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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 not promoted by User:SandyGeorgia 03:05, 13 July 2008 [1].

Battle of the Kalka River

[edit]
Nominator(s): Kyriakos (talk)


I'm nominating this article for featured article because I think that it is FA standard. I've worked on this article for last few months and I think I have brought it to FA standard. The article has passed a GAC and a WP:MILHIST A-class review. Kyriakos (talk) 10:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • Please be consistent with your bibliographical entries in the printed sources section, most are first name last name, but one is last name first. If you're going to use the last name title system in the references, you should probably go with last name first in the printed sources, to make things easier. You just need to pick one way and stick with it.
  • Current ref 5 Rossabi All the Khan's Horses is lacking a publisher.
  • There are two sources in the printed sources section that aren't listed in the references, those should go in a further reading section if they really have not been used as references.
Otherwise sources look good, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:47, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Gary King (talk) 15:52, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose: it needs wikification. There are numerous terms, locations, names, etc. than need linking, while others are linked several times. The articles relies too heavily on two sources (Richard Gabrieland Leo de Hartog) - I fully understand how obscure the topic is and how hard it is to obtain proper citations. Inline citations are sparse (for example, the entire section ==The battle== has only four citations). The article needs some copy-editing (just an example: How large each princes contingent was, is usually not known.) The map with routes of expedition should really be moved up from the aftermath section (probably to prelude). historian Robert Marshall is probably correct in describing - who judged him to be "probably correct"? despite rather fanciful efforts by Gabriel - again, whose opinion? Introduction is too detailed as a summary of the article. It should talk less about what turns the Mongols took and what princes they killed and describe bigger picture items like impact on Kievan Rus', Mongol Empire, future invasions, etc. Leave the details to the body of the article. must have had a devastating impact on Kievan Rus' government and society - any details? In the aftermath there is information only about Mongols, pretty much nothing on Kievan Rus' or other affected states. Just a suggestion, but since pretty much nothing is known about the battle itself and the entire article describes the three-year raid, wouldn't it be better to re-focus the article on that raid instead of one battle? Renata (talk) 23:46, 3 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. Sorry my version of the article was undone. The article as it stands now has many more sources. I'll work on the lead and pay more attention to watch you said. Kyriakos (talk) 09:45, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Notes on the exactness of the figures and course of events, which are not known*

I question a number of the sources and most of the troop figures found in this article, and thus, it's overall quality. I question whether all the information on the lead up to the battle should be in this article - it should be somewhere, probably in an article on the campaign itself. But more importantly, the figures as to the size of armies and their movements prior to, during, and after the battle are simply not at all based on any reality. The medieval sources (and there are very few) say almost nothing of the size of armies and where they were on the battlefield, so how can Gabriel and others know this? In looking at Gabriel and others, they often cite previous authors who themselves do not cite where they got the information, or they repeat information without being at all critical of its accuracy. As to Munro, he is the (fiction) writer known as Saki; he was not a historian, and I am not sure his work on the Russian empire should be considered a worthwhile historic source or if Munro meant it to be. John Fennell, the late historian of Rus and Russian history at Oxford Univeristy, took the figures to task in his book "the Crisis of Medieval Russia" back in 1983, which I put in the article, but which has since been removed. The "Russian Primary Chronicle" and the "Chronicle of Novgorod", both contemporary to the time of the battle, are very limited in what they say of the battle. The "Chronicle of Novgorod" names fifteen princes, of which six were killed, and the "Russian Primary Chronicle" gives the figure of 10,000 Russians at the battle. Since we don't even know exactly where the battle took place, we can't say where particular units or particular princes were on the battlefield or the precise course of battle, so I'm not sure how Gabriel and others, or the editors of this entry, come up with that information. When I have tried to make corrections to this effect in the article, they have, again, been deleted or otherwise taken out. That seems to me to be shoddy history - ignoring the information that doesn't suit your need. If this is supposed to be an article about what really happened at the Battle of Kalka River, it seems to me that it does a poor job of this. --Mcpaul1998 (talk) 12:04, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments on images

  • Image:PremongolEurasia.png - Maps are supposed to indicate the sources for their information on the image description pages. Ideally, they are supposed to be in SVG format as well.

Oppose—Requirement for a professional standard of formatting: overlinked.

Like Mcpaul1998, I am concerned about the accuracy of the article, and the use of sources. For example, we are told "This battle was a significant defeat, given that many of the Rus principalities lost much of their armies, with the notable exception of Vladimir-Suzdal". However, Fennell (p. 68) concludes: "To judge from all the available sources, the impact of the first Tatar invasion on the Russians appears to have been remarkably small". We are told here that Yuri Vsevolodovich "promised support", but Fennell expresses doubts as to Yuri's having done any such thing and one of the primary sources says that Yuri was not present at the council of war in Kiev (p. 67). If we accept Fennell's arguments on the scale of events (pp. 66–68), any secondary source reproducing the sorts of figures appearing in this article must be somewhat suspect. Angus McLellan (Talk) 21:32, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

According to several of the books that I have read on the battle, Yuri of Vladimir-Suzdal promised support but was deliberately slow in sending it so as to strengthen his position after all the other Prince's armies were defeated. Kyriakos (talk) 22:55, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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