Wikipedia:Peer review/Expulsion of the Acadians/archive1

Expulsion of the Acadians

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to improve the article to (possibly) FA status. I like to have a 2nd opinion on how to improve the article. The article failed an GAN in January. Since then, there was a lot of changes [1]. I would like for suggestions on how to improve the article even more.

Thanks, ~~Ebe123~~ on the go! 14:35, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Note: Please do not say that the references do not use the {{Cite}} templates, and there is no section for the notes. ~~Ebe123~~ on the go! 16:24, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Brief comments from Nikkimaria

• Citations need significant cleaning up - the formatting used should be as consistent as possible. You can use templates or not as you prefer for this.
• Captions that aren't complete sentences shouldn't end in periods, ranges should use endashes...if you're going for FA status, WP:MOS compliance is a must
• File:Marquis_de_Boishébert_-_Charles_Deschamps_de_Boishébert_et_de_Raffetot_(1753)_McCord_Museum_McGill.jpg needs US PD tag. Same with File:Flag_of_Nova_Scotia.svg
• Check for repeated wikilinks
• TOC is a bit on the long side
• {{cn}} tag needs to be addressed, and some other areas need citations - aim for a bare minimum of one citation per paragraph, in most cases more
• Suggest writing the "Commemorations" section as prose

This doesn't appear to be too far from GA standards, but is a way off from FA yet. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:08, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions, and I will edit the article accordingly. ~~Ebe123~~ → report 21:35, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Comments by Magicpiano

• General agreement with Nikkimaria's suggestions, but I think the article is a longer way from GA, for reasons of content and organization.
• The article still reads as if it is a bit of a jumble, and needs to be thoroughly copyedited. It lacks a single, coherent voice, and material is sometimes duplicated or restated. In addition to not reading well, this also leads to overlinking.
• The article opens with a section titled "Historical context" whose first sentence is "The Acadian removal occurred during the French and Indian War." I expect a section with that title to tell me about the background and causes of the events to be described, which this sentence does not do. The section also doesn't tell me who the Acadians are or even where Acadia is; it is not a currently-existing entity, so a hypothetical 12-year-old with a modern atlas won't be able to locate it. The organization of this section is almost backwards -- start with necessary elements of early history, then develop the plot.
• The background needs to talk about what sort of polities the Acadians had -- where were the population centers, and how was the resistance (first to British rule, then to the logistics of the expulsion) organized. There is no mention, for example, that governors-general of Quebec actively supported and encouraged Acadian and Mi'kmaq resistance and flight from Nova Scotia (through the offices of people like Rale, Le Loutre, and Boishebert).
• The first time Charles Lawrence is mentioned, it is as "Lawrence" (unlinked). (This is probably a consequence of multiple editor contributions and consequent lack of coherent voice.)
• "Acadia" ceased to exist as a polity in 1713 (de facto in 1710, when British governance of Nova Scotia began); references to areas that were unambiguously under British control after that date should properly use Nova Scotia.
• The logistics of the expulsion from the British perspective are missing. Presumably each of the campaigns was under someone's command: who were these commanders, and who did they get their orders from (was it always Lawrence)? What were the political/military/logistical considerations that went into the decisions to issue those orders? (Some of this is answered in the campaign articles, but should be summarized here.)
• For each campaign, I'd expect to see (to the extent that sources permit) what is known about how many people were taken, how many were killed resisting, how many got away (to where, and what ultimate fate). Where were people "cleared" from the area taken (proximately, so that we know if they were staged or simply loaded onto ships destined for their intended "final" destination). I think the "what happened afterward" is properly in a later section.
• I find the separation of resistance activities from those of the expulsion campaigns problematic. There is often cause and effect in these sorts of events, which the current structure does not really support well; as it stands, the section on resistance reads like a laundry list of events with no apparent connection to anything else (especially given that some of the places mentioned are not those were the events of the expulsion took place).
• Do we know why there were raids into Maine? (i.e. what were the resistance objectives)?
• The section "Aftermath of the Seven Years War" should be renamed (perhaps something like "Consequences" or "Fate of the expelled"), and the needless mention of the fate of French sailors should be removed (or its presence justified in context).
• Words that are not proper nouns (e.g. "Historian" and "Campaign") are sometimes unnecessarily capitalized.

--Magic♪piano 17:29, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Is there a tool or script other than AWB? Thanks for the comments. ~~Ebe123~~ → report 00:36, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. Please check the edit summaries. - Dank (push to talk)

• "The Expulsion of the Acadians (also known as the Great Upheaval, the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, Le Grand Dérangement) was ...": The first sentence should be more compact than this, or people may stop reading before they even get to the verb. We don't need to know that the "Expulsion of the Acadians" was also known as the "Acadian Expulsion", and any deportation is a Deportation, so I removed those two ... it might be better to move either Great Upheaval or Great Expulsion (whichever is the less common name) to the first section ("sometimes called the Great Upheaval", for instance). - Dank (push to talk) 16:33, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
• "The Expulsion (1755–1763) occurred during the French and Indian War. The Expulsion started by the British deporting Acadians to the Thirteen Colonies and then, after 1758, the British sent them to France.": The Expulsion (1755–1763) began during the French and Indian War, when the British began deporting Acadians first to the Thirteen Colonies and then, after 1758, to France. See WP:Checklist#repetition.
• "The British Conquest of Acadia happened in 1710. The Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713, and allowed the Acadians to keep their lands.": More concise (and more detailed) would be: "Two and a half years after the British Conquest of Acadia in 1710, the Treaty of Utrecht allowed the Acadians to keep their lands." - Dank (push to talk) 16:58, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
• "Over the next forty-five years, the Acadians refused to sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to Britain. During this period, Acadians participated in ...": ... allegiance to Britain, participated in ...
• "the French fortress of Louisbourg and Fort Beausejour": fortresses
• "the military campaign that the New Englanders used": You don't really "use" a military campaign, you conduct it or participate in it (or in a part of it)
• "The British sought to eliminate future military threat": ... any future military threat
• "and to permanently cut the supply lines they provided to Louisbourg by deporting Acadians from the area.": You just said more or less the same thing. See WP:Checklist#conciseness. - Dank (push to talk) 17:05, 11 September 2012 (UTC)