Mountain Meadows massacre

Numerous editors have worked on this page over a period of months. We hope to have this featured near the 150th anniversary of the event on September 11, 2007. Please review for the following:

Speaking only for myself, I have trouble viewing this article in a dispassionate way, as my edits are perfect. I seek the clarity of fresh eyes, and the enthusiasm of neutral reviewers. Thanks in advance. Robbie Giles 13:11, 24 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

AndyZ Review

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DrKiernan review

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, DrKiernan 14:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think it looks very good from a brief personal glance, and probably could reach FA status. DrKiernan 14:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Review by Remember the dot

This article has some good information, but it is way too long. It needs to be split up into several smaller articles of manageable sizes. See Wikipedia:Summary style and Wikipedia:Article size. —Remember the dot (talk) 05:14, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is debate among those of us currently editing the article. I agree that this article is too long and some of the background material is too detailed. I am working to tighten the prose, but it needs major trimming after verifying that material targeted for deletion is in a companion article. Thanks for your review. --Robbie Giles 13:20, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
How about writing a 30 KB summary of the article, and creating articles such as Background of the Mountain Meadows massacre, Baker-Fancher party, Investigations of the Mountain Meadows massacre, and Commemorations of the Mountain Meadows massacre for the details? —Remember the dot (talk) 18:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Right now, the article is just under 60kb of prose. This is within the "may eventually need to be divided" range in the Wikipedia:Article size guideline. I've worked to shorten the background section. Now, the background, including the background on the Fanchers, is just 7 KB, which I think is quite reasonable considering the fact that the secondary sources generally devote a much higher percentage to background, and this subject matter requires a particularly-large amount of context. Since the background is short now, and already represents just about the most compressed summary of the background that I can think of, I think we should leave it intact. Splitting it further would start to cause problems with NPOV forking, since most Mormon apologetic commentators emphasize the "past persecutions" part of the background as a way of explaining the massacre, while Mormon critics emphasize the "blood of the prophets" part of the background as a way of showing how the massacre was inevitable.
I think the best candidates for sub-articles would be "Escalating tensions", "Conspiracy and massacre" and "Investigations and prosecutions". Each of these three chunks all have about the same amount of (or potential for) substantive material in them. COGDEN 19:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipediatoperfection review

This is an exhaustive and well sourced article. Its main contributors should be proud. It seems to be more or less NPOV. It is, however, extremely long. To put this in perspective, this article is bigger than the article on Hitler. And the article on Hitler is massive. I agree with the suggestions above to break the article into several smaller articles. Particularly the section on the Utah War which already has its own page needs to be drastically scaled back. I tend not to like the policy of shoving virtually everything to separate articles as is often done with larger articles. I think that it tends to be used to sweep the dirt under the rug. However, this article desperately need it.

You have all obviously put a great deal of work into the article. If you do some trimming I think this page deserves to be on the front page around the 150th anniversary. Wikipediatoperfection 09:02, 19 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, this article is somewhat smaller than Adolf Hitler. When considering article size, only the readable prose is counted, and the Mountain Meadows massacre article has about 60 kB, whereas Adolf Hitler has about 72 kB. By comparison, The Lord of the Rings, Alcibiades, and Punk rock, some of the larger articles to be featured on the front page, are each about 50 kB. I'm not saying that the Mountain Meadows article shouldn't be shortened, but the size isn't quite as out-of-proportion as the raw article size would suggest. That number is inflated because of the large number of citations. I think if we reduce the size slightly to 50kB we'll be okay. COGDEN 17:39, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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