Talk:Battle of Ligny

message: I don't mean to intrude on, from what I can see, is a labor of love from several editors, but I believe that the understandable impulse to inform the reader has been allowed a bit too free of a rein. Speaking as a relatively neutral observer who has not read this article in over a year, I have to express my shock as to what it has become. What was previously a fairly concise (if admittedly thin) article on the battle of Ligny has now somehow metastasized into an enormous, seemingly entirely copy-pasted lifting of the works of Siborne, with nary a paraphrase to help those who were not born in the 19th century along. The article's index of the battle's phases, by itself, spans more than an entire screen. I want to emphasize that I have no dog in this fight other than being a Napoleonic Wars enthusiast, but this article seems like it desperately needs not only pruning, but actual original content. Simply lifting an entire chapter from a book, slapping quotations around it and attributing it, and then calling it a day is not a conducive format for those who want to read a summary of the battle, which is the format for most, if not all, other Wikipedia battle and campaign articles. 
I would humbly suggest to the resident editors that the article be remodeled so that, while keeping the main action covered and well-sourced, it informs the reader in a timely and understandable manner of what occurred during the battle. Brianify (talk) 19:21, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it's dreadful. Awful. A massive, misguided waste. The complete lack of editorial judgement has produced an article that's enormous but largely uninformative and unfit as a reference work. Furthermore it's almost entirely copied from a single source written in the late 1800s! Which results in rubbish like "the battle, on this part of the field, now presented an awfully grand and animating spectacle, and the hopes of both parties were raised to the highest state of excitement intermingled with the quick but irregular discharge of small arms throughout the whole extent of the village, came forth alternately the cheering "En avant!" and exulting "Vive l'Empereur!" as also the emphatic "Vorwärts!" and the wild "Hourrah!"..." and so forth ad infinitum. Whoever did this was hard-working but wrong, which is a terrible combination of attributes.-79.49.59.207 (talk) 23:08, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not as large as the sister article the Battle of Waterloo and there are many larger articles take for example Deepwater Horizon oil spill, however if you like we can discuss how to make this a summary style article. As for the style of the text, Wikipedia articles are a work in progress, any editor can copy edit it, providing the changes are supported by the source or another reliable sources is added to support the change. -- PBS (talk) 08:58, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

text: Myself and PB took the article from the German site and translated it to the article before a certain gentleman decided that we were all misinformed and biased against German's in general. He then decided that the only reliable source was Siborne. In pert. I did not argue about the change at the time because I'd been involved in too many hot topics. As it is at the moment, I agree that the article is almost unreadable because of the archaic English style and the over-reliance on one historian. Quoting large parts of Siborne's work is also problematic. If you go back far enough, you can find the article before it was "improved." That does not mean that it is perfect either because it isn't but it is better referenced, the language more concise. It might be a better starting point to rewrite the article.Tirronan (talk) 04:13, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Article Size and Style

message: See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 154#Battle of Ligny
The thing to do is to improve the text that is there not revert to a version that had its own problems. See the previous sections on this page, not least of which is the brevity of the battle description, the lack of citations and due to its brevity the lack of balance on the Prussian retreat. 
So I am reverting the revertPBS (talk) 17:35, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: You have, of course,  been consequently reverted. This is a place to discuss the changes to the article. It is not the Peninsular, and certainly no place to issue Wellesleyesque diktats. ——SN54129 17:56, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I am sorry I do  not understand please could you explain further. -- PBS (talk) 18:00, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The article was reverted to a smaller mess instead of a huge mess. At least a small mess can be worked on more easily. (Hohum @) 21:26, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit of 4 February 2020‎ 

message: #This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. (January 2020)
#This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. The readable prose size is 113 kilobytes. (January 2020)
#This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (January 2020)
#This article reads more like a story than an encyclopedia entry. (January 2020)
#This article may have too many section headers dividing up its content. (January 2020)
#This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (January 2020)
-- PBS (talk) 17:43, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maintenance templates in article space 

message: This phrase seems to have no meaning. Perhaps the person who wrote it meant "Despite the number of veterans," or something of the sort. Any ideas? METRANGOLO1 (talk) 18:11, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  For all that we may count the veterans,