Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Revolt of the Comuneros

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Revolt of the Comuneros[edit]

Promoted: --ROGER DAVIES ^talk 07:25, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This originally started as a translation of the Spanish Wikipedia Featured Article, but it's since been rewritten and expanded to use mostly English-language sources. Of which, annoyingly, there are only really two good ones, but so it goes. Anyway, I'd like to try and submit this for an FA eventually, and hope any remaining issues can be worked out.

And to bring it up now: there are two slight breaches of the image-placement guidelines from the MOS, but I'm going to file those under "reasonable exceptions" (the left-aligned picture underneath a level-three heading has only one paragraph to work with and has two right-aligned pictures above and below it; the "squishing" at the bottom is unavoidable since the last two pictures only make sense in the last two paragraphs.)

(Also, two extremely minor niggles to which I'd appreciate input on: what should the hatnote be, and should the navigational template have a Spanish flag to make it a bit more visually appealing. But these are both not huge issues, don't want to sidetrack things.) SnowFire (talk) 06:40, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - there are several sentences at the end of paragraphs, and in some cases entire paragraphs themselves, that are unreferenced; these need to be. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 10:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, outside the lead, the only paragraphs without inline-cites are generally short. There are no unreferenced sections, and the cite for that short paragraph is just in the next paragraph. If incline-cites per paragraph rather than per-section is standard, then I'll use the ref-name trick to reproduce the same citation. SnowFire (talk) 17:27, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd use the ref-name trick. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 05:01, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added more references and a few repetitions to emphasize that a section is all taken from one page range. SnowFire (talk) 01:21, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment-Some of the sections are very short and they make the table of contents very long. Consider combining some of them. ṜέđṃάяķvюĨїήīṣŢ ^{Drop me a line} 17:25, 4 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. I'm not completely adverse to this, but this article is on the long side (49K or so readable prose; certainly within WP:SIZE guidelines, but still hefty), and my personal thoughts are that in long articles, lots of descriptive section titles are more important so that people don't lose their place and can easily see at a glance what's going on. It does make the TOC a bit long, but I suppose we could hand-roll our own, shorter TOC if that's a concern.

The other thing is that some of the short sections take place in different geographical locations than their surrounding paragraphs. Specific short section notes: "The Junta of Ávila" is short, but takes place chronologically between Segovia and the Burning of Medina del Campo, yet is clearly distinct from them. It could be combined with the below section on the Junta of Tordesillas, I suppose, but only at cost of awkwardly stepping backward in time = "so there was this other meeting that wasn't as successful before Medina del Campo, but now that Junta gained power and members and moved to Tordesillas." The "Consequences" section on the Battle of Tordesillas is also a bit short, and could probably be combined with the above header on the battle without too much problem, but eh. It emphasizes the switch between the battle itself and the political fallout, so I think it serves a purpose. Thoughts? SnowFire (talk) 20:56, 4 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

~~Comment~~Support
- First of all, several dates are linked, and many many terms are linked more than once. Terms should only be linked the first time they appear.
- "becoming Emperor Charles V and cementing the power of House Habsburg." Wouldn't it be better to have this as "the power of the House of Habsburg"?
- I don't really like the giant map placed in the middle there, it bothers me. Is there some way that it can be smaller or something, so it doesn't break the article as much?
  
  Surprisingly, those were all I could find, so please fix those and I'll support it.Joe (Talk) 01:52, 10 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the input. The only date links are in the infobox, which I was under the impression was okay? At the very least last I checked there was a hot debate on the topic of linked dates in infoboxes. It's not a big deal though; I removed it. Also switched the thing on House of Habsburg if that'd be clearer. I've reduced the amount of redundant links. Some repeated links are still left, but I've tried to be careful with them; it's just that this is a long article, so the "between sections, repeated links may be permissible" rule of WP:CONTEXT comes up a fair amount. Also, I'm not sure how much this is spread with others, but I personally ignore the lead (links in the main body should be repeated, since the lead & the article are basically separate articles), and image captions are their own world which can get links even if it's been done before. I also try to maintain consistency: in some of those lists of cities, individual cities have already been linked, but I either link or not link the list as a whole. A similar example is where Juan de Padilla gets linked early in the Battle of Villalar section because it's been awhile since he was mentioned, and then gets linked again in the same section for the list of people executed because it would be odd to leave him unlinked. Hopefully that's enough?

