Talk:Robert Lee Durham

A fact from Robert Lee Durham appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 10 August 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that in June 2020, Southern Virginia University removed the name of Robert Lee Durham from its main academic building in the wake of the George Floyd protests, citing his racist views?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2020/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Robert Lee Durham.

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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 Yoninah (talk) 13:58, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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... that in June 2020, Southern Virginia University removed the name of Robert Lee Durham onfrom its main academic building in the wake of the George Floyd protests, citing his racist views?[1]

Created by D4iNa4 (talk). Self-nominated at 09:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC).[reply]

Article is definitely new enough, long enough, and original. It is written in an encyclopedic style with copious inline references. One main reference is a biographical dictionary: the other is a Master's thesis from a university archive. Basing an article on a Master's thesis is unusual, but university theses are part of the scholarly literature and in this case it's clear that the thesis is used to fill in biographical details around a narrative from the other published source. The thesis is used for additional facts, not to push any fringe agenda. The hook is short enough and interesting and appears in the article with an inline citation. Grammar point about the hook: we'd say "in June 2020" not "on June 2020", so I've made that one-character change. Any hook with "racist" in needs careful consideration: Wikipedia mustn't use that word recklessly, but racism uncontroversially exists and describing it with excessively sanitised language has its own dangers. In the case of the present article, racist views are the cited reason why the institution changed the name of the building: in fact the source mentions his "explicit, public, proactive advocacy of white supremacy." The biographical dictionary describes Durham's "fear that so-called race mixing would lead to America's downfall". "Racist views" is a more accurate description of this than a euphemistic alternative, so I'm happy for that phrase to be used in the hook. Good to go. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:05, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I came by to promote this, but the lead does not satisfy WP:LEAD. Please expand it to summarize the key points of the article. Thanks, Yoninah (talk) 23:48, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Yoninah:, and now? --evrik ^(talk) 18:29, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it looks better, thanks. I gave the article an edit and also tweaked the hook. Restoring tick per MartinPoulter's review. Yoninah (talk) 21:31, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Yoninah: Your edit left behind "Cite error: The named reference Iva was invoked but never defined (see the help page)." I'm not sure how to fix it myself. SL93 (talk) 07:14, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@SL93: sorry, I thought it was a capital I, not a lowercase l. I fixed it. Yoninah (talk) 10:22, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]