Talk:Josef Hoop/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Thebiguglyalien (talk · contribs) 14:33, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello! I'll read through this article to see how it compares to the good article criteria. I'll have a review written some time today. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:33, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

TheBritinator, the article itself looks well-written, but some issues came up when I looked at the sourcing. Specifically, a lot of general statements are made using primary sources. If you're using a letter as a source, for example, you can say "so-and-so said X in a letter", but no interpretation or generalization of the source is possible; we need a secondary source to do that for us. With primary sources, there's no way to confirm whether statements like this are relevant, generalizable, or even factual without input from a reliable source that analyzes it.

For now, I'm going to close the review as unsuccessful. Don't let this discourage you though. It's not uncommon for an article to fall short of GA on an issue like this, see some reworking, and then come back to easily pass. If you're interested in working on this further, Wikipedia's policy on primary sources can be found at WP:PRIMARY. If you need help with the GA process or you want a second opinion, you can get help at the good article talk page. Or you can ask at the help desk for general editing help. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:05, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the review, it really helps out. TheBritinator (talk) 00:42, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Well-written

Verifiable with no original research

• What stands out to me is the number of older primary sources. This isn't as much of an issue with history articles (as opposed to science articles for example), but it's still something that should be handled carefully. Wikipedia:Original research says that articles should not be based entirely on primary sources and that we should "be cautious about basing large passages on them". If there are more recent sources describing Hoop's tenure that can replace or supplement the primary sources in the article, then using them in the article would be preferred. The best sources for historical figures are biographies or academic articles that are written about them by historians.
• "Nohlen & Stöver" is cited, but there's no indication of what this is.

Spot checks to make sure the article matches up to the sources and that it doesn't have any copyright issues. I've used machine translation to confirm the basics on non-English sources.

• [2] Geiger (2011) – Checked the first five uses:
  • The article says he was one of eight children, but the source says "acht Geschwister" (eight siblings) which would mean he's the ninth.
  • Where does this say he worked on his family's farm?
  • The source says that he studied Oriental languages at university, and it says he was fluent in Arabic, but it doesn't say he achieved fluency while at university.
• [20] Hoop (1937) – Good, but this is the sort of thing where a secondary source should be used to establish that it's relevant to Hoop's career.
• [27] Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1937) – Good, but this is an example of why a secondary source would be preferred. This doesn't appear to have any relevant to Hoop other than that his name happens to be mentioned. This is fairly routine prime minister business that doesn't need coverage. Secondary sources like biographies select what's important for us so we don't have to do as much work figuring it out ourselves.
• [39] Schremser (2023):
  • This mentions Schaedler's contact with Nazi groups, but it doesn't say that Hoop "remained distant" because of these contacts. Which source supports that statement?
  • This source does say that Schaedler wanted to cooperate with Nazi Germany, but it doesn't say anything about it being a factor or not in Hoop's decision. We can't synthesize sources to create new statements or interpretations, we can only repeat the claims that they make.

Broad in its coverage

Neutral

Stable

Illustrated