Talk:Richard II of England

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Richard II of England is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 8, 2012, and on August 16, 2017.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 17, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed
October 13, 2008	Featured article candidate	Promoted

Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on February 17, 2014, February 17, 2015, July 16, 2020, July 16, 2022, and July 16, 2024.

Current status: Featured article

Biography: Peerage and Baronetage / Royalty and Nobility

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On 5 November 2023, it was proposed that this article be moved to Richard II. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Too many uses of names of towns to refer to people without links to the people

In the section marked 'second crisis', it is written that Richard II had "Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick" arrested. What - the whole towns? Well, no, but it's not explicit that this was not the case. As for 'Gloucester' I had to go way back in the article to find out who 'Gloucester' is: in the section 'Coming of Age' it is states that the unofficial leadership of growing dissent 'passed to Buckingham - who by now had been created Duke of Gloucester'

Oh, great, so Gloucester means Buckingham!

But I have to go even further back into the article to find out what 'Buckingham' means (and hence what 'Gloucester' means) : in the section 'Early Life" I find that 'Gaunt' [another town, but in this case *I* happen to know to whom this refers] had informal influence over government, together with 'Gaunt' 's brother Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.

So thus, it takes a lot of extra effort to find out who was arrested in 1397.

I therefore tried to improve the article by explicitly stating that the men arrested were the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, and the Duke of Gloucester, and noted the Duke of Gloucester's name 'Thomas of Woodstock'. I provided a link to the latter for the benefit of future readers who, like me, may have struggled to know who was arrested in 1397.

Immediately that I made this edit, my edit was reverted, with the notification that 'my edit does not improve the article'.

I contend that my edit DID indeed improve the article. I note that the article as it stands has many instances of the names of towns standing in for people, and this makes the sequence of events more difficult to understand than is necessary.

As such, I was surprised that this article has Featured Article status - it does not appear to me to be among the best written of Wikipedia articles. I wonder if the article would retain its Featured Article status, given the lack of clarity in the text, if its subject were not a king of England, and the pride of some editors in having Featured Article status for kings. Boleslaw (talk) 08:14, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It is extremely typical to refer to figures of this period by their titles in this way: you are not the first to take issue with it, but it is not Wikipedia's problem to solve. It is generally good practice to reduce redundancy and repetition in such matters when writing at article-length: when done consistently, the natural impulse of the reader will be to trust that unexplained information had previously been properly introduced, so they can scroll up to locate it if need be. If information is repeated haphazardly, then there is not a clear indication of this and the narrative becomes less clear.

In any case, your latter remarks seem to be a non-sequitur—even if this were a structural problem with the article, it would not seem to amount to the general dismissal you make. Please do not cast aspersions against other editors like that; you're free to disagree with them or critique their work, but it is not conducive to collaboration to disparage their motivations. Remsense ‥ 论 08:46, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]