Wikipedia:Featured article review/Douglas MacArthur/archive1

Featured article review/Douglas MacArthur/archive1

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@Artem.G, EEng, and Jon698:

I am nominating this featured article for review because of the article length. There is lots of information that should be spun out, summarised more effectively, or removed from the article. Examples include MacArthur's personal thoughts on battles he has participated in, several block quotes, information about battles he participated in, and the Legacy" section. It is currently over 19,000 words, which doesn't include the block quotes. The article has been tagged with a yellow "too long" banner since July 2023. A talk page discussion did not yield a consensus, so I am bringing this here to get a wider range of opinions. Z1720 (talk) 16:56, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, Hawkeye, but I agree with the length concerns. The article is an incredible piece of work; it's comprehensive and impeccably sourced, and I take my hat off to the amount of reading that must have been involved in producing it. But an encyclopaedia article should be a summary. The extra detail can go into sub-articles for readers who are interested in particular aspects of his life and career but the main article should just be an overview. 20,000 words is way more than an overview! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:57, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
I concur. I believe the article should meet the first three featured article criteria, but there is a complete failure on all aspects of criterion 4. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:53, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
The Protecting the Emperor subsection has WP:NPOV problems. It relies almost solely on one source and endorses its conclusions in Wikipedia's voice. Mispoulet (talk) 11:45, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

FAC criterion 1a requires that the article neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context. To cater for the readers who only read a few hundred words, we provide the lead, a summary of the article. Many only read this, hence the low average time per article. Others home in on the section that contains specific information that they are looking for. They expect the article to be richly detailed. A minority read the whole article from top to bottom. Article size seems to have little or no impact on the readers.

Unfortunately, search engines often direct the reader to the main article on a subject even when a subarticle on the specific topic is available. This came to the fore in a discussion on the article on John von Neumann. While most articles are stewarded by a single project, this one was of major importance to several projects, and while the logical split of the article would have been to create subarticles for the different projects, most wanted the information sought by their readers to be in the main article.

The guidelines were not based on academic research, which was not available when they were written, but the image of what an encyclopaedia should look like, based upon the paper encyclopaedias of the early 20th century. In paper encyclopaedias, pages cost money, so there was an incentive to keep the number of articles and their word counts down. But Wikipedia is not paper, so those constraints do not apply, and our objective is to produce a comprehensive encyclopaedia, hence we allow unlimited numbers of articles. Most importantly, it is now apparent, as it was not in 2004, that the readers do not access the articles in the same way that they accessed the old paper encyclopaedias. This is the reason that AI-generated encyclopaedias have much longer articles.

That said, Mispoulet brings up a different issue, which I will look into. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:54, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

I think the idea these days is less about physical space and more that a reader should be able to get an overview of any given subject. There's a reasonable counter-argument that most readers skip straight to the section they're interested in, but there aren't many places someone can go for an overview. There's a market for people who want a 20,000 word biography, but the sub-article approach caters for all three—people who want the detail on one part of his career can read the relevant sub-article, people who want every detail can read all the sub-articles as a series, but this article can give an overview and direct people to other articles where they can read more. This is an outstanding piece of research and writing that you should be proud of but, at the moment, it does not "[stay] focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail and [use] summary style where appropriate". HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:24, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

We already have multiple subarticles. I wrote Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines and Relief of Douglas MacArthur, and other editors have contributed Service summary of Douglas MacArthur and List of places named for Douglas MacArthur. An editor who wrote a short 12,000 word article on the 1948 United States presidential election contributed a two-paragraph summary to this article.

During the GAR for John von Neumann, editors expressed doubts about WP:SUMMARYSTYLE because in many cases the search engines redirected the readers to the main article even when an appropriate subarticle was available. (The subject was on top interest to multiple projects.) There was also research indicating that readers seldom click on the {{main}} links. Looking at the stats for the Relief of Douglas MacArthur, the subarticle holds up well, getting around 144,000 page views per annum compared to 1.4 million for the main article. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:51, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: The issue has also been brought up on the GA talk page and that discussion did not result in any changes in GA criteria wording or a consensus to reinterpret GA's implementation of WP:TOOBIG. However, I do not think either the WT:GA nor the Neumann discussions are relevant here: changes to a guideline happen on the guideline's talk page or the village pump, and consensus to change them cannot happen elsewhere afaik. Right now, WP:SS says "Summary style is based on the premise that information about a topic need not all be contained in a single article since different readers have different needs" and "Some readers need a lot of details on one or more aspects of the topic (links to full-sized separate subarticles)." WP:AS, another Wikipedia guideline, says that articles that are over 15,000 words, "Almost certainly should be divided or trimmed"; this article is over 19,000 words. After reviewing the article, I see lots of text that should be spun out or summarised more effectively, so I don't think an exception applies to this article. Z1720 (talk) 23:01, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

