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Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/USS Iowa (BB-61)

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The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

USS Iowa (BB-61) edit

Passed --Eurocopter (talk) 16:29, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Important note for closing coordinator: The nominator, TomStar, has taken an urgent wikibreak but asks that this review be kept open until his return so that he can deal with any matters arising. --ROGER DAVIES talk 17:49, 20 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The last unfeatured Iowa-class battleship is ironically the class leader, USS Iowa, which I have just updated immensely. The goal is to drive to FA and then FT by the end of the year, and this is the first stop on that road. I am open to any and all comments on the article. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:47, 27 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments
  1. This bathtub issue, while interesting, is given too much coverage and I'm not exactly sure why the pic has been left out of the article. Perhaps you could remove the mention of this from the article text and instead describe it in the photo caption. The issue over Polio and FDR is now disputed as a cause of his paralysis so introducing this debate into the article would only cause problems.
  2. There is too much military lingo such as "Navy brass" "splashing planes" "flattop" etc. I understand what these mean but the inexperienced reader may not.
  3. The coverage of USS Thompson (DD-627) is unnecessarily too long and should be trimmed.
  4. "A glimpse of hell" is too sensational of a description for a subsection.
  5. Overall I'm still confused about your reluctance to crack books on the Iowa class. You have 25 references given to an Iowa veterans website for example. Third party references would seem to imply that primary sources in this case should not be from the US Navy or veterans groups as they have an interest in Iowa only to promote her in a positive manner. --Brad (talk) 19:25, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  6. See what you can do to eliminate the "Awards" and "See also" sections. They contain limited information that likely could be mentioned in the article text or the infobox.--Brad (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Respectively,

  • That was actually part of the construction section and was moved to its current location during a copyedit. I didn't move it back because I had not gotten any input on the article in its rewritten form, and I did not add the picture directly because it would have crammed up the spacing in the article (having the tub photo and the table would force the text to a very small size), although if more people agree with your solution I will add the photo and edit the paragraph for inclusion as a caption.
    • I went ahead and put the image in the article with caption as you suggested. Is this batter? TomStar81 (Talk) 19:17, 6 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think that fixes things up. --Brad (talk) 19:15, 13 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I tried to find and eliminate as much of that as I could, but after I while it gets harder to spot and remove. I will take another pass and see if I can find any additional phrasing that needs "englishized".
  • Done.
  • Done. That was supposed to be remained "1989 turret explosion" before being moved out to the mainspace, although I apparently forgot to do so. M'bad :)
  • I actually looked hard for books on Iowa in three separate libraries because the DANFS coverage was so bad for this ship, but all I could find were crates of material on the explosion in the gun turret. I suspect that is probably why DANFS hasn't got better info on the ship, it seems like everyone wants to forget about this vessel because of that fiasco over incident of April 19. I was also attempting to meet the plagiarism people half way with this article since some view the copy/paste of DANFS material here qualifies as plagerism. As to the veterans website, I used their site because it was more exacting on the details than any other source I could find (DANFS included). If that is judged to be unreliable then I may be up the creek without a paddle so to speak.
  • I really find it hard to believe that you can't find books on this subject. I had given you a list of books that I found in my own library network that surely must be in the library network you have access to. The sources cited on the veterans page aren't exactly high quality and are evasive regarding their origins. I hate to make comparisons but for my work on USS Constitution I've read 6 books on the subject and likely will read a 7th. In total I have at least 9 books to cite including the ones I found at Project Gutenberg. This is why I'm dumbfounded when you say you can't find one book on the Iowa class. Sorry if this sounds harsh but my opinion is that your sourcing is too weak for A-Class. --Brad (talk) 19:41, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can find plenty of books on the Iowa class, just not on the USS Iowa specifically, at least none that don't devote 3/4 of the book to the turret explosion. What I am doing now is checking generic WWII books for mentions of the battleship in the various pacific campaigns. I have a GAC open on the talk page in which a user has suggest some places to check for better info, so you can look for some of that to get into the article here before too long (I hope). Thats why we these assessments, every little suggestion counts for improvement. TomStar81 (Talk) 19:59, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done.
  • Comments

Hi Tom. Good luck with the FT drive! I'm wondering why there aren't more of the great images from [1] in the article. One of them - firing off Korea - is available without the annoying text. Dhatfield (talk) 02:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • The simple answer is room issues, we haven't yet got the article to a stable version, and I need some stability in the text before adding additional photos. Also, I haven't yet had the chance to view the article on a higher moniter resolution setting, so I am not sure how much more room I have to play with in the article. I do intend to add more, I just need a little more time :)
    • For some reason this image won't load when I click on it. I will try again later to see if it will come up, but at the moment I think we may need to pursue alternative website to get to it. TomStar81 (Talk) 19:26, 6 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments

Overall, excellent article, just a few points:

