Wikipedia:Peer review/American Civil War/archive4

American Civil War

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This peer review discussion has been closed.

I've listed this article for peer review because it has recently undergone revisions to address the reasons given for delisting it from GA status by a 3-3 vote. I would like assistance in preparing it for renomination to GA status. Thanks, TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 10:11, 21 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: G'day, good work so far. I only took a quick look (mainly focused on referencing):

"The Wilmont Proviso announced this position in 1846.[45]": the citation here seems incorrectly formatted (i.e. it is manually numbered and possibly doesn't correspond;
this caption isn't grammatically correct: "These dead soldiers—from Ewell's May 1864 attack at Spotsylvania—delaying Grant's advance on Richmond in the Overland Campaign."
the paragraph ending appears to need a citation: "Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to several factors explaining the geographic divide, including sectionalism, protectionism and state's rights."
for a successful GA rating, each paragraph should probably end in a citation;
the harv errors script shows a number of citation issues that probably should be dealt with prior to GAN;
"The tariff issue was and is sometimes cited–long after the war–by Lost Cause historians and neo": the endashes here should be spaced per WP:DASH; but you should also be careful to be consistent throughout the article. In some cases you use emdashes in the same instance. Either is fine, but consistency is the key.
be careful of overlink. The duplicate link checker tool reveals quite a few links that might be overlinked;
good luck with taking the article further. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 13:45, 25 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Dead link
Be consistent in your capitalization - sometimes South/Southern is capitalized and other times not, and it's not clear why
The article generally needs more citations
What is a "cockpit of secession"?
"In culture" section: work titles should be italicized, WP:NOTUSA, and on what basis are you selecting which works get included here?
Way too many See also links
Many of your harvlinks don't work
Citation formatting is generally quite inconsistent. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:18, 25 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Firstly, well done for taking on such a major article! Some quick thoughts...
The third paragraph of the lead is massive, and probably needs to be edited down. There is also some duplication/discrepancy in the stats on the casualties in the war between the first and fourth paragraphs (e.g. 600,000 dead, 620,000 dead, 750,000 dead).
"Slavery. Contemporary actors..." - if the intention is to have subheadings, then the article should use the = formatting, rather than in-line bolding.
I'd take another look at the "historiography" section - I'm not convinced this is summarising the historical debate fully.
"In works of culture and art" - I'd be expecting this to have some paragraphs of regular prose, rather than just a list of links. There are a number of academic works on this that could be used.
I'd echo Nikki's point on "see also"
Personally, I'd have found the "war" section more easily read if it progressed chronologically (i.e. had sub-sections on events in 1861, 1862, etc.) Hchc2009 (talk) 08:59, 26 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

I've little knowledge on the topic so won't waste your time attempting to offer any opinions on coverage.
The biggest thing that stands out to me is referencing. Certainly there has clearly been a lot of work put into this area and the article does include a large number of refs which is good to see. Yet there remains a large amount of unreferenced material, the majority of which does not appear to me to be for "the sky is blue" statements. The fact that cn tags were quite rightly added by one editor to some of these [1] but then removed by another with a edit summary of "No citation is needed for all these well-known facts – they're in the McPherson book" [2] clearly fails WP:V. If those involved in this article are serious about moving this one forward then these citations will need to be added and I realistically wouldn't bother requesting a GA/A/FA review until they are.
There are some inconsistencies in presentation of date ranges, for instance you use both "1861–62" and "1861–1865" (relevant policy is MOS:DATERANGE which suggests the former is more correct).
Some inconsistency in presentation of ranks, for instance you use both abbreviations and write them in full.
Per MOS:PERCENT "%" is not preferred. Anotherclown (talk) 11:46, 1 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Skimming this article, I'm reminded why I don't usually review articles that get a lot of hits. There are many changes I'd make to the lead if I were copyediting for FAC ... but I'd be stepping on a lot of feet if I did, because a lot of the text here results from compromises, and I wouldn't be doing anyone any favors by reigniting various fights over wording. Take for example "The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was a civil war":
It may be clear to Wikipedians why we need to say "civil war" three times in half a sentence, but it won't be clear to most readers.
Why do we need to say that the American Civil War is (or was) known in the United States as the Civil War? Does anyone need to be informed that the Greek Civil War is known as the Civil War (in Greek, among Greeks) when the context is clear? Of course no one says "American Civil War" in a context where "American" isn't needed for disambiguation.
"the survival of the Union": the more common term is "preservation of the Union". "Survival" has an arguably correct denotation but the wrong connotation.
"independence for the Confederacy ... formed the Confederate States of America": using a word before it's defined.
I could go on ... but I won't, it's pointless. The process that creates high-traffic, high-emotion articles like this one is an interesting process, valid in its own right, but it's a different process from what happens at FAC, and I don't want to mess with it, so I'll stop here. - Dank (push to talk) 15:47, 8 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Maile

