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Template:Did you know nominations/Capture of Mazatlán

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by  — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:31, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
Multiple issues

Capture of Mazatlán edit

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  • ... that the French army gained advantage of four Mexican Republican generals' rivalry at the Capture of Mazatlán?

Created by Lajbi (talk). Self nom at 13:50, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

  • New enough and long enough. QPQ done. All images tagged public domain. Plagiarism check [1] and manual check of PDF shows no obvious cause for concerns. Article completely supported by inline citations.
  • Offline sources and non-English sources support text and were not plagiarised to write.
  • Not seeing hooked fact in article. The word general appears only twice and for the same guy. "four-way oligarchy regarding the control of the city within the juarista party." does not appear to be the same as generals. Can the hook be explained better so I understand where in the text it comes from so I can check sources if web ones are provided? Or can an alternative hook be found? Or can the text be changed to make the hook more explicity? --LauraHale (talk) 11:37, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
  • The whole story of the surrender explains it as well as this reference. Although the link claims them as "governors" I wouldn't say it is the best term to describe them as none of the aspiring officers were elected governors. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 14:56, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Is the whole story explained in the article? Can you propose an alternative hook where the whole story is explained by the article? --LauraHale (talk) 20:57, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I think the current hook tells it in a nutshell and catchy enough but I will think of a second one if necessary. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 07:53, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • The hook might but I cannot find the hook in the article, and rather than quote relevant parts of article, you provided me with citations. :( Which text supports the general statement? --LauraHale (talk) 08:27, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • In the Surrender section it is explained that Jesus García Morales and Ramón Corona even fought a battle right before the attempted capture by the French Navy. Ramóna supported the surrender while Morales wanted to resist the invasion. Antonio Rosales took leadership above the fomer two and decided to give up the city (and there was also Plácido Vega; commander of the garrison who also had bad blood between him and Rosales, which is also mentioned in the paragraph). And the whole story revolves around their opposing opinions on the surrender to the French. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 09:01, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Please quote the article text where I may verify "Republican generals" is actually found in the article and supported by sources please. "In May Plácido Vega, 3rd division central army General " and "Advocate for surrender General Corona tried " do not clearly support the hook. I think you'd be better off proposing an alternative hook pulled almost verbatim from the article if you cannot provide a quote the article text where I may verify "Republican generals" is actually found in the article and supported by sources. Hook guideline 2 says "hook fact is accurate and cited with an inline citation in the article " which is why I looking for this.--LauraHale (talk) 09:22, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Let me clarify the question. Do you need to know whether they all were affiliated with the Republican Army? Or their ranks is on the focus? Both are kinda trivial; I've never seen basic information like those to be individually cited within a hook...although I could try to fix that if that's at stake. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 14:02, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I need the article to support the hook. I cannot find the four Generals and their affiliation in the article. While trivial, the hook needs to be supported by the article. Seriously, at this point, it would be easier to just propose an alternative hook ripped from the article. --LauraHale (talk) 21:59, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Okay than based on the above reference (word by word), I suggest:
ALT1... that the French army gained advantage of four Mexican governors' rivalry at the Capture of Mazatlán? Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 09:10, 10 July 2012 (UTC)


Name the four governors: Jesus García Morales the liberal governor of Nuevo León, Antonio Rosales governor of Sinaloa. I count two. four-way oligarchy , which appears in the article, is not the same as governor because the article has not established that the oligarchs are governors. Propose alternative? Edit the article to establish the oligarchs are governors OR name the four governors in the article?--LauraHale (talk) 10:11, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

  • ALT2: ... that Capture of Mazatlán was preceded by a naval blockade dating from mid-April 1864 and a four-way oligarchy regarding the control of the city within the juarista party?


