Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Special Boat Service

Special Boat Service

Any article about special forces will be hard to find verifiable/reliable sources so this will never be an FA article. However I think it coulld be A Class but needs some outside thoughts. I have cut down all the action man and boys own hero stuff and the article has been stable for some time now. As ever any comments appreciated.--Jim Sweeney (talk) 11:32, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

AustralianRupert

Good work so far with this one, Jim. Here are my comments, mainly cosmetic issues:

• in the lead "counter-terrorism" has an endash, but this should be a hyphen;
• Afghanistan and Iraq could be wikilinked in the lead to the respective conflicts;
• on my screen there is a large amount of whitespace due to the positioning of the photograph of Major Lassen. This would probably be fixed by moving it left;
• in the first and second sentences of the Second World War section, you have mixed capitalisation of the word "commando"; also I suggest moving the wikilink of this term to the first mention (i.e. from second sentence to the first);
• in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Second World War, the word captain has been capitalised, however, in this case it is an improper noun and should be lower case (per Wikipedia:MOSCAPS#Military terms;
• in the Second World War section you have used "Agean", is this correct? Should it be Aegean?
• in the Post war section, I think "king" (as in "king Idris I of Libya") should be capitalised;
• in the Post war section, the name of a ship ("Queen Elizabeth 2") could be italicised, as this seems to be generally accepted throughout the project;
• in the Special Boat Squadron section, I think the word "Invasion" should be lower case;
• the first sentence of the 21st Century section is a run-on sentence. I suggest adding a comma after the word "Barras";
• the second sentence in the section needs to be tweaked as it is not grammatically correct ("This was followed in November 2001 the SBS..."). Perhaps change to "During the US invasion of Afghanistan, the SBS had an extensive role...";
• The Recruitment, selection and training section could have emdashes added beside the bulleted points for consistency.

Anyway, that is it for now. Cheers. — AustralianRupert (talk) 12:32, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

All done I left the image aligned right but moved it down that may cure the problenm on your screen with whitespace ? Thanks for the review.--Jim Sweeney (talk) 13:00, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

That did the trick! Good work. — AustralianRupert (talk) 09:30, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

ALR

Should probably come as no surprise, but I have concerns about the over-reliance on news-media sources for a lot of the current stuff, a couple of the others I'd question whether they meet the Verifiability criteria; Britains Small Wars and Military Careers. In practice BSW isn't bad, but the Military Careers website is a rehash of Elite-Forces UK.

Personally I would add some caveats to the organisation section to reflect the reliance on a 10 year old BBC article. There has been a significant restructuring since 2003 so it's quite out of date. There is nothing reliable in the public domain so my inclination is to caveat, or even slim it down. I should have culled all of that when I restructured the page, but it was a while ago and I was still hesitant about being overly deletionist.

ALR (talk) 17:10, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Its included in the Present day section - The Ministry of Defence does not comment on special forces matters, therefore little verifiable information exists in the public domain.

The news media are reliabe sources - The Times, Independant, Daily Telegrapth, BBC etc

Thanks for the input and and help with RS is appreciated --Jim Sweeney (talk) 17:29, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

My concern is mainly around the extent of their use.

I can have another nose around but the applicant criteria, testing standards, process etc are all contained in a Confidential DCI/ DIN, similarly the ORBAT is Conf. Military tasks are public domain but a bit high level, so doing anything with them would probably be OR.

It's much improved, but I'm not sure that I know of anything public domain that is really credible.

ALR (talk) 20:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Nick-D

This article is in reasonable condition, but I think that it needs quite a bit more work to reach A class:

• Why not call the "British Naval Service" the "Royal Navy", which is its common (and very well known) name?
• The history section is a bit sketchy
• The claim " that by 1944 200–300 SBS men held down six German divisions" isn't credible. German dispositions in the Balkans were mainly motivated by the massive resistance movement and fears of a full scale Allied invasion.
• The statement that "The SBS went on to serve in the Korean War " is wrongly placed after accounts of their activities in the mid-1950s; the Korean War was long over by then.
• The coverage of the Iraq War should include the reports of a patrol being badly bungled which led to public recriminations between the SAS and SBS
• The 'See also' section should be integrated into the article, and the Australian clearance diving teams removed - the CDTs are not special forces and don't have a comparable role to the SBS (they focus on general diving duties and mine clearance, with a limited sideline into beach reconnaissance and small detachments with the Tactical Assault Groups) Nick-D (talk) 09:09, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the review - changed to Royal Navy, This was not the Balkans but the Greek islands, Korean War detail moved up the article to correct time, I have got rid of the see also section I have nver liked them and it was left over from before I started working on the article. --Jim Sweeney (talk) 23:32, 19 March 2010 (UTC)