legacy of a dispute with a couple of editors who don't like the sources' mention of Cyrus the Great carrying out a massacre, basically because they subscribe to a nationalist POV that idolises Cyrus. I've removed them for now, since it's merely WP:IDONTLIKEITism.
  • I'll take a look at the other points you raise. -- ChrisO (talk) 11:42, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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