Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Battle of Austerlitz
I've worked hard on this article for the past few days and have taken it from a relatively average piece of work to at least a quality worthy of a good article, and hopefully worthy of FA after peer review. Let me know what you all think.UberCryxic 03:27, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
A very good article! There are several areas where some further improvement might be possible, though:
- Maps! The USMA has some excellent situation maps of the battle that I'll try to upload tomorrow; the current ones are far too small.
- The writing style is slightly hagiographic in parts (e.g. "The ensuing melee deservedly earned a reputation for being one of the greatest cavalry fights in all of history and revealed the superiority of French cavalry over their Allied equivalents" or "In a brilliant double-pronged assault, St. Hilaire’s division and part of Davout’s III Corps smashed through the enemy at Sokolnitz and persuaded the commanders of the first two columns, generals Kienmayer and Langeron, to flee as fast as they could"); adjectives like "greatest" or "brilliant" should be used sparingly, if at all.
- There's no mention of the battle's role in fiction; I'm not entirely sure of how extensive this is, but large portions of War and Peace do take place there.
- The "Battlefield legends" section seems somewhat irrelevant. Almost all battles have associated legends; unless these are notable in some way, there's no need to list them.
- I would move the "Battlefield" and dispositions sections to "Prelude" and limit the "Battle" section to the blow-by-blow account itself.
- Some of the single-paragraph sections should either be expanded or merged with the surrounding ones.
- Double footnotes (e.g. 43/44) are bad; both references should be listed under a single note number.
Mostly looks good, though; all of these are more stylistic and cleanup issues than content ones. Kirill Lokshin 04:02, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
Kirill, thanks very much for your review. Yeah I badly badly need good maps; if you can get any I'd be very glad and eternally grateful. Just put a link my talk page or something. I'll definitely change some of those awkward phrases; maybe later I'll do a copyedit. The War and Peace idea is awesome; totally forgot about that. But I think I'm going to put the fiction in the Mythology section; so like a "Mythology and Fiction" section; what do you think about that? Now, while I did want to be unique as much as I could, I did stick to tradition mostly and based this off other FA battles. I relied heavily on the Battle of Badr, which was made FA a few weeks ago. That article, for example, has the plans and the movements preceding the battle under the "Battle" section. So that's why I put them there too. The FA Battle of Warsaw has two very short paragraph sections ("Bolshevik Plan" and "Breaking of Soviet Ciphers"), but I'll think about expanding them nonetheless. Will definitely take care of the double footnotes.UberCryxic 05:13, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
A fine piece of work! I recommend a copyedit before putting this up for featured candidacy. You'll get fewer comments or objections if a sentence such as (from the introduction) "Despite difficult fighting in many sectors, the battle is often regarded as a tactical masterpiece in military history" loses its last three words. Better still, quote a later general who admired its tactics. I agree with the above that some adjectives are hard to get through FAC. I had to remove "brilliant" from Joan of Arc even though the context was supported by multiple citations. This last suggestion is purely optional, but what other artistic works have portrayed the battle? Some film adaptations of War and Peace probably did (at least the interminably long Russian version) and probably some other period fiction in novels and film. Probably some modern war games used it too. I can't see any significant obstacle to FA. Durova 02:34, 21 March 2006 (UTC)