Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Pre-dreadnought

Pre-dreadnought

I have been working on this article (following on from battleship and ironclad warship which became FAs) and want some feedback. I haven't exhausted my to-do list on it yet but there will inevitably be some things I've missed. The Land 16:10, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Ready for A-class review, do you think? The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

A-class review now open. The Land 18:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Maralia

• "The last ships which can be considered the 'first pre-dreadnoughts'" . . . you've lost me here. Can't there be only one set of 'first pre-dreadnoughts'?

(More to come later - got interrupted for real life stuff!) Maralia 18:50, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Erm. Yes. The basic problem, as with all naval terminology, is that there is no hard and fast definition of what a pre-dreadnought is - no-one sat down and thought "I'm going to build a pre-dreadnought battleship". So you have some people arguing the Admirals (1889) are fundamentally pre-dreadnoughts, or that they aren't but the Royal Sovereigns (1892) are - only with the Majestics do you get a genuine consensus that the pre-dreadnought design had been reached. So the Majestics are the last first pre-dreadnoughts. I agree it's a very confusing phrase and should probably be changed ;) The Land 19:40, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I made it through the rest of the article now. Made various typo fixes and such; my edit summaries should explain those. A couple more issues:

• "The first French battleship after the lacuna of the 1880s was Brennus" Lacuna is a fairly obscure word that I only barely remembered—and I had 8 years of Latin. You might want to rephrase this.
• "In some ways these ships prefigured the later battlecruiser concept" Perhaps presaged rather than prefigured?

Thanks for an interesting read! Maralia 02:58, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Done. Thanks. The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I went through the changes you made since yesterday, and made some typo fixes again. A couple new issues:

• "battleships worldwide started to be built to a similar design" Can you reword this out of passive voice?
• "the chaotic appearance of the ironclad warships" This reads as though individual ironclads had a chaotic appearances; it doesn't really convey what you mean. I'm drawing a blank on a better way to say it, but I'm sure we can come up with something. Maralia 15:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Chaotic development does the trick. The Land 17:18, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

One more thing: the formatting within References and Sources is inconsistent. Examples:

• References 9, 10 and 13: "title. page" "title, page" and "title page"
• Sources 2 and 3: publishing date is in different places

From a prose standpoint, I think it's ready for A-class review. Maralia 17:58, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Kirill Lokshin

Looks quite good, overall. A few specific points:

• The caption for the diagram of the HMS Agamemnon mentions "five turrets amidships". Are you counting turrets along a single broadside? There are six turrets making up the secondary battery, as far as I can tell.
• External links should be placed after the reference section(s).
• I'd suggest changing all of the footnotes to short form and having a separate section for an alphabetical bibliography. The long-first-note style doesn't lend itself to a medium where text can be moved in an article; here, for example, Roberts and Gardiner both appear in short form before the actual publication data is given.

Kirill 19:01, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Fixed Agamemnon - you are right, six turrets. Have added the sources in full, will return to the full-length footnotes later. The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)