Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Tet Offensive/1

Tet Offensive

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: My opinion on this was roughly neutral and at best the discussion here will result in no consensus. Given that this has been open since last year I am going to close it as a keep and remove the tags. If anyone feels strongly about this close feel free to revert it. AIRcorn (talk) 06:22, 11 April 2013 (UTC).

There have been a few major cleanup tags on this article for a while, so I feel a reassessment is in order. The two tags are one suggesting the tone of the article is not encylcopaedic and the other suggests that a more worldwide view is needed. I opened a discussion on the talk page, but it hasn't really addressed the issue. I don't think we can have a Good article with these tags on them, so am hoping this will result in either some improvement or agreement that the tags are not necessary. Worst case scenario is that the article will be delisted.

Tone

The tone applies to criteria 1a of the GA criteria. The concern is that the writing style leans too much towards an essay than a article in an encyclopaedic. The talk page comment accompanying the tag said I see a lot of colloquialisms and other kinds of unencyclopedic language in this article. Some examples of what could be considered inappropriate or prehaps informal tone (some bordering on original research) are:

• During the fall of 1967, the question of whether the U.S. strategy of attrition was working in South Vietnam weighed heavily on the minds of the American public and the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
• Provided with an enemy intelligence windfall accrued during Operations Cedar Falls and Junction City, the CIA members of the group believed that the number of communist guerrillas, irregulars, and cadre within the South could be as high as 430,000.
• This prompted the administration to launch a so-called "Success Offensive", a concerted effort to alter the widespread public perception that the war had reached a stalemate and to convince the American people that the administration's policies were succeeding.
• Under the leadership of National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow, the news media then was inundated by a wave of effusive optimism.
• Westmoreland was even more emphatic in his assertions
• By the end of the year the administration's approval rating had indeed crept up by eight percent,

That is from the first section. Overall I think that the writing is of an excellent quality, but I can see why there are concerns over the tone.

Globalise

This relates to the broadness criteria, and is the older tag. This is what I can gather the reason for the tag [1]. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on this. It could be relavent and considering it has sat on the article for 1.5 years it probably is not completely misplaced.

I have notified, RM Gillespie, RedSpruce, KAM, Kauffner, Muboshgu, Iankap99, Interchange88, Ciroa, 74.177.109.240 and the wikiprojects on the talk page. AIRcorn (talk) 07:13, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

• A lot of material is sourced to "Nguyen, p. xx". The full sourcing must have dropped off at some point. There is a lengthy section on communist decision-making that I find problematic. Various authors have radically different takes on this issue, but you wouldn't know that from reading this article. For example, "Although Giáp went to work 'reluctantly, under duress,' he may have found the task easier due to the fact that he was faced with a fait accompli." That is presumably based on the CIA's theory that Giap was quarreling with Thanh, who planned the offensive. The two complained about each other using incomprehensible Marxist jargon, so what the dispute was about and how Giap really felt about the offensive is anyone's guess. Kauffner (talk) 14:17, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

• Comment. I haven't read all of the article yet, but the tone/prose style doesn't strike me as a major problem. Yes, there are sentences which can be improved; no, it isn't serious enough to demonte the article. Majoreditor (talk) 00:59, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
• Keep While some sentences could be rephrased there isn't a major issue with this article. My biggest complaint would be that the references needed to be reformatted. I have done corrected this issue. Don4of4 ^[Talk] 17:34, 2 March 2013 (UTC)