Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907

Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 edit

I wrote this back in November (after stumbling across a marvellously useful source text at work), and had forgotten about it until now, when I finally got around to writing the parent article at Haldane Reforms.

I'd like to knock it up to a higher class, and with a bit more work I suspect it has the potential - it's a nice tightly defined topic. However, it's an unusual type of article - part milhist, part statute law - which makes it a bit hard to decide on how best to structure it, quite what material to bring in, and what would be better split out to daughter articles. Any thoughts? Shimgray | talk | 21:30, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abraham, B.S. edit

Just a few points I noticed:

The lead requires an expansion. A good two or three paragraphs should do.
Per MoS, headings should not have "the" at the start.
Emdashes (—) should be unspaced.
Is there a reason why the caption on the Sir Richard Haldane photo is in italics?
I'm a little concerned on the over reliance on the Dunlop and Godley sources. Would it be possible to further diversify the cites?

I hope this helps. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 10:03, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea why Haldane's in italics - it wasn't actually in the source, but it seems to be fixed after some fiddling. I confess to no particular views on ndashes and emdashes, so I've converted the offending ones back into plain hyphens :-) As for the headings... I'm not sure. If I drop "the" from the two subheadings in the background section, they don't sound right to me. Hmm.

Dunlop and Godley were the ones I had handy :-) I'm optimistic that Mitchinson's Defending Albion will provide a third source to support most of it, and some pointers for further reading, but there's only one copy available to me and I haven't been able to get to the library recently.

I'll have a think about how to structure a new lead - thanks for the comments. Shimgray | talk | 17:59, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The places you had endashes and emdashes were correct, and need to be in those places. What I ment was that there should not be spaces either side of the dash. For example: "Army Corps of regular troops — with units reinforced individually by reservists — and a third composed partly of Regulars" --> "Army Corps of regular troops—with units reinforced individually by reservists—and a third composed partly of Regulars". If the "the" is dropped from the headings they sound fine to me; as I said it's also against MoS as well. Good work so far! Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 23:17, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I follow! I had originally written the entire thing with plain ASCII hyphens, and someone had helpfully come along and converted them to the appropriate dashes - I didn't want to alter their formatting without some clearer idea of why... changed.

As for the headings, I've tried to reword them a bit so as to avoid "The -". Shimgray | talk | 13:52, 15 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

All of the dashes and headings look good now. :) Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 21:32, 15 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

...wow, a three-week delay in replying! Er. I've dredged through three or four probable sources in the library, including Defending Albion, but they mostly focused on the Territorial Force itself rather than the legislation which brought it into existence, or the debate surrounding it. So no luck as yet expanding the sources. I'm having a fresh shot at the lede just now... Shimgray | talk | 23:01, 4 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]