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Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Reginald Pinney

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Reginald Pinney

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Nominator(s): Shimgray | talk |

One of an occasional series of articles on British generals of the First World War, and my first A-class nomination. Pinney was not a particularly prominent figure, though he seems to have been the unnamed subject of one of Sassoon's satiric poems. He was well-regarded by his contemporaries, though sometimes unpopular with his men - among other things, he was devoutly religious, and forbade any issue of rum in the trenches. On the whole, a fairly representative example of his kind.

Created in September 2010; GA a week later (reviewed by Jim Sweeney), and not much since. I've given it a tidying-up and a quick copyedit in preparation for A-class. Shimgray | talk | 19:05, 10 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • CommentsSupport
    • Good to see some work on British generals of the Great War, and first drop is ... Reggie Pinney??? Anyway, some comments:
    • Image Review: One pic, copyright expired.
    • Could we have a consistent spelling of "major general"?
    • Add battles and wars to the Infobox
    • Was the scholarship fund in memory of Pinney or his son?
  • Support Comments/suggestions: only some very minor stylistic suggestions from me
All done bar a couple of OCLC lookups and endashes (oh dear), & I'll look into these tomorrow. Shimgray | talk | 22:29, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
...and all completed. I am agnostic about the OCLC numbers; there's several more-or-less comparable records for the same edition of each of these works in WorldCat (it's not perfect at deduplicating older or small-press material) and so assigning one particular number rather than another seems of marginal utility - it's only going to return some of the items, whatever happens. Shimgray | talk | 19:29, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments This is a good quality article, and I found it an interesting read - great work. I have the following comments:
    • The first mention of '33rd Division' in the lead should be linked
    • Do we know what position(s) Pinney held in the Boer War?
      • No, but I'll look into this. I believe it will have been relatively "normal" regimental service, probably as a senior company commander (if he was a major). Army Lists should at least give us a battalion, and I'll construct something from that. Shimgray | talk | 21:46, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • Done. The answer is "very little"; he arrived in November 1901, by which point the major fighting was over and it was mostly security/garrison work. A detailed history of the RF might show something, but there's certainly no "named battles" to reference. Shimgray | talk | 22:07, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • "the Territorial Force was embodied to replace them for home defence duties" - 'embodied' sounds a bit odd in this context. I'd suggest something like 'mobilised' instead. You should also explain that the TF was a reservist formation.
    • "it is not clear if Pinney's brigade was involved in this attack as an organised unit or not" it would be worth consulting a wider range of sources on this. Does the British official history might have anything on this? - I see that you've consulted it.
    • What's meant by 'waves' of New Army divisions should be explained. Nick-D (talk) 10:39, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support My comments have now been addressed. Nick-D (talk) 07:17, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support Comments -- I copyedited a little but generally thought the prose was fine, likewise structure, citations, image licensing, and level of detail; well done. Some points:

  • "On the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914" -- best avoid seasonal references; if we mean "August" for the outbreak of war that's what we should say (actually I went and changed this myself).
    • Done. Two instances of "summer" left - one at the end which I can't reword because I don't know a more specific date, and one earlier which should be okay as it's in the fairly specific context of "the summer offensive". Shimgray | talk | 22:10, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Haven't read "The General" since I was in high school -- thanks for bringing it back to me... ;-) However, MOS-wise I believe poem titles are treated similarly to song titles, i.e. in inverted commas rather than italicised.
  • No other images of the chap around? If not, perhaps the walls of text in Brigadier in France and Divisional Command could be broken up with say one picture each depicting a battle in which he was involved, or other contextual PD imagery.
    • I've had a dig around but can't find any clearly-identifiable pictures of any of the units he commanded. I've added a generic one of a machine-gun crew to the end of the divisional section; decent pictures of Ypres, for the first section, seem quite rare. Shimgray | talk | 21:59, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmm, yes, bit of a surprise there's so little of relevance image-wise. Mind you, I think the Vickers shot, though excellent in itself, may be too generic for this article. The picture of captured British and Portuguese troops in Battle of the Lys might be marginally better, given it's an action that involved the 33rd to some degree, and you mention the Portuguese... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 06:42, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the references section you link one or two notable publishers but not all, e.g. Macmillan -- best be consistent either way. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 01:42, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sources/Spotcheck -- I checked notes #4, #9, #10, #40, #45. Unless mentioned below, info seemed accurate without evidence of copyvio or close paraphrasing:

  • Re. #9, couldn't see the six divisions sent to France mentioned on page 7, only earlier (page 3 first up).
    • p. 3 doesn't really say it either, only by inference. I'll look at reciting this "background" section, probably from Vol. I of Edmonds. Shimgray | talk | 22:46, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Sorry about the delay - this should hopefully be okay now. It's surprisingly hard to source the commonly-known details from the official histories! Shimgray | talk | 21:59, 8 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • Tks -- yes, I sometimes find it easier to use more general books for the basic stuff myself... Cheers,
  • Re. #10, generally accurate but I don't think the author explicitly equates the Wessex with the 43rd -- you might need to add the previous citation (#9, i.e. page 7) to make that connection clear.
  • Re. #40 (and others from same source), I'm a little unsure of Baker as an RS, certainly if you take this to FAC -- while the site's information seems well-written, he appears to only recently have made history his profession and claims just one published work. Granted the material cited to him isn't controversial but then I'd have thought it might just as easily be found in more clearly reliable sources -- no? Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 01:42, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support:

  • Look good to me: interesting and well written. One minor query:
  • "an Expeditionary Force of six divisions" - if we're talking about an expeditionary force (as opposed to the BEF), is it correct to capitalise it? (NB: I'm not sure) Hchc2009 (talk) 20:19, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • It is intended to be "the" BEF (just known as the EF at this point), rather than a generic expeditionary force (though of course it's one of those as well.) I could rephrase to "the Expeditionary Force of six divisions", but there's something a little awkward-seeming about that - can't quite put my finger on what, though. Shimgray | talk | 22:00, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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