Do you have a suggestion for a section that could be spun out. Last time I did that was for Hanford Site -> Hanford Engineer Works. In that case there was a clear candidate, but it was still a lot of work. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:23, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

It is less about spinning out one or two individual sections. Rather, each section should be evaluated to decide what information to keep because it is among the most important aspects of his biography, and what can be spun out, summarised more effectively, or deleted as too much detail or trivial. If I was copyediting the article, I would summarise the block quotes and removed them, as I do not think they add to my understanding of MacArthur and most of that information can be explained more succinctly. In general, when a section is spun out I recommend aiming for two-four paragraphs in the main article as a summary of the spun out information: essentially, the same length as the lead of the spun out article. Yes, removing information from the article is a lot of work and time to achieve, but I think it is necessary for the article to keep its FA status. Please ping me if you would like an example of what I would do with a section and I will edit the article. Z1720 (talk) 20:45, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Some of the quotes are very important but others less so. I had trouble with two in the past:

I originally added the "Our father" quote, but when I tried to remove it, another editor reverted me as he wanted it retained;
I tried to remove the Medal of Honor citation as it was in an image, but another editor reverted me on the grounds that other MoH winners have the citation in their articles.

I will remove some of the non-controversial ones on the weekend. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:51, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

If anything is removed and then reverted, I would direct the editor to this FAR and we can discuss its inclusion. Z1720 (talk) 19:50, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Done. The article is much better than I realised. The work on World War I has been superb. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:38, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: At over 18,000 words, I think this article is still WP:TOOBIG. Based on that guideline, I would expect about half of the text currently in the article to be spun out or summarised more strictly. I also see that the article has not been edited since January 31. Are you or anyone reading this interested in continuing this task? Z1720 (talk) 01:12, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Nobody else has stepped forward with any suggestions. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:01, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

I recommend considering to spin out any section with a level 2 heading into a new article, then cutting that section down to roughly four paragraphs in this article (the size of the lead of the spun-out article. Such sections where this could be possible include "Korean War" (Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War), "Occupation of Japan" (Douglas MacArthur in Japan post-WWII), "Legacy" (Legacy of Douglas MacArthur). This is not a complete list. I also think "Dates of rank" can be removed as redundant and WP:TRIVIA: any significant promotions for MacArthur would already be described previously in the article body. I also recommend removing block quotes from the article, and instead summarise the information. If the block quote is significant, it can go to Wikiquote. I also recommend merging and reducing the prose from "Junior officer" and "Veracruz expedition", as these are too much detail for this level of broadness for the article. Alternatively, this information and "Early life and education" could be spun out into a Early life of Douglas MacArthur article. Z1720 (talk) 03:14, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

I've had a good at trimming the article, and at my request, Nikkimaria has also had a go. A result, the article has been trimmed by 15%. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:33, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Nikkimaria for undertaking that task. I welcome any thoughts you want to share about the article length. My thoughts above about spinning out sections remain unchanged after looking at recent edits and trims. Z1720 (talk) 20:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
As noted on my talk, I think the Korean War and Occupation spinoffs are both feasible. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:52, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I think it needs to be strongly considered whether increasingly whittling down the article will actually make it better. As has been noted, biographical articles are harder to spin out sections from than regular articles. Normally, when you split articles, you can provide fuller context of the situations that led up to and fallout from whatever the article's subject is about. For example, Relief of Douglas MacArthur provides context around Truman's concern's with MacArthur, as well as explaining the fallout of the dismissal politically for the President, as well as in Japan. None of this stuff would be appropriate for MacArthur's biography in substantial detail, because it isn't really about the man himself. It is important to cover, so it goes in a subarticle; the ability to add this extra context is what makes the subarticle useful.

Compared to this, what good would having an article titled Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War actually do? Everything that would go in that article would be directly relevant to the main article, where it is placed better in context of the totality of the man's career. There are two actual impacts, as far as I can tell, for having such a subarticle.
First, a reader that wants to read a thorough account of MacArthur's service in Korea has to be shunted to a subarticle, where they will then read an abbreviated summary of the general's career before getting to the actual Korea part because we have to include the context somehow. It will just be a severely truncated, essentially worse version of the main article.

