Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Convoy GP55/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Karanacs 18:57, 18 August 2009 [1].

---

Convoy GP55

Nominator(s): Nick-D (talk) 10:52, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

• Featured article candidates/Convoy GP55/archive1

This article covers what was both the most successful and last attack by a Japanese submarine off the Australian coast during World War II. It recently passed a Military History wikiproject A-class review and has since been improved thanks primarily to comments from Abraham, B.S. and Joe N. As such, I believe that it now meets the featured article criteria. Nick-D (talk) 10:52, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Support for 1a.

• I had to fix the date range, which in "Background" was squashy. (It's fine in the infobox.) Please see the advice in the MilHist style guide. Date ranges are important for MilHist.
• Have we gone to a new wording for daughter article links at the tops of sections? "For more details on this topic, see Axis naval activity in Australian waters." I can't recall the standard text, but this seems wordy. At least remove "on this topic"?
  • I've replaced this with {{main}}, which is probably better here given the length of the article's name Nick-D (talk) 02:59, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
• "outdated doctrine"—sounds very political; will the reader finish the article with even a brief idea of what the doctrine was, and why it was outdated (at the time)? And was this an Australian trait? Are we comparing with other English-speaking countries? Also, consider "poor training" rather than "a lack of training" (but you may think the current wording is more accurate).
  • I've clarified this to explain that the Australian military hadn't been keeping up with improvements to anti-submarine tactics in other areas. The main training problem was a lack of opportunities to train rather than the actual quality of the training which was provided (though it was a bit behind the times).
• "on 5 June. On 7 June"—I relocated, but watch such reps.
• In trying to avoid a high density of "she"s, I substituted the name of the ship once; please check whether I messed up.
  • Looks fine, thanks
• See what you think of my commas; to my liking, there were slightly too few.
  • Seems good to me - I seem to use less commas than most editors
• Sometimes the dodgy "noun plus -ing" construction is so easy to improve: "The Australian failure to sink the submarine was due to a lack of practice and to insufficient ships being available for an adequate search scheme." See this?
  • I've just made a run through the article and removed some of the 'ing's Nick-D (talk) 11:21, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
• "Sydney–Brisbane convoys"—en dash because it's motion from one to the other. Please see WP:MOSDASH and/or these easy exercises. Tony (talk) 13:27, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Done Nick-D (talk) 11:21, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. Done; thanks. Alt text is present but has some problems.

• Alt text and caption have duplicated material; by and large they should have little in common (see WP:ALT #Difference from captions).
• Alt text contains phrases that cannot be immediately verified by someone who is looking only at the images and is not an expert in the subject: "Japanese", "I-168", "I-174", "I-174 was from the same class as I-168.", "Australian Bathurst class corvette HMAS Deloraine", "USS LST-469", "August 1943", "the location of the attack on Convoy GP55". This material should be rewritten or removed or moved to caption. See WP:ALT #What not to specify and WP:ALT #Flawed and better examples, example 3.

Eubulides (talk) 15:48, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for those comments - I've just updated the alt text so that it's hopefully consistent with the guideline. Example 3 is very useful! Nick-D (talk) 00:02, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that. It looks good. I did one little further tweak to make it a bit briefer as per WP:ALT #Flawed and better examples, example 2. Eubulides (talk) 06:26, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comments – Links all work on the link checker, and the source reliability looks okay. The only question I have is whether an access date should be added to the Combinedfleet.com reference in the bibliography. Otherwise, the formatting also looks good. Giants2008 (17–14) 01:34, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Thanks for that. I've just added an access date for that link Nick-D (talk) 07:58, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

• Support Fine article, Nick, well sourced (nice to see Wilson's thesis there, I've found it useful for some of my articles as well). Just a few queries/comments, mainly to do with expression, none of which significantly affect my support:

• Intro:

• which travelled between Sydney and Brisbane - I think we'd generally use "that travelled" rather than "which travelled"; occurs in Background and Attack also...
• is three Landing Ships, Tank acceptable, rather than three Landing Ship, Tank? Just curious...

• Background:

• greatly expanded the number of aircraft - "greatly increased" might be more more logical
• tactics which had proven most successful in other theatres of the war - apart from the "which/that" thing, this kind of makes me expect "such as..." at the end, i.e. briefly, what might they have done but didn't?

• Attack:

• three ships in the centre columns and two in those at the edges - does this mean it was effectively one ship per column or is that too simple?
• where she was presumed to have attacked from - would prefer from where she was presumed to have attacked
• While the corvettes believed that they had sunk I-174, she was only lightly damaged and withdrew to the east - "had withdrawn" seems to agree more with "the corvettes believed"

• Aftermath: 80 nautical miles (150 km) box - wouldn't a box be nautical miles square?

Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 04:12, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for those excellent comments Ian. I've added them all except for the one on tactics (the sources are annoying vague about how the Australian military was behind the times - it's simply asserted that the tactics were not those being used elsewhere) and I-174's withdrawal, as she withdrew at the same time that the corvettes gave up hunting her in the belief that she'd been sunk. Nick-D (talk) 08:08, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

No prob, we're always constrained by the wording in our sources; just took care of a few more instances of the above style tweaks as well... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 09:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Ian - much appreciated. Nick-D (talk) 11:39, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

• Support: well done in my opinion. I just have one minor point: should the in line citations be in numerical order where you have multiple citations beside each other? There is one instance where they are not in numerical order. It is in the first paragraph in the Aftermath section (citation # 22 appears before # 17). I've not changed it myself in case I am mistaken about the need for this. It is a nitpick, but that is basically because I couldn't find anything else to say...;-) — AustralianRupert (talk) 23:41, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
  • There is a second instance of non-numerical order refs. It is in the last paragraph of the Attack section (citation # 15 before # 11). This was caused by me, though, because I found a ref that hadn't been consolidated. I've not re-ordered the numbers, though, as I'm still not sure if it is a requirement. Sorry if I've created more work. — AustralianRupert (talk) 23:52, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
    • FWIW, I don't know that it's a requirement but I think it's neater - certainly no-one's ever had a go at me for doing it...! Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 00:14, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
      • Thanks for those comments. I also don't think that multiple refs need to be in numeric order, but it certainly does look neater. I've just tidied this up. Nick-D (talk) 07:50, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:40, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

• Image Review (Oppose, for now). When you fix the below problems, could you post a note on my talk page? Thanks
  • File:I-68.jpg needs a lot more source information. Could you track down the source link (The ID# is NH 73053 if that helps) and add {{information}} to the page, filling in as many parameters as possible?
• NW (Talk) 02:47, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
  • • Done. The U.S. Navy web page where the photo was taken from states that "To the best of our knowledge, the pictures referenced here are all in the Public Domain, and can therefore be freely downloaded and used for any purpose" Nick-D (talk) 08:20, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
      • Great, thank you for your work. Images look great now. NW (Talk) 14:19, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.