Re making the map smaller: Hmm, don't agree with you on that one, and the people I asked for copyediting also favor the larger map. A 350px scaling is what's used in the Spanish article (es:Guerra_de_las_Comunidades_de_Castilla#Reacciones_a_las_propuestas): I personally found the map at that size completely illegible. Even if you know the city names already - which is less likely on the English Wikipedia than the Spanish one - I find the green/purple dot distinction very hard to make out. And once the image gets to be greater than 400 pixels, images have to be wide images - otherwise it looks completely ridiculous on 800x600 resolution monitors, with a tiny sliver of text on the left side. The problem is that rather than having a handy coloration for "Side X controlled this territory" like most modern wars, this one was a checkerboard of cities some of which joined, some of which didn't. So maps like Image:US Secession map 1861.svg which are easy to understand at low resolution are impossible, and the reader needs to be able to make out the color of each individual city. SnowFire (talk) 06:17, 10 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that's OK. I suppose that it would be hard to make the map smaller, I just don't like the way it looks now. I suppose there's no better way though, so it's fine. Joe (Talk) 22:49, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment on Sources/Refs - you can de-link the red-linked author dates at the bottom. Otherwise, references and bibliography look perfect (though I can't tell if the Spanish websites are RS's). Cheers, —Ed 17 ^{(Talk / Contribs)} 00:40, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re Spanish website linked: Actually added a few recently. I don't know the Cervantes Virtual Library well either, but it's just mirroring a historical document. While I haven't read the original Edict of Worms myself, I'd be completely shocked if they'd tampered with it somehow. On the other hand I am sure that the convenience-link for Don Quixote is valid, because I checked the relevant section. The link to the Virtual library on the Ph.D thesis seems pretty on-point, and I'm only really using him as a source to confirm "yes there were big demonstrations of Castilian nationalism at Villalar that invoked the comuneros." I added another link recently to confirm that Villalar changed its name in 1932; for some reason the town's official website doesn't have this (what I'd have preferred to link to), so I used a reputable news site instead, Cadena SER. This fact isn't terribly controversial anyway, there are plenty of websites that back 1932 up; this one just seemed fairly respectable. As for the two holidays, the first link goes to the Boletín Oficial del Estado, so that's pretty reliable. The other link is to the Tierra Comunera political party, which is what organizes the Toledo party. It's self-published, but I think they can be trusted about the basic facts and that the event exists (if not statements like "last year's event was a tremendous success!").

Went a slightly different direction on the authorlinks. Some of them are definitely notable academics, and even had articles already on the Spanish and French Wikipedia, so I translated some short articles on over on Maravall and Perez. I did remove the other author redlinks, with the exception of Haliczer, who I'll try to write a stub on later. SnowFire (talk) 04:18, 13 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- - Support —Ed 17 ^{(Talk / Contribs)} 18:21, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note Don't want to rush people or anything, but my library books will eventually expire and I happen to be facing a hard deadline in early December on returning them. Additionally I won't be around much during the Thanksgiving break. I'd like to go to FAC while I still have the books handy so I can address any content disputes, so if there are any further problems, can people raise them? Thanks. SnowFire (talk) 04:28, 17 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support - only one minor comment, image sizes should be left unspecified per WP:MOS. Well done! --Eurocopter (talk) 18:30, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Re image sizes: still wish the technical options were better on that. Ideally there'd be a *minimum* size that could be set (but still scaled up by users who want that in their prefs), or maybe something like "this picture should display at default+50px." Anyway I changed most of the images to either have no specification or be 300px. The pictures that I've set to 300px would look bad at low resolution, generally due to their dimensions being wider than they are tall and thus looking strange and tiny at 180px width. 300px is the maximum size thumbnails can be set to display at, so nobody will have their image scaled down due to that setting. Exceptions: The two maps are at native resolution and messing with that would distort the text. The lithograph of Juan de Padilla's native resolution is 161 so I set it directly to make certain it doesn't get blown up and look ugly due to artifacts. The shot of the church of Valladolid next to the TOC is at 275px, because aesthetically it seems good to make it a little smaller than the infobox to set it apart (and the difference for those who'd like to see it at 300 is tiny anyway). SnowFire (talk) 22:30, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.