Talk:Siege of Turin

Expansion

This is part of series of updates for major battles in this theatre, so I've made it consistent, added references etc.

Robinvp11 (talk) 16:10, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Explanation

@Robinvp11: The user in question has displayed a tendentious editing pattern across a number of articles related to French and Italian battles. In these edits, he attempts to construct a narrative of the valiant Italians fighting desperately (and more successfully than they actually did) against the overwhelming forces of an evil France. Some small context can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Eyes on some doubtful editing on the end of WWII., and the best exemplification of his editing style can be found at Second Battle of the Alps. The revert I made here was part of what was more or less a mass rollback of the user's edits.

Several issues caused me to revert this particular edit, One was the changes to the casualty statistics in the infobox. He reduced the size of the Savoyard garrison from 22,500 regulars plus militia to 14,500, and deleted the lower estimate for French strength, so that it said 48,000 instead of 40,000–48,000. Meanwhile, he reduced the Savoyard/Austrian casualty count from a range of 7,000–11,000 to a specific 8,246, while he increased French casualties from 16,000–18,000 dead and 6,000 wounded (22,000–24,000) total to 29,500 total casualties. These edits serve to make Italy (Savoy) look weaker and France stronger than they actually were, which makes the Savoyard victory more impressive. Note that none of them cited sources, and some even deleted sourced statistics. I note that some of the changes were made to match the body, but most of them weren't.

The infobox was the main thing, but there were some others. For example, he changed "By October 1795" to "By the end of 1975", which made the French advance look slower. He also added the note that the France had been in an "extremely favourable position" prior to the battle, making the Savoyard victory appear more significant, while adding "finally" to their sentence about their completing a blockade makes it seem like the French forces were taking longer than they were supposed to, thus making French forces look less skilled/competent.

His changes weren't all bad, but a lot of them were, and I thought it easier to revert them and let someone re-add whatever was good manually. You disagree about the best technical route. It doesn't really matter, but unless you object, I would like to revert all of the changes I just described here. Thanks, —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 13:54, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

I didn't want to lose the other revisions ie better picture, additional references etc (and as the person largely responsible for the rewrite, they are improvements on my edits so I can say that :)).

Again, "extremely favourable position" and 'finally' were my wording and accurately reflect phrasing used in the source provided. I don't know what the past context is but its very hard for an outsider to understand why these qualify as 'tendentious editing.' I've altered the wording but frankly, I would not consider changing 'October 1705' to 'end of 1705' as being a slur on French competence.

If you want to change the Infobox, please do so; numbers are hard to establish, and if you have better ones, that's great but simply reversing it puts the burden on others.

Robinvp11 (talk) 15:02, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Citation queries

Hi. Nice article. A couple of comments.

• The cite and the source for Duffy have different dates. (And I can't, personally, track either of them to an edition of the book in question.)
• Somerset is cited but is not in the list of sources.

Gog the Mild (talk) 23:11, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Sorted, tx Robinvp11 (talk) 14:01, 14 July 2020 (UTC)