Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Cambodian Civil War/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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 06:17, 31 January 2007.

---

Cambodian Civil War

This article meets all criteria for FA-status.

• Nominate and Support. --Ineffable3000 21:42, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. Sorry, it's an interesting topic, but the copyediting doesn't meet the "brilliant prose" standard yet. It took a lot of concentrating and re-reading to follow along the chronology, and I'm still unclear about many items. I'm also not crazy about the "main article" tags at the beginning of almost every section, and some of those "main articles" really aren't larger discussions of the section being tagged (example: Sihanouk Trail, and Vietnam War are listed as main articles of the "background" section, yet the Sihanouk Trail isn't even mentioned in the background section and the Vietnam War only indirectly). Neil916 (Talk) 06:46, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

• Comment The ending is a bit...sensationalist no? :-p Gzkn 08:25, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose I think this is a really good article and a great effort to cover a very complex topic. But I echo the point Gzkn makes about the end, and feel that a similar tone occurs in other points of the article. This gives the impression to me that I am reading an account of events from a specific point of view rather than a God's eye view. Examples of such prose include
  • “The war was over. The terrible dreams of the Khmer Rouge were about to come to fruition in the newly-proclaimed Democratic Kampuchea. The Year Zero had begun.”
  • “On 11 September, Cambodia held its first open election. Open did not mean fair however”
  • “The prince now found himself in a political bind”
  • “Besides, PAVN and the NLF would make very convenient scapegoats for Cambodia's ills,”

I think these examples would be perfectly acceptable in a journal, under a named author. But it doesn't feel right on wikipedia. These statements are "telling" rather than "showing".--Zleitzen 02:43, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.