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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Military history of Australia during World War II/archive1

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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 promoted by SandyGeorgia 22:48, 27 June 2009 [1].

Military history of Australia during World War II edit

Nominator(s): Nick-D (talk) 11:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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A large number of editors and I have been working on this article for just over three years, and I think that it may now be FA standard. The article was assessed as a GA on 22 January and passed a Military History Wikiproject A-class review on 26 January and has been improved further since then. Nick-D (talk) 11:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Interesting article Well I did some random copyediting and have learnt a lot so far from the bits I tweaked. I thought that the last section was very interesting, ewspecially the last para about how it changed social roles. I think this definitely needs expanding because the way it's written sems to imply that the effects of the war last for a generation or so. Also because the section is relatively subjective I think it would be better to have a wider range of sources and ideas about the effects of WWII on society, especially elaborating on the indept foreign policy. I assume mass immigration was encouraged because of the worry that war depletes so much but I am not sure YellowMonkey (click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 07:48, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for your comments. As the article is primarily about the military aspects of Australia's involvement in the war, I've tried to keep that material to a minimum as it's at the margins of the article's scope. It belongs somewhere on Wikipedia (History of Australia since 1945 perhaps?), but I'm not sure if this is the most appropriate article. Nick-D (talk) 07:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments -
  • I'm sure we've discussed www.uboat.net before, but I can't find it on my cheatsheet. Someone refresh my memory if it's reliable?
  • Minor quibble - current ref 179 (HMAS HObart..) says "Sea-Power Centre" as the publisher, but certainly appears it's the Royal Australian Navy when I click on the link.
Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:41, 6 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for those comments. www.uboat.net was used as a source for FA SM U-66 (promoted to FA in March 2009) and I'm pretty sure that I've seen it used in other FAs and A class articles. I've asked User:Bellhalla for comments on the site's reliability. I've updated the publisher details for ref 179 - it used to be on the Sea Power Centre part of the RAN website, but moved into the main part of the website when it was redeveloped a few months ago - great work spotting this! Nick-D (talk) 00:05, 7 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm sure Bellhalla will fill in my faulty memory. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:30, 7 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • As mentioned above, Nick asked me to comment on the reliability of Uboat.net. Some recently published books that use Uboat.net as a non-trivial source are:
          • Atkinson, Rick (2002). An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (1st ed.). New York: Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 9780805062885. OCLC 49383747.
          • Conley, Tom (2007). Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816643578. OCLC 73501932.
          • Lecane, Philip (2005). Torpedoed!: the R.M.S. Leinster Disaster. Penzance, Cornwall: Periscope. ISBN 1904381308. OCLC 74335239.
          • Treadwell, Theodore R. (2000). Splinter Fleet: The Wooden Subchasers of World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1557508178. OCLC 43706924.
          • Whitlock, Flint; Smith, Ron (2007). The Depths of Courage: American Submariners at War with Japan, 1941-1945 (1st ed.). New York: Berkley Caliber. ISBN 9780425217436. OCLC 77503911.
          • Wise, James E.; Baron, Scott (2004). Soldiers Lost at Sea: A Chronicle of Troopship Disasters. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1591149665. OCLC 52182511.
          • Zuehlke, Mark (2008). Operation Husky: The Canadian Invasion of Sicily, July 10–August 7, 1943. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 9781553653240. OCLC 245556470.
        • — Bellhalla (talk) 11:36, 8 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. No issues that I could find. Great article. Cla68 (talk) 05:41, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Still a bit of cleaning up is possible in the prose.
  • Why pipe to "Nazi Germany" with just "Germany", when most people will avoid a pure country link? I'd use both words. I wonder the same about "Europe", "North Africa", etc—can they be neatly linked without piping, so the reader might be attracted more to the specificity of the links? Unsure.
    • Done
  • A succession of "Australia" and "Australian(s)" in the lead. The term could be rationed. I'll try in the lead, if you could check through the rest of the article.
    • Reduced a bit in the lead
  • "led to the development of a larger peacetime military and began the process with which Australia shifted the focus of its foreign policy to closer alignment with the United States rather than Britain." Are there good refs futher down for these major claims? This one, too: " The effects of the war also fostered the development of a more diverse and cosmopolitan Australian society." Maybe ... I'm being lazy in not scrutinising further.
    • That's cited in the 'Defence of Australia' section and the last section of the article
  • On the whole, you might consider using a few more commas. Take this sentence: " The Government's decision to immediately enter the war was primarily made on the grounds that Australia's interests were inextricably linked to those of Britain and that a British defeat would destroy the system of imperial defence which Australia relied upon for security against Japan." Try on after "Britain". My thinking is that three things encourage the use of optional commas: (1) a formal register, (2) a longish sentence, and (3) not many commas in the vicinity. In particular, commas can be used after a sentence-intial prepositional/adverbial phrase. ("In early 1944, the ...", "At the time war was declared, the Australian armed forces were ..."). Tony (talk) 13:53, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'll have a look at this; I tend to think that commas are over-used in Wikipedia articles
  • PS I'm assuming that your references, the ones for major claims (and there are plenty) are squeaky clean, academically right up there. Are any refs to publications from within the military, rather than to independent scholarly researchers? Tony (talk) 13:59, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yep - the main sources are the Australian official history of the war (which was funded by the Government but the historians were granted total freedom and almost unlimited access to records and remains the key source on Australia's role in the war) and the other standard works on the war - all the sources are highly reliable and they could be used without fear in university essays and the like. Only two of the references were published by the military, and they're articles written by the highly regarded historians David Horner and Peter Stanley who are not employed by the military (Horner used to be in the Army, but left before becoming a historian and Stanley has never served in the military as far as I'm aware). Thanks a lot for your comments. Nick-D (talk) 02:50, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Shouldn't it say how many casualties there were in the lead? --Thanks, Hadseys 08:28, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • The number of Australians killed and wounded is in the last sentance of the first paragraph. Nick-D (talk) 08:49, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose to a singular but serious image licensing issue:

  • File:Battle of Greece - 1941.png: base maps (File:Battle of Greece WWII map-fr.png and its predecessor) are released under GFDL/CC-2.5-SA. That means subsequent derivative works must be released under GFDL or CC-SA compatible licenses. Public domain is not acceptable (attribution is lost)! As licensing is personal intent, the uploader (User:Raymond Palmer) should be the one to correct it (or face deletion of improperly licensed image). However, his account is now "closed", so I think we must get some admins proficient in image-licensing to resolve this.

Otherwise, all other Images are verifiably in the public domain. Jappalang (talk) 09:35, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    • Thanks for that. As the timeframe for fixing up the image is uncertain at best and it's of limited value to this article given that it's only relevant to a few weeks of the war, I've removed it from the article. Nick-D (talk) 10:06, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • No problems, I have nominated that map for deletion; perhaps the Commons admins can resolve its issues. Jappalang (talk) 10:58, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • Commons admins have decided that they are empowered to correct the license. Jappalang (talk) 13:39, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - two ISBN's are only nine digits long when they should be 10 or 13; I've marked them with hidden comments. Could you check them? Cheers, —Ed (Talk • Contribs) 03:27, 13 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Done - thanks for your excellent copy edits too. Nick-D (talk) 07:09, 13 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment References 57, 64, 76, 113, 140, and 157 need page numbers. Mm40 (talk) 11:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Those are all online references which are only available in HTML format, so they don't have any pages. Nick-D (talk) 08:40, 24 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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