Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Cham Albanians/1

Cham Albanians

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delist per uncontested and supported review comments below. Articles can be renominated at any time. Geometry guy 23:54, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

This article is not good social science, nor good history. It reads with a Greek POV, with some concessions to Albanian ideas. An social science approach does not start from national perspectives -- whether Greek or Albanian -- but tries to understand how and why things evolved in a particular way. There is no such analysis here, which means it is nothing more than opinions backed up by some selected references. Xenos2008 (talk) 03:30, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. Please provide specific examples of what you consider to be POV assertions or poor-quality sources. Thanks, Majoreditor (talk) 23:24, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. The article had been nominated for GA by an Albanian editor, who had worked the hell on it. I just wanted Xenos to be aware of that. Which are the poor-quality sources? The ones Balkanian provides?!--Yannismarou (talk) 16:00, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. Certainly, the article can be improved. But the facts are a) it provides a very thorough coverage of the Chams, their history & culture, as well as their current status & politics as a community. b) in terms of POV-ness, throughout its development, it has had to be toned down from a pro-Albanian POV to a more moderate one, a fact the article's principal editor (Balkanian's word) appreciated and accepted. I think he would be quite surprised at having this article labeled "pro-Greek" in any way, especially given the epic quarrels with Greek editors over its content and style. c) the GA criteria do not call for scholarly standards as to the text's critical and analytical merits, but broad coverage (check), verifiability (check), and NPOV (check IMO and until I see some concrete examples to the opposite). Regards, Constantine ✍ 16:21, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

• I should point out that the definition of NPOV is not that it satisfies two parties (e.g. Greek and Albanian) but that it actually tries to take some distance from the subject matter and describe the events for the benefit of outsiders. It will take some time to go through this carefully and explain what the exact problems are, and I am short of time at the moment: I will try to do so in a week or so. However, my general point is that anyone not versed in the history of the Balkans will read this and actually fail to understand anything other than the Greek POV. The precise mechanism by which this occurred for this article is not of interest to me, or to any reader. Xenos2008 (talk) 19:34, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

  NPOV is about representing significant viewpoints fairly and without bias. If this is what you mean by distance then I agree. However, NPOV is not about eliminating points of view (the N in NPOV does not stand for "Not") but describing them without endorsing them. That can mean going in close. In terms of GA criteria, you evidently believe the article does not meet criterion 4. Are there any other GA issues you would like to highlight? Geometry guy 21:31, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. I also want to say that almost the entire article is written from an Albanian editor (Balkanian's word-710 edits-) with the help of other Albanian editors in such a way that almost every try from Greek editors to change a sentence immediately resulted to a massive edit war from the part of the Albanian editors. I would like to point that the POV flag in the article is currently put after the protest of many Greek editors over that situation while the Albanian contributors insisted on the removal, causing the interference of administrators who accepted that the article has indeed Albanian-POV issues and decided that the flag should remain. Regards, --Factuarius (talk) 07:46, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

• Moved to talk. Comments on this reassessment should be based on whether the article meets the GA criteria or not. I have moved the latest thread (and a couple of preceding comments) to the talk page. If there is no more substance than a content dispute going on here, I will close this reassessment without prejudice. Geometry guy 12:23, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

• To answer specifically, the Greek POV starts with the military occupation of Chameria in 1913 and everything thereafter is dominated by Greek POV. There is so much wrong with it, it is a major effort even to document the problems. I have seen from some small changes I made on Chameria that the Greeks are not able to defend their claims with valid references, that some of the references used are student presentations, and there are strong claims being made that are not supported by the references provided. In other words, the whole of the post 1913 history is fraudulent and manipulated. It is completely unacceptable to think that popular Greek opinion counts for anything, yet this is the basis of the modern history section of this article. VERY POOR WORK INDEED. Xenos2008 (talk) 15:17, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

  Vague. Vague. Vague. Can you be at least once a bit more specific; locate the problem and expand it with concrete examples, instead of writing generalities?--Yannismarou (talk) 15:59, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

  I agree with this. If there are many things wrong with the article, it is not necessary to document them all, only to point to some of them. Geometry guy 16:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. I recommend that this GAR be closed with no action taken. Majoreditor (talk) 05:18, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

  I'd like to, but I usually read through the article first to check that the consensus reflects the content. Reading through the first half raised so many problems that I cannot close this GAR. Here are some quotes: the problems are mostly self-evident, but I've added remarks in some cases.

