Wikipedia:Peer review/Ottoman Empire/archive2

Ottoman Empire

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I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to help it become a GA status article.

Thanks, Clarkcj12 (talk) 17:52, 25 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by A. Parrot

I know the GA criteria, but having never been through the GA process, I'm not very familiar with how the criteria are applied in practice. My comments are mainly aimed toward general improvement—which I think is reasonable, because a lot of general improvement will be needed before this article is ready for a GA submission.

Overall

Length: There are nearly 14,000 words in this article, whereas preferably there shouldn't be more than 10,000 even for a large topic. See WP:Article size. I have some specific suggestions below about what to cut.

Structure: There are a few sections too many, and disproportionate attention is given to some subjects. Probably several sections should be shortened and consolidated. See WP:Manual of Style/Layout. Some detailed suggestions below.

References

There are in-line citations, but their placement is very spotty; large chunks of the article lack them. The minimum standard for a Good Article is: a citation at the end of every paragraph, every statement that is likely to be challenged, and every direct quotation. It also looks clumsy and is almost always unnecessary to have more than two or three citations in one place.

The reference style is inconsistent. Some of the in-line citations contain commentary rather than just references in support of a statement in the body, even though there is a "Footnotes" section for notes containing commentary. Either the combine the two, or separate them. The references in support don't have a consistent format; for example, book references sometimes provide the place of publication and sometimes don't, and website references often have nothing more than a linked title and an access date. Absolute consistency isn't in the GA criteria, but general consistency is a good idea in any case. WP:Manual of Style/Layout, Help:Footnotes, and WP:Citing sources have a good bit of information on the organization of references.

The sources themselves are largely reliable, but many are less than ideal—general reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica, out-of-date historians like Arnold Toynbee, online scans of Ottoman banknotes. The most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journal articles and books written by academics, which, as the "Further reading" section shows, are abundant on a topic like this. Look through the references and further reading, identify the most recent and general of the highly reliable sources, and get your hands on as many as you can. Then use them to support as much of the unreferenced content, and the content with the weakest sources, as you can. If you use sources that are now in the "Further reading" section as references, move them from one to the other; that section is oversized.

Images and templates

It's not in the GA criteria, but I really feel there are too many, or at least too many in the same places. The images are bunched together in many places, looking cluttered, while other sections have no images at all. Look through the clusters of images and decide which are most relevant to the text at hand. The templates aren't as bad, but there are some places where they and the images are really crowded, like the start of the article body and the very bottom of the page. Some of them might be better removed.

History section

A lot of the article bloat is here. With sub-articles for so many of these sections, a lot of the detail can be removed, in accordance with WP:Summary style. The "Decline and modernization" section is particularly oversized. For example, the "Modernization" section contains very long lists of the reforms during the Tanzimat period, which surely can be summarized; the first paragraph of the "Crimean War" section is mostly irrelevant to the Ottoman Empire; and the detail about the Congress of Berlin is terribly disproportionate to its overall significance in six centuries of Ottoman history. I want to emphasize that these are only examples, and a lot of cutting is needed in a lot of places. When that is done, several of the sections can be combined, making the article body and the table of contents shorter.

Fall of the Ottoman Empire

I seriously question whether we need separate articles on Fall of the Ottoman Empire and Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, although that's not directly relevant to this article. I am certain that the "Fall" section in this article should be merged with the sections on dissolution above it.

Administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire

In contrast, this section should be expanded, although not hugely.

Economy

This part is missing some fundamental things like currency. It should look more like an overview of all the topics in the main article on the Ottoman economy.

State

I can't really judge whether this is a good overview of the topic without seeing the relevant sources, but it doesn't look bad at a glance. I question the relevance of the last paragraph, though.

Society

This part might better be titled "Social structure", like the corresponding sub-article, to make clear why there's a section separate from "Culture". The section doesn't feel cohesive in its organization, and some parts, like the bit about plague, seem to have been thrown into it as a catch-all section. It might work better if it mentioned the aristocracy, like the sub-article does, and moved down (or up) the social hierarchy.

Culture

On the surface, it looks decent. The paragraphs on different aspects of the culture don't connect very well, but that's hard to do with such disparate subject matter.

Demographics

The sections on "Language" and "Religion" look fairly decent (although "Religion" has a tag complaining that it doesn't give enough attention to Islam; with a little expansion on the subject, the tag should be removed). The strange part is "The Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Iraq and Kurdistan" and its single subsection. The section is all about the views of one scholar and should probably just be removed. In its place, I would recommend a section on "Ethnicities", about all the peoples within the empire. The views of the one scholar might be useful as a source for that section but don't need nearly as much weight as they're given now.

Law

My thoughts about this section are much like those about the "State" section.

Military

Fairly decent, but, like the History section, it seems to give disproportionate attention to more recent times, including a very short-lived air force. The Ottoman military must have been far more famous when it was the terror of Europe, and more needs to be said about that period.

There's a lot of material to work with in this article, but it's much in need of somebody to reorganize and streamline it. I wish you well in that effort. Let me know if you need any other help. A. Parrot (talk) 01:40, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]