Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/La Grande Armée

La Grande Armée

This article is a true team effort. The legendary User:Adam Bishop and User:Angela were notable early contributors. I found and expanded it and have recently had the pleasure of working with User:Ansbachdragoner, who has greatly improved its quality and depth. User:ALoan and User:UberCryxic have also put considerable work into it. Together over an extended period, we have built an article on one of history's greatest military forces which, though not perfect, we feel is worthy of feature consideration. In preparation for this, we invite your input.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 22:37, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Vedexent

My initial reaction is "Wow!". This is an amazing article.

Pros

• I am not knowledgeable about the history of the time, so I can't speak to it's accuracy (other readers will have to address that), but I can say that as an "ignorant but interested reader" I found that the article really explained things clearly and in an interesting fashion.
• Good use of illustrations. While plentiful, they are interesting, well laid out, and don't overwhelm the text.
• Well organized.
• Well written prose. I'm not sure how, but the "tone" of the text manages to elicit the grandeur and ceremony one would associate with an army of this period.

Cons

Not being "up to speed" on the history, I'm afraid my quibbles are all about structure, but I think they're usually minor and easily corrected quibbles, and may simply be a matter of taste (in which case you can just ignore them :->).

1.

First of all, the intro is a little "shuffled" and in one spot goes a little more detailed than needs be for an intro.

I'm of the school of Wikipedians which believe that the text before the TOC should be a brief, organizatinally simple, summary of the entire article, but have minimal detail, allowing casual readers to read 3-4 paragraphs and decide if they want/need more detail (although some people read only that section).

The intro meanders back and forth between description and history. If the last part of the second paragraph was the first half of the last pargraph it would be nice clean intro->description->history.

Additionally, the detailed breakdown by nationality list in the intro might be better later on in the article; the causual reader may not know if they want to delve in deeper yet (hopefully they do), and so isn't looking for information quite that detailed in the intro.

2.

I hate to say it, because I looked at your bibliography, but I think you need to footnote your text to the sources. While not required for the casual reader, "inline references" seem to be a "big deal" for FAC reviews. I realize that with an article this complex, with that large a bibliography that will be a big task, but it is almost a requirement for FAC, and I think this article is good enough to warrent Feature Article status once every i is dotted and t is crossed.

3.

A really minor aesthetic suggestion: the TOC is quite long, leaving a large chunk of "whitespace" to the right. I know that some people collapse, or have TOCs toggled off, but for the majority of people who see the TOC, perhaps one or more illustrations could be included at that point to break up the whitespace? It is also possible that the "Unit Box" will be expanded in the future, as it seems to be mostly empty, extending somewhat into this space.

General

• One oddity that I've noticed is your use of "bullet points" in place of "headers" for the lowest level of organization. I realize that without doing that, the TOC would be even longer than it is, but it does look a little odd for a Wikipedia article in that respect.
• I don't know if it is possible to fix - it may simply be a fact of Media Wiki right now, but your bullet points do get "thrown out of kilter" in places, right next to images it seems.

Overall

Overall, this is an extremely well written article that is informative, entertaining, easy to read, and well organized. I think that the FAC process will require more extensive inline footnotes, but other than that, any other "problems" are minor, or aesthetic, in my opinion.

I think this is an article that really should be "polished up" the last 2% required by the FAC process, because I think it will make one heck of a good FAC article once passed.

Kirill Lokshin

• First, a few general comments:
  • Inline citations! Even if they're not really needed, a lack of them (particularly in an article of this size) will cause the FA nomination to go over like the proverbial lead balloon. Given the high quality of references used, though, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a dozen or two key facts that can be cited.
  • Image placement is a problem at some points; the pictures should ideally be spaced on both margins, and the galleries spread out into the text. Some of the images need better captions as well.
  • The article still needs a few rounds of stylistic copyediting to eliminate some of the choppier sentence structure.
  • The bullet-point layout should be removed in favor of proper subsections (with {{details}} at the beginning of each as necessary).
  • Wikification! Many things deserving of their own articles (regiments, weapons, etc.) aren't linked. You may need to create a few stubs after you do this, though, to prevent the article from having too many redlinks.
• Now for a few more specific points:
  • The infobox could use some expansion; moving the size breakdown into it might be an easy way to do that. And what exactly is the top image?
  • "Organization": perhaps outline it somewhat further down, at least to regiment level?
  • "Imperial Guard": no mention of the Guard artillery? It's referred to in the "Artillery" section, but a more complete breakdown might be in order. Alternately, it may be worthwhile to trim the material in these sections somewhat and refer more prominently to the actual Imperial Guard article.
  • "Ranks of the Grande Armée": with the large table and the gallery, this isn't really a good prose section. The table also seems to give British rather than French modern ranks.
  • "Formations and tactics": any chance of getting some diagrams for these? Chandler has some pretty decent ones, if there's anyone with enough drawing ability to work from them.
  • "History": the raw lists of battles are unnecessary, as the important ones are already linked in the text. If you must have them, though, replace them with the appropriate campaignboxes instead.

