Talk:Charles R. Larson (scholar)

A fact from Charles R. Larson (scholar) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 November 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Charles Larson became one of the first Americans to teach African literature, after working in Nigeria for the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Charles R. Larson (scholar).

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 06:42, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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... that Charles Larson became one of the first Americans to teach African literature, after working in Nigeria for the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft? Source: [1]
- ALT1: ... that ...? Source: "You are strongly encouraged to quote the source text supporting each hook" (and [link] the source, or cite it briefly without using citation templates)

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Valerie Broussard.

Created by Drmies (talk). Self-nominated at 17:33, 2 November 2021 (UTC).[reply]

New enough, long enough, QPQ done, Earwig initially looks concerning but on review is fine. My concern is that the hook is not directly cited. The bit about "avoid[ing]" the draft is of course implied but not directly stated in the article; WaPo says "in order to obtain a draft deferment", which I guess is close enough. The "first" part seems stated in the article but I fear we'd have to add some qualification like "at the university level" since it's not clear how one could verify the claim that he's the first teacher ever of African lit in the US. Maybe something like alt1: " ... that Charles Larson, who published several books about African literature, had never read a book by a "minority writer" before moving to Nigeria?" Also, CounterPunch was recently deprecated (WP:COUNTERPUNCH), although the citation to it might be fine per WP:RSOPINION. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 02:50, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AleatoryPonderings, I didn't see you had commented here. Thanks for the review. So, I also think "close enough" for the deferment, and I do want to get that in because it places the entire thing in historical context. I also think that the CounterPunch thing should be able to stand (I've followed those discussions a bit), since it's not about a viewpoint or so--the comment is by a CounterPunch person about another CounterPunch person, so the "opinion" link makes sense.
But the biggest thing of course is "first"--and you are right: looking at the hook again I'm wondering how I didn't put "university blah blah" in there. Below is my tweaked version. Drmies (talk) 23:04, 13 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

ALT2: ... that Charles Larson became one of the first college professors in the US to teach African literature, after working in Nigeria for the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft?

Works for me. I added in an explicit mention of the deferment to the article. I also added two links to the hook; I find the title of Draft evasion in the Vietnam War rather POV-laden, so feel free to remove that one—obviously not a problem with Charles R. Larson (scholar). AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 17:21, 14 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

To T:DYK/P1