Second, the Korea section of MacArthur's biographical article will be less thorough, and thus the article will be a poorer encapsulation of the man.

It has already been acknowledged that the article is exceptionally well-written; to be very frank, it's hard to see how anyone reading the article could disagree with that. WP:SIZE is a guideline, not a policy, and guidelines are "best treated with common sense". Shunting portions out of the article just to make it shorter, without regard to whether it improves or worsens the coverage of the subject, is not sensible. Furthermore, what the guideline actually says is that articles with more than 15,000 words should almost certainly be trimmed, operative word here being "almost". Most articles should be shorter than 15,000 words, but this is not most articles. This is about one of the most important military commanders of the 20th century, a major figure in three separate international wars, and on top of that he was effectively the leader of Japan during the occupation, and thus a central figure in that country's modern history. It's not necessarily a problem that it takes a lot of words to explain the man. If it can be shortened without reducing the quality of the article, great, but care should be taken. If not, that's fine. It's okay to have one out of 6,873 featured articles significantly over 15,000 words. Ladtrack (talk) 06:31, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

~~Move to FARC~~. Work to trim the article has stopped. The FAR has determined that the major discussion topic for this article is its size. I think it is time to move this article to FARC so that editors can formally state whether the article topic can justify its word count. Z1720 (talk) 04:03, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Striking Move to FARC: work is ongoing to reduce the prose size. Z1720 (talk) 00:20, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

I've had a read-through this evening and I don't agree with the length concerns. I spend a lot of time reading military history or listening to military history podcasts and I'd say the depth of coverage here is squarely what is expected from an audience who is interested in this subject. Of course the aspects of criterion 4 at question here are subjective and I think it's incumbent on objectors to identify unnecessary detail for discussion and resolution. Laser brain (talk) 02:17, 22 March 2026 (UTC)

It is unfortunate that WP:SIZERULE is so wishy-washy. I agree with User:HJ Mitchell when they say that encyclopedia articles, by their very nature, should be summaries. If I was dictator of Wikipedia, I'd change the rule to be "Maximum article size is 9,000 words; a waiver up to 11,000 may be granted only in compelling circumstances".

But the Wikipedia community has not been able to strenghten WP:SIZERULE, and a recent proposal to change it (perhaps to make it stricter) failed to come to consensus.

Since the wider WP community will not change WP:SIZERULE, the FA community should update WP:FACR criterion #4 to specify clear, FA-specific size limits ... perhaps via an RfC on the FA Talk page? Without such an update, the FA community is doomed to debate the size issue again. And again. And again. Noleander (talk) 00:27, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

i also think WP:SIZERULE applies here. feel free to ignore my suggestions, but just skimming through the article i had a few thoughts about possible moves/cutting down on text. (1) maybe move some of the information about his medal of honor citation to the service summary or escape from the philippines article(s). (2) some of the information under 'defense of the philippines' isn't so much macarthur-focused as it is campaign-focused. (3) since there's already a relief of douglas macarthur sub-article you could cut blockquotes and move most of the information on his dismissal into that article. (4) given the state of the supreme commander for the allied powers article it would be nice to see some more fa-quality prose there instead. (5) i'm sympathetic to the proposal to create new sub-articles but struggle to see how they would be placed; if i were to pick one i might create one on his inter-war career since there's currently 3,000 words of text devoted to it and probably more that could be added. do you reckon this could be summarised in the main article within 650 words (about the same length as the lead)? i can create mockups/give examples if it helps?--Plifal (talk) 05:07, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I would agree with the size concerns mentioned here by Plifal and also above - it feels like a lot of leeway has been given to this article that I haven't really seen in other military articles, though I admit I am hardly a wikiexpert in that area. The overabundance of quotes and blockquotes strikes me as the biggest problem, and I would be curious how many of them are strictly necessary; "Later life" in particular has quite a few blockquotes from MacArthur's speeches. There's also some paragraphs that could arguably be removed entirely; the one starting with MacArthur has been portrayed as a reactionary, although he was in many respects ahead of his time. in Legacy for example, is entirely attributed to one source and reads more of a summary of the previous sections rather than actually commenting on MacArthur's legacy in any way that's not already been covered (and while I'm calling for the word count to be reduced, I'm surprised there's not more of an assessment from more recently on the man himself rather than just his removal).

While MacArthur is undoubtedly important to America's military history, if I were reviewing this as a fresh FAC I would oppose based on length (FAC criteria 4). RandomEditsForWhenIRemember (talk) 21:13, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

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