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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Krag-Petersson

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Krag-Petersson

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Selfnomination. The article has been throught a peer review, a (failed) FAC, and another peer review. I feel the article as it now is ready for FA-status - much more so than last time it went on FAC - and that all the issues raised have been adressed.

I truely do feel that this is a very comprehensive article avilable on the Krag-Petersson rifle; one of the first (if not the first) repeating rifles adopted by any armed force. I also believe it follows all the guidelines for a FA. However, if you do spot somethign that needs improving, I'm more than happy to fix it.

WegianWarrior 08:35, 28 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support – would prefer {{inote}} to {{ref}} in this case. =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:18, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
  • Support. Looks good. --Carnildo 05:51, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Very good. Seems to meet all criteria. Rossrs 13:55, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support — Looks good to me. — RJH 14:50, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, interesting read. Phoenix2 16:10, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment. Just remove those 18 footnotes to Norske Militærgeværer etter 1867 and settle for the entry in the reference section. Those very, very few who can get a hold of the book (and also happen to speak Norwegian) will know what to look for and those who don't aren't going to demand specific page references. / Peter Isotalo 22:09, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's no value to removing them. They serve to help verifiability. Convert them to inotes if you like, but the criteria specifically call for inline citations. - Taxman Talk 11:58, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
      • There's no value in keeping them. They're overly pedantic and letting them be encourages people to keep on misusing footnotes. The criteria says "...enhanced by the appropriate use of inline citations". "Inline citation" doesn't mean "footnote" to begin with and intepreting "appropriate" as "mandatory" requires a good deal of imagination. Referencing things like uncontroversial historical dates and effective range of rifles with footnotes really serves no purpose. I do appreciate that you want articles to be well-referenced, but it's very obviously going too far in a lot of articles. Try not to defend references for their own sake or we'll get even more footnote-disasasters like names of the Greeks. Notes 10-12 and the one refering to the New Testament are among the prime examples of how to never, ever use a footnote. / Peter Isotalo 21:22, 30 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Taxman, are you sure you're not going on automatic in opposing Peter Isotalo here, just because the two of you are already at loggerheads about referencing? I don't always agree with Peter in that debate, but here he's just, well, right. Wegan Warrior, I'm sorry if I seem to be jumping on you, and I'm sorry I wasn't around to catch this detail on Peer review. It's not the case that verifiability becomes fuller, or more exact, the more notes you have. Sometimes it does, here it doesn't. First, having so many notes that say "ibid" is an obsolete way of doing things—a relic of a leisurely era—modern style sheets recommend much leaner and meaner systems. Also, I can't tell what information they're references for, from the way they're placed in the text. It sort of looks like statements like "The function of the extractor was particularly praised in the official reports" are referenced by a mere entry in column--I don't have the source, but it seems surprising. WW, is that it, or are the notes meant merely to indicate where in a column some particular model (or, uh, part of a model...? a measurement..?) appears? If so, don't do it; the reader can locate it easily, just tell him/her, once, what book to look in. Replace all these notes with a single reference that says something like "Unless otherwise indicated, the models (ranges...?) discussed are tabulated in this work". These footnotes are purely decorative. There is value to removing something that distracts/intimidates the reader without adding actual information. I'd do it myself if I could tell a gun from a hole in the ground, i. e., if I could tell how to phrase the single reference. And, no, please don't just make them invisible, where's the sense in that? If they were useful, they should be visible. If, as is the case, they're not useful, they should go. And in case the notes stay nevertheless, some technicalities: 21 and 24 don't work, 3 and 4 are reversed (I don't know how that's possible, since the numbering is supposed to be automatic--a bug?), and there's some sort of mixup with 15 to 17 that I can't rightly sort out. Bishonen | talk 01:07, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • Sorry, but you're both wrong. I'm not knee jerk reacting to Peter, he is simply going against what the criteria call for. Appropriate clearly means they have to be there, but doesn't specify how many or what form. Appropriate cannot mean none. And there was long and involved discussions in a number of places to solidify the consensus around the way the criteria read now. If you have preferences that are counter to the criteria, I'm fine with that, but discuss it in the proper place, don't give incorrect comments to a nomination. We apply the criteria, not our whims, and the criteria call for inline citations. Peter, you're right, they don't specify footnotes as the way to go, any format is fine. And Bishonen, if the primary objection is they look bad, then making them invisible is perfectly valid way to avoid that, but still aid verifiability. I can still edit the source and see the citation information. Again, have the conversation in the right place, and don't give wrong advice here. - Taxman Talk 15:33, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
            • That's what you got out of that—my primary objection is they look bad? Don't worry, I'm done, I won't offer any more whims and preferences. Bishonen | talk 16:48, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
              • Oh come now, I wasn't meaning to be offensive, and I'm sorry if I was. I just had a very limited time to make that edit. I was using "look bad" to stand for all the arguments of them being distracting, etc. As I mentioned inotes solves that part of the problem anyway, without much loss of verifiability. - Taxman Talk 18:17, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
