Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Military Revolution

Military Revolution

Submitting request for Aryaman13. Kirill 17:41, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Seems heavily WP:ORish and needing a lot more citing(some paragraphs without anything at all). At the moment reads much more like a college(=university) essay than an encyclopaedia article. Buckshot06 22:08, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kirill Lokshin

This is a very good start, but I would tend to agree with Buckshot06: it still retains an overall structure and flow more suited to an essay than an article. A few more specific points that stand out:

The "Origin of the concept" section is woefully incomplete. While Roberts was the first to propose a coherent thesis of the "Military Revolution" under that name, the general point that a revolutionary development in warfare had occurred in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries was certainly made by historians before that point (F. L. Taylor and Charles Oman, for example). There's some potential for a longer section outlining the develompment of the concept up to and including Roberts' formal introduction of it, I think.
A large part of the "Discussion on tactics" isn't, really. I would suggest breaking things apart into multiple sections on the different variations on the basic thesis (Roberts & tactics; Parker & geography; Hall and firearms per se; and so forth); some of these points are more technological than tactical, and trying to cover them all under a single heading is probably not the neatest way of approaching it. Hall's Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics may be a useful source for some more material on the technological side of the debate, incidentally.
The "Discussion on size of armies" has an unduly prominent place, I think, given that it's only one of the concerns involved; I'd suggest pulling it into a somewhat more general section on the various historiographic issues involved in this debate. Alternately, it may have potential as an entirely separate article on the army sizes of the period; but it's not really the core of the military revolution thesis, I think, and should not overwhelm this particular article.
The "Conclusion" section is entirely out of place; such general statements should be made in the introduction to the article.
On a more technical note, the footnotes need some cleaning up, and should probably contain page numbers (or ranges) where possible.

Hope that helps! Kirill 23:07, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]