    • There's some inconsistency with regards to the usage of "US" and "U.S." when referring to the United States. Although either is acceptable, I would clean this up to ensure that only one is used throughout the article.
    • Would it be possible to create a separate section as "References" to list the books and articles used, and then change the current refs section to "footnotes"? It becomes quite confusing at times when there isn't a list of the books used above or below
    • On that note, there seems to be a lot of articles & government publications used in the references. There's gotta be a few books out there on the Iowa-Class as a whole. Would it be possible to diversify the refs by drawing resources from some of these? While I recognize the issue raised in your response, I've got plenty of books on the Pacific Campaigns that can likely be used. I'll see what I can help with in regards to print-references.
    • There's a lot of choppiness throughout the prose (this can be solved by a copyedit, which I'm willing to do some of)
    • There's some difficulty with a lot of unnecessary dates being linked (I have problems with this in my writing as well;). I know we like blue, but it does get a bit excessive at times (like I said, I take flak for this as well)
    • That's all I can find for now, I'll take another look tomorrow morning (I'll do some copyediting in the meantime). Regards, Cam (Chat) 06:29, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Overall I thought it was a very good article, however, I cannot support it for A-class till the issues mentioned above are resolved. Besides those, I just found a few stylistic/grammatical errors, which I've gone ahead and corrected for you. I agree that the tub picture should be displayed if at all possible(funny picture, by the way - I love the little toy cruiser...for FDR to play with?). Borg Sphere (talk) 19:49, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Could have been added for visual effect, as I'm not sure roosevelt would have had any toys in his bathtub (although I wasn't there, so I wouldn't know that for a fact). I added the toy picture and am working on the other issues. TomStar81 (Talk) 20:11, 6 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments

Looks like a great article, just a few comments below:

  1. I notice you have All Hands in the notes section, a quick search lead me to the Navy's All Hands archive site which will help you get a more full cite, and the ability to link to it.
  2. According to WP:MOSNUM, inparticular MOS:UNLINKDATES: The linking of dates purely for the purpose of autoformatting is now deprecated. So you might have to remove the date links, or wait until the handful of users who are auto unlinking arrive at the article.
  3. In the construction section is there anyway to expand it? Like add more information on it's construction like how many men worked on it, any challenges faced during construction, etc. because that whole section sans 4 sentences is about the armament, which leads me to my next comment.
  4. Can an armament section be created/expanded by either adding a subsection to the construction section or it's own section with like a paragraph or two about its fire power? The way it is now is 4 quick sections about it's armament, and I understand that a FA article exists on the Iowa class in general, but a section in the USS Iowa article I think is warranted.
  5. I'm going on a stretch here, but can this image be placed in the article? It's a featured picture and would be well placed to show the strength of the ships fire power.

That's it for now, I'm kind of new at this so I probably be back with some more questions and comments. El Greco(talk) 20:00, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Repectively:
  • I hadn;t realised that they had an online archive, that will likely help in formatting the article's All Hands references. Thanks for that.
  • In general I tried to link only those dates that had a full month name year setup, although I admit that I need to read up on this a little to see how exactly this effects my article here (and by extenion, the other five articles already there :)
    • Tony has removed all instances of just date linking, so we are good to go on those grounds now. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:16, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I could look into expanding the section along those lines, although I am not sure to what extent information on the subject will be available. I do know that the battleship wasn't built by men, it was built by women, who were working the navy yards for the men while the latter were off to fight the war. Apparently, the "rosies" left good luck messages engraved within a fuel tank on Wisconsin, so there maybe some material of this nature for Iowa as well.
  • That bumps up against both Wikipedia:Article size and Wikipedia:summary style, both of which need to be kept in mind when working on the article. Moreover, almost all the armament info is at armament of the Iowa class battleship. This format was adopted some time ago to keep all involved editors mostly happy, and it has worked up till now with little or no resistance. Most problematic with the issue of the construction section is that rattling one section also invites the possibility of rattling these sections for the other three completed Iowas so they maintain uniformity for a FT shot. I want to say here explicitly that I will rearrange the sections if enough people agree it needs to be done, but I until I see the enough people mark (maybe three or four people in agreement with you) I am not going to rearrange the sections (yet, anyway).
  • Of course. I just need a little more stability in the article and a higher resoltion moniter before I add the image in. It will be added, trust me; this is one image that most accurately says "600-ship Navy", so it will be added even if I have to remove and article or two to get it in. TomStar81 (Talk) 20:25, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's fine with my fourth comment, I just threw it out there. Better to keep it consistent with the other articles then not to. I mainly brought it up if there was any difference in armament for the USS Iowa as compared to the other ships since she was the lead ship. El Greco(talk) 20:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I've reviewed some of the sources, and added some material myself as I build the USS Iowa turret explosion. I think the article accurately reflects the current sources and meets the criteria. Cla68 (talk) 03:19, 22 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question...Is the section on WWII taken more or less directly from the US Navy's history of the ship and/or from Morison? It seems kind of hagiographic. Cla68 (talk) 05:37, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • The others are, but this one isn't; the WWII section was rebuilt from the Iowa veteran's association ship's history page, with checks against DANFS (what little material there was to check against) and reports from other ships (one liners mostly) that confirm Iowa's presence in the combat actions. If you like I could try and tweak this a little, although admittedly I am not sure exactly how I would be able to pull this off. TomStar81 (Talk) 19:39, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
One problem with giving the history of an individual ship, is that to perhaps get an objective outside opinion of the ship's performance might require unreasonable searching through seemingly unrelated sources. For example, the book: Brown, Herbert C. (2000). Hell at Tassafaronga. Ancient Mariners Pr. ISBN 0-9700721-4-7. states that the interception of Japanese warships fleeing Truk lagoon during Operation Hailstone was fairly botched, with at least one or more of the Japanese warships escaping in spite of the superior numbers of American warships present with many of them almost being hit by Japanese torpedoes launched during the encounter. I'll review the article again. Cla68 (talk) 08:03, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The concerns I had have been addressed. Excellent article. Cam (Chat) 02:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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