          • Taxman, what I'm saying is no different from complaining that there are too many images or sub-sections in an FAC. Countering by (somewhat erroneously) claiming that they're mandatory is not the least bit relevant. You're also insisting on a very narrow interpretation of the criteria despite the fact that they're ambiguously worded. What bish and I are saying is that citations and footnotes should be used with moderation and common sense (and perhaps advice from people who have proper experience of using them). If a note clearly serves little or no purpose in referencing an article "...enhanced by appropriate usage..." might just as well be interpreted as "none" (though not in this particular case). To claim that they have to be mandatory is informal instruction creep and seems a bit like an attempt to supress differing opinions. You're right that this is not really the right forum for this discussion, but since you're clearly misrepresenting our objections and trying to make this into some sort of policy violation, it's hardly prudent to demand that we take it elsewhere. / Peter Isotalo 16:38, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • It's quite different. See below. - Taxman Talk 18:17, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
        • Okay, I'm confundled - not about the broken notes, which I fixed (fingertrouble on my part, and forgetting to shuffle the notes after shuffling sections of the article around), but about what is really required of citations. When I placed Jarmann M1884 on FAC (see Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jarmann M1884), I was told that all historical information should be referenced with footnotes. Now I'm being told that items at least I consider significant, like the details of the official reports, shouldn't be cited. And to top it off, it seeems like there has broken out a small fight over various systems for doing it - I'm not keen on the {{inote}} myself, because it hides things from the casuall reader, but I have made a test of it in my user-space. Now, On one hand we have the need for inline citations of historical information, on the other the need to 'reduse clutter'. Could the version with the {{inote}}'s be a solution people can agree on? WegianWarrior 07:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • PS: Same goes for when I had the Krag-Jørgensen on FAC, inline citations and footnotes of historical information was apparantly important in the article. I'm still confundled as to whats the proper way to do that apperantly. WegianWarrior 08:05, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • I understand your frustration, Wegian. The problem is simply that people haven't really given much thought to how and why citations and notes should be used, only that they have to be used. I hate to say it, but anyone who claims that you have to precisely reference every historical fact clearly has little or no pre-wiki experience of footnotes. / Peter Isotalo 16:38, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • Actually people have given a lot of thought to it and there have been extensive discussions about it. Clearly, you're just not aware of those discussions, but don't claim they didn't occur when you don't know. Numerous nominations have also helped evolve the consensus and that came to the fact that the criteria call for them to be used, and that appropriate specifically does not mean none. It does represent a strengthening of the criteria, and we were all well aware of that when the discussion was going on. So, I'm not misrepresenting, you are clearly calling for something different from what the criteria do. Again, if you would like to influence or change policy, please do it at the talk pages Wikipedia:Cite sources and or Wikipedia:What is a featured article where most of the consensus for this part of the criteria was built. And please go read the discussions there before you claim I'm misrepresenting. After that, and in the proper place I would welcome any input you may bring with your additional experience. To WW, yes, inotes would meet my criteria since they still help verifiability, and still avoid the clutter that other people find distracting, etc. It's not ideal, but we don't have an ideal system yet. - Taxman Talk 18:17, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
              • So let's sum this up, then. I'm going against an undeniable and undisputeable previous consensus decision that apparantly was so unanimous that it didn't even require the polcy documents to clearly show its intents. I think you're the one who needs to go lobby for a policy change. / Peter Isotalo 08:25, 1 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • WW, I'm sorry my input was unhelpful. Please note that I haven't objected, and I don't have anything more to say, so don't be concerned about my comment. Bishonen | talk 16:48, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • Wow. Such heat, so little light! The fact is that all disciplines, all professors, all editors (the kind who work at academic presses, not the kind who contribute to Wikipedia) have preferences in how much is cited. However, Bishonen is quite correct in saying that the style sheets used by most in the humanities (including therefore History and its children, military history and cultural history) shy away from noting every fact. We're not quite at the "cite only if it's controversial" stage, but we're not trying to "show your work" by establishing every place that an author learned a thing, either. The critical axes, it seems to me, are readability and reproducibility. (Footnotes are, in act, our version of scientific method.) If the punctuation of the text by note breaks up readability, then the thing should be rewritten to make the notes less necessary. If the author is switching between sources for unavailable facts, citation is necessary. Otherwise, it's easy to put a note up saying, "Material on the easing of the spring taken from Bob and Robert 4-15": that note lodges the discussion without puncturing the prose. Unreadable because overly cited is bad. Geogre 19:20, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Now, I hope no one has bad feelings over making me a bit confused - after all, I'm not angry or upset. My goal is to write the best articles I can, and to that end I do try to make sure I follow the rules; allthought it's obvious that the rules in this cause is more of a guideline. However, would it be an idea to make some sort of list somewhere that gives samples of what sort of things ought to be cited in different sorts of articles? WegianWarrior 08:26, 1 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, although a quick definition of the word breechblock within the article would be nice to have. - Mgm|(talk) 08:21, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
  • Support, now that I've waded into it. It looks very well done and researched, which I obviously think is important. Sorry for any fireworks, just intending to be accurate. I would prefer though the couple orphan one or two sentence paragraphs be merged into other paragraphs or expanded if possible. They just break up the flow too much, and I've never seen encyclopedic prose that didn't read better without them. - Taxman Talk 23:09, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • Support - but I agree that the pile of ibid. notes is not necessary. -- ALoan (Talk) 09:44, 1 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
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