Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/World War II/Archive 1

World War II

Just wondering what more needs to be done in this article before its ready to become a FAC. --Mercenary2k 10:25 AM April 20, 2006

Kirill Lokshin

This is a hard one. It doesn't seem to be a poor article content-wise (someone with more background on WWII might be able to comment more meaningfully on that, though); but it has persistent layout and referencing problems:

• An article of this length really needs more footnotes. I think the general rule of thumb has been to have at least one per section.
• The masses of extremely short (pseudo-)sections are difficult to read, and break up the flow of the text considerably. It may be difficult with material so contentious on many points, but this article really won't succeed as a FAC until someone goes through and collapses them all into large, well-written chunks of prose. In addition, breaking things up by year and European/Pacific location isn't the most natural way of doing it. I would try to avoid a by-year breakdown entirely and instead go for a roughly chronological layout by campaign. In other words:
  • War begins
  • German invasion of Western Europe
  • Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia
  • Axis Balkan campaigns
  • War in North Africa
  • German invasion of the Soviet Union
  • U.S. entry
  • German offensives in the south
  • Pacific island campaigns
  • Battle of the Atlantic
  • Soviet drives into Eastern Europe
  • Allied invasion of Italy
  • Allied invasion of France
  • Battle for Germany

Obviously I've ommitted a number of major things that would need their own sections; but, within each section, you can have straight chronological text, which should be much better prose than a bunch of miniature sections.

The material is there; it just needs to be reworked into a form closer to a normal article rather than a giant table of contents for all our WWII material. Kirill Lokshin 03:49, 24 April 2006 (UTC)