Throughout, though, it's an outstanding article; it just needs some cleanup before moving on to FAC.

Durova

While Napoleon isn't my area of specialty, I know a few things about French history. The specifics of his army organization are too in-depth for me to critique. Overall, however, this is an impressive article that reflects a great deal of research and hard work. You should be proud.

I agree with both of the above comments about line citations. When I was preparing Joan of Arc for FAC candidacy I surveyed existing FA articles as models. This was a mistake: standards have grown increasingly stringent and a significant portion of older FAs wouldn't pass candidacy today. Some of them are even getting de-listed.

Try moving the discussion of the 1812 campaign to a conclusion section at the end of the article. It's out of place in the introduction. Also there was a recent edit war at Battle of Borodino where some Russian editors contested a description that called this a French victory. Their reasons had some some merit. I suggest characterizing this as a marginal French victory.

What I would like to see in the introduction is a brief comparison to earlier French military structures. How was Napoleon's army different and in what respects was he most innovative? Which innovations were most successful?

Some of the text could use a copyedit. I know how hard it is to look at the same words for the umpteenth time and retain a fresh perspective. Here are two sentences where I got bogged: "After a month in Moscow, the army was forced to march back the way it had come, into the teeth of the harsh Russian winter. Constantly harassed by Cossacks and Russian irregulars, cold, starvation and disease, the Grande Armée was utterly destroyed as a fighting force." The commas in the first sentence are gratuitious. My eye lingered at the second one because of its lack of parallel structure. It seems to suggest that cold, starvation, and disease were extensions of the Russian army.

It will be tedious to add footnotes, but the other changes should be relatively simple to implement. When the time comes I think you'll have smooth sailing at FAC. Durova 03:30, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine)

First, thanks for your comments, suggestions and especially PRAISE :). Now on to try and address the former two so it may be more worthy of the latter. Kirill:

