Talk:Central Powers

This review is transcluded from Talk:Central Powers/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: History6042 (talk · contribs) 21:27, 29 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Reviewer: ClaudineChionh (talk · contribs) 06:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Starting review. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 06:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I'm afraid I'm going to quick fail this on coverage and citations. However, I know I could be too harsh when I used to grade undergraduate assignments, so if another reviewer or GA coordinator thinks I'm doing the same here, I'll give it another go. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 22:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Apart from the introductions to the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman sections, this reads like a list with some padding. I would expect to see much more discussion of the context and relationships between the various powers. Many of the dependent states only have a one– or two–sentence section of prose – if you don't have much to say about them, the tables do a good enough job of presenting the minor belligerents.

Verifiability is a core policy and it is the responsibility of the editor who adds content to provide complete references to support any quotations or statements. This is especially crucial when writing on a historical topic. At the bare minimum, I expect to see author, title, and publication date for books or author, article title, journal title, and publication date for journal articles, so that I can verify that these are real sources and that support the statements that they reference. For books, the name of the publisher can help us assess whether the book is reliable. In many of these references, I can't even tell whether it refers to a book, chapter, journal article, or some other type of publication, so I wouldn't know where to start looking for it. You should also gain more practice using citation templates consistently and citing different pages within the same book using {{sfn}} or {{rp}} templates.

These are the problems I found in my first scan of the reference list. Only the ones listed in Unacceptable citations warrant a fail on their own; incomplete citations on their own do not fail the GA criteria, but there are too many of them.

In case reference numbers change during editing, the numbers here are from this revision.

The following citations do not provide a title, let alone date or other publication details – the authors' names do not appear anywhere else in References or Further reading. This means it is impossible to verify them with any certainty. This is unacceptable in a Good article, especially on a historical topic where the majority of sources are offline.

• [17] Washausen, p. 116
• [22] Gottschall, p. 177
• [108] Shukri, "As Senussiya..." p. 156. I can't even tell if this is a journal article, book chapter, blog post, or something else entirely.

The targets for the following refs are not defined in this article so they're essentially missing title and other publication details.

• [41] Miller 1999
• [53] Hoisington 1995, p. 63
• [54] Fage, Roberts & Oliver 1986, p. 290
• [55] Burke 1975, p. 440
• [81] Nicolle (1997), p. 5
• [100–103] Hart 2013

A reader or reviewer can try looking up these incomplete citations in a library catalogue but I really expect an editor who is adding a reference to provide sufficient publication information, which you should already have in front of you.

• [7] Hagen, William W. German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation. p. 228. This doesn't even have a publication date, which is essential for us to know what this source means by "modern".
• [32] Pánek 2009, pp. 336-337 No title or other publication details.
• [33] Biondich 2000, p. 9 This links to a reference list in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia article. The reference needs to be defined in this article. Was this ref just copied blindly from the other article?
• [63] J. M. Roberts. Europe 1880–1945. p. 232. No date.
• [68] Kataryna Wolczuk. The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation. p. 37. No date.
• [76] Hala Mundhir Fattah. The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1745–1900. p. 121. No date.
• [77] Zvi Lerman, David Sedik. Rural Transition in Azerbaijan. p. 12. No date.
• [82] See Gilkes, Patrick / Plaut, Martin: Great War Intrigues in the Horn of Africa, in: Shiferaw Bekele, The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa 2019. pp. 37–58. Incomplete citation and incorrect use of italics.
• [84] Dilebo, Getahun. Emperor Menelik's Ethiopia, 1865-1916 National Unification Or Amhara Communal Domination. UMI Howard University. p. 244. No date or indication of what kind of publication this is – a dissertation, monograph, report, working paper...?

• [95] Archives, The National (28 September 2018). "The National Archives - Milestones to peace: the Armistice of Salonica". The National Archives blog. Retrieved 6 October 2024. Incorrect author name – it shouldn't be hard to get this right.

I'd really encourage using {{Cite}} templates to ensure that citations present full publication details and conform to the citation style guidelines.

• [5] and [6] Meyer, G.J. A World Undone – also, since this is the same book, you should use either {{sfn}} or {{rp}} to cite different pages within the same book.
• [30] Cashman, Greg; Robinson, Leonard C. An Introduction to the Causes of War has author, title, and publication details, but using {{Cite book}} would mean it's formatted according to the style guidelines.

Author, title, and date are the bare minimum; providing the names of publishers helps us determine reliability of sources. You can use {{Cite book}} to provide full citations in this section.