You may find it useful to break up the "background" section. At the moment, it is a little difficult to parse, and might benefit from subheadings such as "tactical situation," "political situation," etc.
Make sure you follow the citation guidelines throughout. The "first day of battle" section is very sparse.
In the "aftermath" section, it may be useful to discuss the larger consequences of the battle, if any.
In many places, a slightly more encyclopedic tone is necessary.
A copyedit would be useful, as the prose is occasionally choppy and difficult to read.
Hopefully these thoughts are helpful.
Carom (
talk) 23:09, 17 February 2008 (UTC)reply
Oberiko
I'd take the pictures out of the infobox, it's not something I've seen anywhere else.
I don't think you need the header on the "Outcome" sub-section
The Chronology, having three points, really isn't all the useful and is basically summarized in the introduction
There are to many infoboxes on the bottom, most of which are barely related to this event. I'd recommend scrapping them and putting a campaign box under the main info box.
Oberiko (
talk) 21:21, 20 February 2008 (UTC)reply
Automated
Here's some automated suggestions I got using
User:AndyZ's script.
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic
javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.
Per
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space - between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 16 km, use 16 km, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 16 km.[?]
Per
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), headings generally do not start with articles ('the', 'a(n)'). For example, if there was a section called ==The Biography==, it should be changed to ==Biography==.[?]
Watch for
redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's
redundancy exercises.)
Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
As done in
WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the
CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2][?]
The "Territorial Changes" part in the infobox needs some fleshing out. "Southwest Virginia" is a fairly general term. Personally, I would simply add more detail to that one element of the infobox, without making it overly long.
Considering the size of the article, there are very few citations. When I have more time, I'll add the "Citation Needed" clips to the article. Density of citations is also very low in some of the sections
I'm going to have to agree with Carom. the "Aftermath" Section needs a lot of fleshing out.
In the infobox, you need to find a statistic for "strength". The casualty figures tell me that this was a relatively small battle. however, I would prefer to have an actual figure for the strength of the opposing armies.
There are places, especially in the "first day of the battle section", that are very difficult to fluently read.
There are other places, mainly the opening of the "Second day of the battle" that read too much like a historical novel. I would suggest reformatting this to fit the prose of an encyclopedia, rather than a historical novel.
I checked the history of the page, and it was once 20,000 bytes in size. Now, it's only 16,000. I would investigate why this is, and consider adding back in some of the stuff which was cut from earlier versions, so as to flesh out many aspects of the article.
Lastly, the "outcome" section is almost contradictory at times. The Union forces achieved a tactical victory, and yet the rebels had inflicted heavy casualties against the Union Army. This is further contradicted by the casualty figure in the infobox. A tactical victory usually means that one side inflicted more casualties on the other. I, personally, would qualify this as a Tactical Confederate Victory, Strategic Union Victory.
Good luck carrying the article forward. All the best