• Inline cites have been added. More are on the way. But I really don't see where we need to cite every paragraph or section. Especially when it is clear where much of the information came from by glancing at the reference section. This not a Doctorial Dissertation or research paper. But if it fails for this reason, oh well. We can always cite the hell out of it and resubmit. I think most readers simply want a well written, informative and well referenced article. On this level, I believe we are nearly there. In his memoirs the Duke Rovigo often gave his only references as "This was told to me by officers and gentlemen of indisputable charachter.", which should be good enough:).
• No mention of the Guard artillery? I knew someone would catch that:) Yes, this was a deliberate decision on my part. The section on the guard is already a bit long, the one on artillery was waaay too short, so the only real solution was to combine them. Besides, there really is'nt THAT much one can say about the Guard's guns which doesnt also apply to line batteries.
• "Organization": perhaps outline it somewhat further down, at least to regiment level? Done..err will do!
• "Ranks of the Grande Armée" section. Is needed, I feel, to further illustrate Napoleonic command structure and how it differed from the Ancien regime, its enemies and modern armies. I will add a column of modern French ranks also, if you REALLY insist. But except for spellings (Capitaine, Général etc), they differ little from Anglo-American ones. The gallery, I felt, was a cool way to lead the reader to key biographies of the Marshals, instead of just giving another dull list or a bunch of "See Also's". I've thought about moving the section up, next to Organiztion. What thinkest thou?
• The article still needs a few rounds of stylistic copyediting to eliminate some of the choppier sentence structure.-Agreed! I have a terrible habit of creating long, compound sentences sometimes. I've found a few and broke them down into bite-sized portions, but there are still too many out there, contorting and confounding the poor readers' eyes and brains:)
• The bullet-point layout should be removed in favor of proper subsections (with {{details}} at the beginning of each as necessary). How do we do this and avoid turning an already long ToC (as per Vedexent) into THE TOC FROM HELL? Besides, I personally, don't mind bullet points, afterall "those are only bullets, not turds" as Colonel Lepic said:). I dont think this will be a major issue.
• "The infobox could use some expansion; moving the size breakdown into it might be an easy way to do that. And what exactly is the top image?" Excellent suggestion! The infobox needs some fleshing out. The top image was created by Jfreyre especially for this article. He did a great job and I told him so.
• ""Formations and tactics": any chance of getting some diagrams for these? Chandler has some pretty decent ones, if there's anyone with enough drawing ability to work from them." Ohhh if only!...this is at the top of my personal "Wish List" for this article! I was even thinking about using the map editor from Rise Of Nations or Imperial Glory, to create some illustrations based on Chandler's work since I have no artistic inclinations whatsoever. I was going to do the same thing using Rome:Totalwar for the Roman tactics article PhilX and I were working on. In a way, this section suffers from the opposite problem of the one on Ranks. So in a weird way it sort of balances out, with the shortcomings of one somewhat compensated for by the strengths of the other. This is also one reason why I'm reluctant to move the Ranks section to the top.
• "Image placement is a problem at some points; the pictures should ideally be spaced on both margins, and the galleries spread out into the text. Some of the images need better captions as well." Image placement is as much art as science. And it one of the biggest pains I've had in this one. You've probably caught my discussions with Leithp on this matter. The galleries for the infantry of the guard and cavalry of the line, were the best solution I could devise for keeping the images from clogging the texts in those sections. It is less than ideal, but it works. Now that the text is far more fleshed out, I will try moving some of the other images around the margins as you suggest, for a more dynamic display. Maybe expand some of the captions too And I would still like to find a better Hussar pic, preferably of an actual French hussar of the proper era.
• "Wikification! Many things deserving of their own articles (regiments, weapons, etc.) aren't linked. You may need to create a few stubs after you do this, though, to prevent the article from having too many redlinks." Point taken. But I've noticed a recent trend against over-wikification especially with regard to dates. I agree with you, red links, while unpretty, are important calls for more information. But not everyone sees it thusly. To them, they are unneeded eyesores and dead ends. So I've mainly linked those items which have existing artys/stubbs. It is more of a stylistic rather than editorial decision, and one I make only to try and get our Armee through FAC safely without sucumbing to Gerard's law. We have enough work to do on this without creating more, unless it is truly necessary. And yes, Iam basically a lazy bastard:)
• ""History": the raw lists of battles are unnecessary, as the important ones are already linked in the text." Consider them gone. They are an artifact left over from that section's evolution.

Vedexent:

• "First of all, the intro is a little "shuffled" and in one spot goes a little more detailed than needs be for an intro". The intro is often the oldest and most neglected part of an article. Yet it is, argueabely, the most important. For an FA it IS what appears on the mainpage! The last FA I worked on I had to flesh out the intro because it was too short. This time it's the opposite. Moving the nationality breakdown to the infobox, as Kirill suggested, would certainly help.

Regardless, some rewriting and reordering is in order.

• "I hate to say it, because I looked at your bibliography, but I think you need to footnote your text to the sources." As I told Kirill, I think we can pull it off without citing every sentence. A dozen or so, strategically placed footers should do nicely. And if it fails due to this, well we can always add more and resubmit. There are a lot of cranks who use lack of inlines as an excuse to oppose because they have no other good reason. But doing it just to please them, at least initially, will be more trouble than it's worth.
• "A really minor aesthetic suggestion: the TOC is quite long, leaving a large chunk of "whitespace" to the right." I'm playing around now to try and alleviate this. I moved the big Imperial "Cuckoo" up and switched it around with the small banner. This seems to have helped somewhat. Yes, a minor aesthetic detail, but these things can add up. It is a big, article, though, so a big ToC is the unavoidable result I'm afraid.

Durova:

• "Try moving the discussion of the 1812 campaign to a conclusion section at the end of the article. It's out of place in the introduction." Agreed. Perhaps replace it with a shorter summary.
• "What I would like to see in the introduction is a brief comparison to earlier French military structures. How was Napoleon's army different and in what respects was he most innovative? Which innovations were most successful?" I can do that, sure. The obvious ones, such as introduction of perminent Corps, brigades and improvements in command, control and communications, logistics, support services and tactical innovations are all discussed in the article. Again, it would seem the introduction is the section most in need of work.
• "Some of the text could use a copyedit. I know how hard it is to look at the same words for the umpteenth time and retain a fresh perspective." The section you refer to was recently added by UberCryxic. Overall he did a very good job. I did some edits on it, but it obviously still needs more. There are also some passages which seem borderline PoV to me. After the intro, it is the section in most need of attention. The devil's indeed in the details, more specifically the wording.

Thank you again, Gents, your help and encouragement is appreciated.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 21:37, 20 March 2006 (UTC)