Wikipedia:Peer review/Battle of the Plains of Abraham/archive2

Battle of the Plains of Abraham edit

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I've listed this article for peer review because it has already achieved good article status, and it is of excellent quality and may be close to ready for featured article status. Your thoughts and ideas are appreciated. Thanks, 252semist (talk) 05:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: Nicely-done article, well-illustrated. I found this highly readable and quite interesting. My main suggestion would be to include more background for the reader, chiefly in the form of a map showing the region, but also in the form of a few more details in the "Legacy" section.

The two close-up maps in the article are helpful, but I longed for a map early on that would show the entire region and place Quebec City in a wider geographic context. Ideally, it would show the location of the city and the St. Lawrence River in eastern Canada, and would make clear the direction of flow of the river. It would also show Cap Rouge. If you can't find a map like this on the Commons, you might be able to make a map from public-domain base maps and data from other maps, or you might enlist the aid of a Wikipedian who likes to make maps.

Infobox

"600 colonial army
1,800 militia and indians" - Cap and link "Indians"?

Lead

"The battle involved fewer than 10,000 troops between both sides, but proved to be a deciding moment... " - "Between both sides" seems a little awkward. Would it be more clear to simply delete "between both sides"?

Overview

"France was forced to draw its troops back." - Would it be helpful to say which direction they were going? Retreating to the west from Louisburg, or retreating to the east from Fort Frontenac?

"7,000 regular troops, 300 gunners, and Marines" - Should "Marines" be lower-cased or perhaps linked to something?

"In preparation for the fleet's approach to Quebec, James Cook surveyed a large portion of the river... " - Shouldn't the specific name of the river, the St. Lawrence, appear here on first mention? Would it be helpful to say that they were approaching from Louisburg, if that is the case, east of Quebec City?

"distributed some 12,000 troops in a nine-kilometre long collection of fortified redoubts and batteries from the Saint-Charles River to the Montmorency Falls" - Convert to imperial also; i.e., "distributed some 12,000 troops in a collection of fortified redoubts and batteries, 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) long, from the... "?

"Wolfe, on surveying the town of Beauport, found that the houses there had been barricaded and organized to allow for musket fire from within; they were built in an unbroken line along the road, providing a formidable barrier." - What road? Did Beauport have only one street, or was this a road from Beauport to Quebec City?

Preparations

WP:MOSQUOTE suggests using blockquotes for quotations of four lines or more. It deprecates fancy quotes, in any case.

Landing

File:WilliamHowe1759.jpg is problematic in three ways. It should be moved to avoid overlapping sections and displacing an edit button. It is directional and should be positioned on the left side of the page so that it looks or moves into the page rather than out. It is not clear from the text who Sir William Johnson is. If the image is of Johnson and not Howe, does it belong in the article?

Battle

Rather than repeating a main word from the article title, I'd try to find a different but suitable word or phrase. I don't know if "battle" has any precise synonyms. Would "Epic fight" be a possibility? Or just "Fight"?

The Battle on the plains

This head repeats the title too. Could it become "Main engagement"?

"An eyewitness with the 78th Highlanders (Dr. Robert Macpherson) wrote three days after the battle" - Wikipedia generally avoids using academic titles like "Dr." Instead it uses descriptions such as "Robert Macpherson, a physician"). I don't know if he was a physician; this is just an example.

File:Sketch for The Death of Montcalm.jpg overlaps two sections and displaces an edit button on my computer screen. Moving it up one paragraph would fix this.

Aftermath

File:Death of General Montcalm.jpg is directional and would look better if placed on the right side of the page.

Legacy of the Plains

I would shorten the section head to "Legacy".

"the Moulin à paroles" - Would it be helpful to include an English translation in parentheses?

"including the 1970 FLQ Manifesto" - Would it be helpful to explain why the manifesto annoyed the federalists? Readers unfamiliar with Canadian history may not have any idea what the manifesto was about.

"Today, while much of the foreshore along the base of the cliffs that were scaled by William Howe's men the morning of the battle has been taken over by industry, the Plains of Abraham themselves are preserved within one of Canada's National Urban Parks." - I'd recast this for concision and better prose flow. Suggestion: "Although industry occupies much of the foreshore beneath the cliffs scaled by Howe's men on the morning of the battle, a national urban park preserves the Plains of Abraham."

References

Citation 52 refers to a book not listed in the "Bibliography" section. Should it be added to the bibliography, along with date of publication, publisher, and ISBN or OCLC? Also, pp. should be p. since it's a single page.

Citation 62 is quite mysterious. It is not French or English, and the clarifying note does not clarify. Can't a better source for the claim be found?

Citations 63 and 64 are incomplete. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and access date, if all of these are known or can be found.

Bibliography

It's often possible to find OCLC numbers for books published too early to have ISBNs. You can usually find these via WorldCat.

Other

The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find one or two dead URLs in the citations and one link that goes to a disambiguation page instead of the intended target.

Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:08, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]