# Talk:5th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Confederate)

Hi Hog Farm. If you are wanting to run this at ACR and possibly FAC then consider adding a bit of deep background on how the ACW started, both nationally and in Missouri. If you are stumped, I know where you can cut and paste something from  . (Don't forget to attribute per WP:COPYWITHIN.) And this article, at 22kB, is currently small for a FAC - see graph showing the average size in kB of the individual FAC pages for both archived and promoted FACs. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:37, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@Gog the Mild: - It's been on my mind, but this one needs quite a bit of work yet, beyond the background.  Tucker's only a medium-grade source, so he'll need support, and I'll need to dredge Google books for any other sources for comprehensiveness' sake.  That graphs a little scary for me: the three longest article's I've worked on significantly are the Newtonia one, this one, and Bledsoe's Missouri Battery.  All are under 25kb of readable prose.  I lack sources for key battles on Bledsoe, so that one won't even see ACR for likely a long time.  I'm getting ready to go back to university in a few weeks, and won't have room to take my books with me, so I've been trying to decide on whether I should try to crank out a couple more articles, or focus on improving already existing ones.  My hope is to have all of the infantry and artillery entries in Template:Missouri Confederate units navbox bluelinked someday (I lack sources for two of the campaigns most of the cavalry units were in, so I am not the editor to write those articles).  I hope you win your re-election for MILHIST coordinator come September, you've been doing a great job. Hog Farm  Bacon 03:51, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
Hog Farm, you worry too much. Peacemaker's current FAC is 22kB and that is not a problem. I was responding to your comment on GoCER that "Warning, it's a bit of a long one."

I don't really have an answer re the thinness of sourcing for some articles, other than what you are already doing: assign them a mental quality level which they won't be promoted over unless/until you find additional sources. Your tentative assignment of ACR to this one as an upper limit seems about right.

Working some deep background into articles at any level seems to me to be a good habit to get into. Personally I ask myself "If an intelligent undergraduate at a rural college in India were reading this, would they understand the context?"

Re what to work on: well I can tell you what I did, which may or may not help. I spent six months mostly working existing articles which took my fancy up to B class. Then 2 years ago I started doing some GANs. If you look at the icons at the top of my talk page, which are in chronological order, you can see that I generated quite a few before trying my first ACR, and got several of those before my first FAC. So by the time I was in full FA production mode I had a solid foundation to work on. I also kept/keep a note of articles which I may care to improve some time in the future - a real grab bag, see here, especially right at the bottom. So if I am away from my sources it is easy to find something to keep me amused which can be improved via online sources.

Sounds as if you need someone to buy you this for Christmas.

Have fun, take care.

Gog the Mild (talk) 09:38, 5 August 2020 (UTC)