  • "For the next few decades, according to complains by the Albanian side, the Chams were marginalized and discriminated against by the Greek state, who viewed them with distrust. Their properties were confiscated, some thousand were expelled to Turkey, and their cultural identity was suppressed."
  • "However, apart of the accusation of the Albanian side, there was little evidence of direct state persecution."
  • "At the same time, Orthodox Chams are often referred by Greeks as Arvanites (Αρβανίτες),[2][7] which primarily refers to the Albanophone Greeks of southern Greece but is commonly used as for all Albanian-speaking Greek citizens."
  • "In the first decade of the 14th century, some Albanian clans were reported in Epirus and Thessaly, mainly hired as mercenaries from the Byzantines."
  • "After the Ottoman conquest of the region, a number of Albanians were converted to Islam, while others maintained their Orthodox faith." How many, and according to whom?
  • "The process of Islamization of the Chams started in the 16th century, but it reached major proportions only in the 18th and 19th centuries."
  • "The main instigator for the beginning of mass conversions in the region were the draconian measures adopted by the Ottomans after the two failed revolts of Dionysius the Philosopher, who had led an army made of Orthodox Albanians and Greeks, as well as a number of Muslim local farmers, against the Ottomans.[35] In their wake, the Ottoman pashas tripled the taxes owed by the non-Muslim population, as they regarded the Orthodox element a continuous threat of future revolts. Another reason for conversion was the absence of liturgical ceremonies in Chameria, especially in the northern part of the region.[35] According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, in the wider region of what today is Southern Albania and Northwestern Greece, "it lacked the church discipline; in the churches was not performed any religious ceremony, what meant that Christianity did not have deep roots there".[36]" Is that last quote, with its appalling English, an authorized translation?
  • "The Souliotes were important contributors to the war that achieved the Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, liberating a number of regions, under the command of Markos Botsaris and Kitsos Tzavelas." This sentence has an unqualified perspective (e.g., "liberating"). The rest of the subsection has a similarly unencyclopedic tone in several places.
  • "It can be inferred that during the Interwar period the Muslim Cham community did not appear to have a clear-cut understanding of their national affiliation beyond their local religious affiliations.[51] Chams were in fact divided amongst themselves as to where their loyalties lay.[21] In the event, the Chams chose the Greek nationality instead of the Turkish." This garbled and wordy prose may reflect hedging of OR.
  • "After pressure by Italian and Albanian delegates which made a strong case that the Chams primarily self-identified as Albanian nationals (a dubious claim), Greece in 1925, two years after the exchange had officially began, accepted that Muslim Chams were not subject to the exchange." Dubious according to whom?
  • "On the other hand the Albanian state presented the Chams as being forced to leave Greece because the Greek authorities were making life "unbearable" for them; but this was merely a ploy to distract world opinion and attention away from the harsh conditions endured by the Greek minority in Albania." Dubious prose, dubious interpretation, and the rest of the subsection is similarly involved and unencyclopedic.
  • "His priority in establishing good relations with Albania was soon materialized by four agreements between the two governments, among others addressing the confiscation of Cham properties before 1926, when Greek refugees from Asia Minor were settled in the region." A better subsection, but prose like this needs clarification.
  • "Furthermore, beginning in 1927 with the publication of the relevant Presidential Decree, the Greek government implemented a policy depriving Muslim Chams and other minorities of their Greek citizenship if they would leave Greece. According to the 1927 decree, Greek citizens of non-ethnic Greek origin ("allogenis") could loose their citizenship if they left the country." Appears to say the same thing twice, and consequently is very confusing.
  • "But once again, the change of the Greek government with the coup d'état of Ioannis Metaxas made this agreement void." Looks like OR to me (is "but once again" in the source, or is it a synthesis?)
  • "The Albanian state gave them homes in specific areas in the south of the country, so as to dilute the local Greek element in the region (known as Northern Epirus to Greeks)[5]. In 1946, they formed a congress, where they adopted a memorandum accusing Greece for their persecution, and asked the international community to react in order to return to their homeland and to receive reparations." Is "so as to" in the source? Why "accusing" and why "for their persecution"?
  • "For those Chams of the Orthodox faith who remained in Greece after 1945, their Albanian identity was suppressed as a deeply repressive policy of assimilation ensued and, as before World War II, the Albanian language was not allowed to be spoken in public, nor taught in the schools." Strong language, no citation.

  This is all I can manage for now, and I'm less that half-way through. The article is 161Kb, which is well beyond recommended guidelines. In addition to the above problems, the article plainly goes into unnecessary detail and fails to make adequate use of summary style. I am unable to see how it can remain as a GA in its present form. Geometry guy 21:52, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

• Delist After just a partial examination, I agree with two major points raised by Geometry Guy. Clearly this article is (1) too large and goes into unnecessary detail, and (2) lacks citations for contentious material or material likely to be challenged.

Even if you are a believer in handling more than minor fix ups to articles here at GAR, surely this article needs such major work that it is impractical to do in this environment with multiple reviewers. So let's just delist. The article can be given a peer review and then renominated where a single reviewer can guide the article to GA. Diderot's dreams (talk) 20:16, 16 September 2009 (UTC)