In works of culture and art section - what makes this different than a See also section? It's just linking to a bunch of Wikipedia articles, with no other prose or citatiions.
See also section - overkill, needs trimming considerably.
External links section - does the article really need all those links?

References

Notes 1, 3 and 4 have no sourcing at all.

Citations and Bibliography
Citation 2 needs to be extended. What is this, a website, a link to a book?
Citation 3 is an External link with used as a citation - blocked by my browser as "untrusted site" - and probably needs correct formatting as a reference.
The referencing style is inconsistent. I'm not going through everything, but it is unclear what many of the citations are. A book? A link to one of the sources from Wikipedia Library? Some books are under Bibliography, some seem to be inline citations of their own, and some it's unsure what it is. Consistency of style would be good
Citation 6 needs to be extended. What is this, a website, a link to a book?
Citation 7 - is this a book or some other reference? If a book, it needs to be consistent with other books.

HarvErrors script shows me that the following under Bibliography have nothing in Citations point to them:

Catton, Bruce (1960). The Civil War. New York: American Heritage Distributed by Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-8281-0305-3.

Footnote 5 has "See Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat, p. 335." buried in the prose.
Footnote 6 has "See Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat, p. 335." buried in the prose.
Citation 132 - Bruce Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, pp. 263–296.

Davis, William C. (1983). Stand in the Day of Battle: The Imperiled Union : 1861–1865. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-14895-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Davis, William C. (2003). Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-3499-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Donald, David; Baker, Jean H.; Holt, Michael F. (2001). The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-97427-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Fehrenbacher, Don E. (1981). Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502883-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Fellman, Michael; Gordon, Lesley J.; Sunderland, Daniel E. (2007). This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath (2 ed.). New York: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-321-38960-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Guelzo, Allen C. (2012). Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-984328-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Holt, Michael F. (2005). The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-8090-4439-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Jones, Howard (1999). Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-2582-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
McPherson, James M. (1992). Ordeal By Fire : The Civil War and Reconstruction (2 ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-045842-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

What is citation 177 - James McPherson, Why did the Confederacy Lose?. p. ?.

Rhodes, John Ford (1917). History of the Civil War, 1861–1865. New York: The Macmillan Company. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

See Citations 68, 69, 76 - listed individually, instead of footnotes pointing here

This was just at a glance. Good luck with getting all this in shape. — Maile (talk) 16:39, 21 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

@Dank: Your comments are not pointless. I started reading the article before I saw that it was being peer reviewed. The first thing that stood out was the redundant language and I stopped reading when I got to the part where the war was fought to "determine the survival of the Union". The causes (some of), listed in the body can be summarized in the lead.

The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 would suffice and be a good start. The Union was not concerned over "survival" so why is this listed as a reason. I suppose some will eventually attempt to change history by a convolution of the facts. The content "The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories." has a strange choice of words as "fractious" actually means irritable or unruly. Does anyone really think any of these words or their synonyms apply? --Comment made 10-23-15 (oops) by -- Otr500 (talk) 19:46, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]