Can we agree on ALT2? This is from the TEXT of the article. --LauraHale (talk) 10:13, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Fine for me. Thanks for your help and time. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 11:19, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
  • The ALT2 is problematic: it's practically a direct quote from the first sentence of the "Surrender" section, but it does not have an inline citation. The citation at the end of the following sentence does not mention control of the juarista party (shouldn't it be "Juarista"? a proper name?), so I have to conclude that this hook is not cited per DYK rules, or that I'm missing something in that NYTimes story. I did not look further to see whether the four-way oligarchy was mentioned. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:28, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Erk. My major bad. :( Should have checked this one better given the issues with the hook text not supporting the article repeatedly. --LauraHale (talk) 21:53, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I will take care of this problem tomorrow. Since I'm working with several sources within an article it could happen that the reference is in the paragraph but I need to "repeatedly" recheck them from time to time. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 22:37, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Okay so the word "juarist" (Juarista is the Spanish version) appears on the second page of the NYTimes article. But of course I can delete the final a from the ending of the word to identically match with the hook. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 09:24, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
  • The point was not the difference between "Juarist" and "juarista", but that the nearest citation—New York Times article—did not seem to support the "four-way oligarchy regarding the control of the city within" said party, whatever its name. Hook facts must be supported by inline sources, and the source given does not appear to support the statement in the article, which Laura used for the ALT2. This is about both the hook and the article itself: can you point out where the material is that supports the article's assertion? It may not have been the Times article at all, since the citation is after the following sentence. if there isn't a reliable source we can use to verify the sentence, it will have to be deleted, and we'll need a new hook. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:49, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Okay so I try to get this straight, if you still don't find it sufficient, I'd step back from this nomination. Hopefully it won't happen. So that being said:
  1. Of course the four-way oligarchy isn't mentioned in any of the references word-by-word as the whole article is about it and the hook is only allowed to be 200 characters long so it's just a summary of its content.
  2. In the most part this reference has the major info needed to back up the claims (in my point of view)
  3. I quote exactly from the reference:
    "we are blessed with an Emperor and a President, and, touching our State in particular, we have no less than four governors"
    "Corona having raised the standard of revolution against Governor Garcia Morales"
    "However one colonel Rosales[...] jumped into No. three"
    "Chico Vega at once pronounced in favor of the Empire, and now holds his own at Culiacan, the State Capital"
  4. Although it needs some background knowledge (which is available in the rest of the references) it is a well-established fact that they were all Republicans and wanted the best for their party they'd just disagreed on the surrender to the French. But if it is still the cornerstone of the problem, the word "Republican" (liberal/national/juarista) can be taken out.
  5. If you can suggest a better alternate hook that could be triggered from the above citations, I'm all open for it. Cheers. Lajbi Holla @ me • CP 16:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Fresh reviewer needed to go over this. Thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:28, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
  • This has been languishing here, and I can see why: the article has all kinds of problems, esp. of the writing kind. I'm coming across many, many grammatically deficient or ambiguous sentences and phrases with unclear antecedents and not properly paralleled verb tenses ("...then switched into "battle formation" and following an artillery strike, and a series of gunshots;"). I'm in the process of fixing the lead, which didn't even say what the battle was and instead spent all its time describing how many saddle makers the city had and how prosperous it was (it should, of course, provide a definition of the term, a contextualization, an statement on the outcome, and some kind of statement on the importance of the battle). Now, it seems impossible that such a hefty article wouldn't be able to generate a simple and uncontroversial hook, which after all this time may be necessary. I'll see what I can find, but I am not going to rewrite the entire article, which simply must be done before this is to be OK'ed for the main page. Drmies (talk) 03:36, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Exemplary of the quality of the article is what would have supported the earlier hooks: "The takeover of the city was preceded by a naval blockade dating from mid-April 1864 and a four-way oligarchy regarding the control of the city within the juarista party." What is "a four-way oligarchy regarding the control of the city"? What does "regarding" mean here? Why aren't "naval blockade" and "four-way oligarchy" not parallel in a semantic sense? or, what does it mean that a four-way oligarchy "preceded" the takeover? Drmies (talk) 03:39, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
[EC] I've also spent time with the article recently, and also concluded that the article has serious problems. One of my biggest concerns is that the article is almost entirely sourced to contemporary newspaper accounts (published in distant newspapers), which in 1864 were generally of the "letters from the battle scene" type. These are best understood as primary sources -- they often have errors attributable to their being written in the heat of battle, and they typically lack the kinds of contextual information needed to make sense of them. Of the 13 sources cited, only two (Bancroft and Creelman) are English-language documents written at a later time. From the Bancroft book and other sources, I've managed to figure out a little bit about who the factions involved in the battle were (for example, I inferred that the "juarista party" mentioned in the "Surrender" section and the ALT2 hook were persons loyal to Mexican president Benito Juárez), but I couldn't figure that out from the article. Another symptom of the serious problems with the article is the fact that the infobox gives the date of this "capture" as having been in March 1864, but the article appears to identify the "capture" as having occurred in October/November. Sadly, I conclude that the article isn't coherent enough for DYK, and it does not have the kind of sourcing we need for DYK. --Orlady (talk) 04:06, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Given the two reviews above, it's clear that the article does not meet the requirements for DYK. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:41, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
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