Talk:Causes of World War I/GA1

GA Review

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I am currently carrying out the GA review for this article. I will add comments as they come up. — AustralianRupert (talk) 07:32, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

General points

As I mentioned on the talk page yesterday, there are a few general points that I feel need to be fixed up.

• Referencing: this is a major hurdle. There are a number of citation needed tags, plus large sections with no citations at all. A general rule of thumb for B class is that every paragraph or block of information (e.g. list) has at least one citation (more if multiple sources are used). For GA it would be a higher requirement, that is one citation per assertion made (hence many GA articles frequently have hundreds of notes);
• Citations: a number of the citations could be consolidated using WP:NAMEDREFS;
• Endashes and Emdashes: date ranges and page ranges require endashs and emdashes should be used also for aside points made within sentences as per WP:MOS;
• Reference list/further reading: there appear to be a couple of different styles of listing sources. The style needs to be consistent, e.g. some years have brackets, others do not.

GA Review criteria

I am still in the process of reviewing, but so far I believe that there are a number of issues that I feel prevent this article from being a GA.

• It is reasonably well written.

  a (prose): b (MoS):

• I believe that the introduction is really too short for a GA, as it is normal for a GA to have at least a couple of paragraphs.
• A number of MOS issues as per above. Endashes and emdashes need to be added. Also the introduction needs to be expanded.
• Some minor capitalisation and punctuation issues (for example in the Assassination section).
• Some of the prose is not as succint or as clear as it could be. For example, in the Colonial expansion section: "In 1914 there were no outstanding colonial conflicts, Africa having been essentially fully partitioned apart from Ethiopia for several years. Though the antagonisms the various rivalries and crises had provoked had not entirely subsided, the war emerged from a crisis in the Balkans so colonialism had, at most, an indirect role."
• There seems to be a mixture of citation style. In most of the article footnote style is used, however, the Havard style has also been used, e.g. in the Arms Race section.
• There is some mixing of terms, for example sometimes the Netherlands is used, but then Holland is used also. See Primacy of the offensive section.
• Citations should generally appear after a punctuation mark, e.g. a full stop (see Historiography section).
• Some of the sentences technically aren't sentences as they lack both a subject and predicate, e.g. Famous proponents include Joachim Remak and Paul Kennedy.
• There are a number of typos — I have fixed many of them, but the article requires a copy edit for typos.

• It is factually accurate and verifiable.

  a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

• As per the general comments above, there are not enough in line citations to consider this a GA article. There are very large sections without in line citations.
• The Further Reading section is massive, possibly too large. It would probably be best just to include three or four authoritative works.
• All the works used as in line citations should be included in a specific section, e.g. a Notes and a References section (with a separate Further Reading section for works not cited, but which a reader may be interested in).
• In the section on Kaiser Wilhelm's actions it mentions the British Navy. No such organisation exists. It should be Royal Navy. If you want to use a different (but more descriptive) term, British navy could be used as an improper noun but it is probably not good practice to do so.

• It is broad in its coverage.

  a (major aspects): b (focused):

• Some of the sections seem a little indistinct, for example the Anglo–German naval race does not really explain why this was a factor in causing the war.
• Despite some sections being indistinct, the article largely has good coverage, and is in most parts focused.

• It follows the neutral point of view policy.

  a (fair representation): b (all significant views):

• Some use of words that affect NPOV, for example "startling words" in the Escalation section when referring to Kaiser Wilhelm's commentary. Another example is the use of the word 'stupidity' when referring to the British proposal to limit the war to one front in the Escalation section.
• The article seems to discuss all points of view evenly, although some words (as above) impact upon its neutral point of view.

• It is stable.

  No edit wars etc.:

• This article seems a very contentious topic to me. From the article history I can see a couple of reverts and a lot of work still being carried out. In this regard, it may not be able to be considered as stable. Having said this, this in it self is not necessarily a reason to fail the article for GA, however, given that there seems that there is still work being done (there have been a lot of recent changes), the article does not seen to be stable to me.

• It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic.

  a (tagged and captioned): b (non-free images have fair use rationales): c (public domain images have appropriate rationales)

• The photo of the arrest of Princip has a very weak public domain claim in my opinion. I will freely admit to not being an expert in this regard, but the way I see it the rationale does not adequately detail why it is public domain, it just states that it is.

This could be questioned by the image police sometime in the future, which would damage the article. I have seen other photos with much more certain public domain claims be deleted, so it would be a concern with this photo.

• Overall:

  a Pass/Fail:

Comments Whilst the article is interesting and generally covers the topic well there are a number of issues that mean that it fails the GA criteria, however, this is not meant to be a criticism of the effort put in to the article — which is clearly considerable. Due to the large number of issues that this article has, I feel that it cannot be resolved by placing the GA nomination on hold. As such, I feel that it fails the requirements for a GA and as such close the review accordingly. I recommend that the article be put up for peer review (by going to WP:MHPR) before nominating it for GA again.

— AustralianRupert (talk) 08:14, 1 May 2009 (UTC)