Talk:Reconquista

Article needs some help!

I just read this article with basically no background on the subject, I am trying to fill some gaps in my own education. As it is, the current article's layout and style is confusing and doesn't really give understanding or the "big picture" of the history.

The "Concept and Duration" section seems out of place. The introduction of the article gives you a summary of the events, I'd expect a discussion of the events to follow. The first half of the section does its job but the second half starts going off the rails. "The Crusades" paragraph seems like two distinct ideas, the first part about events contemporary to the Reconquista but the second part on Chanson de Roland, although interesting and useful, seems like too much detail too early in the article and is not super related to where we started with the Crusades in this paragraph. The next four paragraphs seem to be entirely about the historiography of the Reconquista. This article deserves a first-class historiography section but instead it seems to be shoved into the end of this "Concept and Duration" section. Typically discussions of historiography are kept towards the end of the Wikipedia article, and for good reason - we are here to learn about the topic at hand at first and then learn about its academic history and context once we've got a grounding in the topic itself. And this section is going all over the place: the final paragraphs "The idea of a "liberation war"", "The same kind of propaganda" and "Some contemporary authors" are all about events in the past 100 years. We haven't even started explaining the Umayyad conquest yet, why are we talking about the Spanish Civil War?

The Background section of "History and military campaigns" is useful but too detailed. "After the establishment" paragraph is a lot of detail about a short period of time but doesn't seem to support anything in the rest of the article. "A serious weakness" paragraph is either contradicting itself or unclear, it starts by talking about serious internal problems with the Umayyads but the last two sentences basically say "actually, they kept it together until 719/720 and really just had their expansion come to a halt" rather than any sort of collapse or internal problems.

The "Early Reconquista" and "Northern Christian realms" sections are organized around the individual Christian states. However, the article's job here is to tell the narrative of the Reconquista, and these states are merely part of that narrative. The focus should be on the timeline! When conquest happens, when does it happen? And just as importantly, the space BETWEEN warfare, when conflict is light or non-existent, needs to be included in that narrative and given the same first-class treatment as the conflict does! Otherwise you wind up with an internally inconsistent article: is it "no military campaign lasts eight centuries", and you're describing it as a bunch of smaller efforts, or is it a single effort that's just had a lot of delays and setbacks? The focus has to be on the narrative timeline of events of the Reconquista to make sense either way!

The "Kingdom of Navarre" section starts with Pamplona and only brings up its conversion to Navarre in the very last paragraph. It also seems to drift in the article, not really tied into the main narrative of the Reconquista. I feel the entire "Northern Christian realms" section is losing a lot of the forest for the trees.

Anyway, I know this is a rant but hopefully someone who has actually read on the topic can take this to heart and make the article more useful for newbies and more cohesive.

Lordgilman (talk) 23:49, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to change it. We encourage you to be bold in updating pages, because wikis like ours develop faster when everybody edits. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. You can always preview your edits before you publish them or test them out in the sandbox. If you need additional help, check out our getting started page or ask the friendly folks at the Teahouse. Andre🚐 03:54, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Ultimately, for a page like this, with a broad organisational issue like the one raised, that is not as helpful advice as you might think it is. The reorganisation and re-explanation of what Lordgilman is talking about is an expert-level problem—or at least one that requires familiarity with the subject. Not to mention any ongoing controversy… — HTGS (talk) 08:25, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

The longest armed conflict in recorded history

Is there one reason why we shouldnt add this information? Same thing with the blue whale page adding information from the largest and heaviest animals page, except this time we add the information from list of conflicts by duration. @Remsense, please explain why you dispute this obvious information? Formerlychucks (talk) 14:16, 25 January 2025 (UTC)