The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by SandyGeorgia 00:24, 19 September 2011 [1].

Battle of Vukovar[edit]

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Nominator(s): Prioryman (talk) 23:58, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Joy and I are co-nominating this article for featured article status. It has recently undergone a major expansion and rewrite to mark the upcoming 20th anniversary of the battle, which falls two months from today, on 18 November 2011. The battle was a critically important event in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and will be the subject of commemorations in Croatia. It will also attract significant international media coverage, some of which has already begun to appear, in the run-up and on the day itself. Having written featured articles before, I've set out to write this to featured standard from the outset and I'm pretty sure that it will meet many of the featured article criteria. The sister article on the Croatian Wikipedia is already a featured article (though this is not a translation of it). Prioryman (talk) 23:58, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - while I appreciate the work that's gone into this article, I don't feel it currently meets the FA criteria. Here are some specific concerns:

Some internal inconsistencies, for example in the use of World War II vs Second World War
WP:ENGVAR: be consistent in the use of either American or British spelling
Missing bibliographic info for Little & Silber 1996; no citations to Crnobrnja 1996
A few instances of phrasings too close to those used by sources, for example "devastation not justified by military necessity" (verbatim from source)
Manual of style issues: spell out "%" in article text, don't include external links in article text, etc
Provide conversions for figures like "2 million tonnes"
Several vague or subjective statements - for example, "a very distinctive architectural and cultural character" - according to...? There are Baroque and classical mansions in other places, what makes these so distinctive?
Check for repetitive and redundant phrasings
File:Logo_of_the_JNA.svg - on what source was this image based?
File:JTO-logo.jpg gives a deleted page as a source. Please check for other image issues
Captions that are complete sentences should end in periods
Problems with reference/citation formatting: page ranges should consistently use "pp." and endashes, some books include publishers while others don't, etc
Some references are incomplete - for example, newspaper sources without weblinks should include page numbers. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:57, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I could only find two references to "World War II"; both changed to "Second World War" for consistency.
I've made a few changes to the spelling. There are still American spellings in the article but these are within quotations - they don't need to be changed, do they?
Little & Silber 1996 was a typo; should have been 1997. Fixed now. Crnobrnja removed.
"Devastation not justified by military necessity" is a legal term of art. I've put it in quotation marks to make this clear. Are there any other examples?
% now spelled out as "per cent" except when given inside parentheses as part of a list. I only found one external link in the text - now removed.
Conversion of tonnes to tons added. Converted km to miles and m to ft.
Added a pre-war source to spell out what was so distinctive about Vukovar.
I'm using the harvnb format. Changing "pages" to "pp." in the template doesn't seem to work and breaks all such references when I try it. I've added dashes for the page ranges.
It would be helpful if you could indicate which books don't include publishers. I've checked them all individually and I can't see any that don't have publisher info. I made a point of including it, so I would be surprised if there were omissions.
Repetitive and redundant phrasings - can you identify some for me?
I could only find one example of a caption that was a complete sentence that didn't end in a period - now fixed.
I'll have to defer to our ex-Yugoslav editors on the sources of the logos, which were already in the article when I started editing it. I don't think they're essential so I have no objection to removing them if necessary.
I should be able to get hold of the page numbers - bear with me, please.

Thanks for your time. Prioryman (talk) 07:49, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. I would very much like to see this article become featured, and I know it's a hard article to work on. It's a really good idea to put military history articles through the military history A-class review before they go to FAC ... we do a good job of prepping them. Peer review for history articles can also be helpful. Some problems from the lead section:

"between August–November": see WP:DASH
"destroyed with over 700,000 shells fired at it": destroyed by over 700,000 shells (unless you're saying that something else destroyed the town)
"even now", "the town is today", "these days": see WP:DATED
"deeply divided – these days psychologically rather than physically": I get what you're saying, but "psychologically" isn't the word I'd use. - Dank (push to talk) 03:15, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Reworded these various elements to resolve those issues. Prioryman (talk) 07:53, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - Thanks. When an article gets early opposition at FAC, it's generally because we're a bit short on reviewers. If there's a lot to do before we can support, and different reviewers are covering different things, then after all the work is done, all the supporters would have to go back and review the whole article again to see if they still support, and we just don't have time to do that (at least, not if we're going to be fair to all the other FACs). So thanks for fixing those, but I'm still opposing, since this is a very, very long article and it appears to me there's going to be as much work to do in each section as there was in the lead. I understand that you'd like the article to be in the best shape possible for the 20-year anniversary, in about two months, and GAN tends to have a long wait these days, but you've got time for a peer review or an A-class review. - Dank (push to talk) 12:04, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    - Having had a prior review isn't part of the featured article criteria, so it seems a bit unfair to effectively make approval conditional on having an A-class review or peer review beforehand. Is there really time to do an A-class review and a featured article review? There certainly isn't time to do a GAN considering how slow it is these days. Prioryman (talk) 19:09, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      - There's time if we get started right away. See WP:MHR for instructions. There are a few articles ahead of yours, so we won't all jump on it at once, but you should start to see some helpful edits and reviews soon. (This isn't a guarantee it will pass ... that's up to the reviewers, and I only look at one small part, the prose.) - Dank (push to talk) 19:19, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        OK, I'll give it a go. I'll remove this nomination temporarily from the FAC page. Prioryman (talk) 19:27, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        
        See Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Battle of Vukovar. Prioryman (talk) 20:05, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.