Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Pre-dreadnought

Pre-dreadnought

I have been working on this article (following on from battleship and ironclad warship which became FAs) and want some feedback. I haven't exhausted my to-do list on it yet but there will inevitably be some things I've missed. The Land 16:10, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ready for A-class review, do you think? The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A-class review now open. The Land 18:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Maralia

"The last ships which can be considered the 'first pre-dreadnoughts'" . . . you've lost me here. Can't there be only one set of 'first pre-dreadnoughts'?

(More to come later - got interrupted for real life stuff!) Maralia 18:50, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Erm. Yes. The basic problem, as with all naval terminology, is that there is no hard and fast definition of what a pre-dreadnought is - no-one sat down and thought "I'm going to build a pre-dreadnought battleship". So you have some people arguing the Admirals (1889) are fundamentally pre-dreadnoughts, or that they aren't but the Royal Sovereigns (1892) are - only with the Majestics do you get a genuine consensus that the pre-dreadnought design had been reached. So the Majestics are the last first pre-dreadnoughts. I agree it's a very confusing phrase and should probably be changed ;) The Land 19:40, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I made it through the rest of the article now. Made various typo fixes and such; my edit summaries should explain those. A couple more issues:

"The first French battleship after the lacuna of the 1880s was Brennus" Lacuna is a fairly obscure word that I only barely remembered—and I had 8 years of Latin. You might want to rephrase this.
"In some ways these ships prefigured the later battlecruiser concept" Perhaps presaged rather than prefigured?

Thanks for an interesting read! Maralia 02:58, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Thanks. The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I went through the changes you made since yesterday, and made some typo fixes again. A couple new issues:

"battleships worldwide started to be built to a similar design" Can you reword this out of passive voice?
"the chaotic appearance of the ironclad warships" This reads as though individual ironclads had a chaotic appearances; it doesn't really convey what you mean. I'm drawing a blank on a better way to say it, but I'm sure we can come up with something. Maralia 15:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Chaotic development does the trick. The Land 17:18, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One more thing: the formatting within References and Sources is inconsistent. Examples:

References 9, 10 and 13: "title. page" "title, page" and "title page"
Sources 2 and 3: publishing date is in different places

From a prose standpoint, I think it's ready for A-class review. Maralia 17:58, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kirill Lokshin

Looks quite good, overall. A few specific points:

The caption for the diagram of the HMS Agamemnon mentions "five turrets amidships". Are you counting turrets along a single broadside? There are six turrets making up the secondary battery, as far as I can tell.
External links should be placed after the reference section(s).
I'd suggest changing all of the footnotes to short form and having a separate section for an alphabetical bibliography. The long-first-note style doesn't lend itself to a medium where text can be moved in an article; here, for example, Roberts and Gardiner both appear in short form before the actual publication data is given.

Kirill 19:01, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed Agamemnon - you are right, six turrets. Have added the sources in full, will return to the full-length footnotes later. The Land 14:19, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]