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Archived comments from Squeamish Ossifrage

[edit]
Original threaded discussion
  • Oppose. It's a topic of extraordinary historical significance, but I just don't think it's ready for FA. There are quite a few referencing problems. Date formats are inconsistent.[update: already consistent throughout in d/m/y format – PB] Reference templates for some sources in the Notes seem off, especially the way that you deal with sources that do not have an identified author; crediting the publishing organization is not the typical practice here,[changes made, please look again in case I missed something – PB] and, that aside, using organizations' initialisms as the author probably isn't best practices.[again, please specify: some of the initials are the actual author's initials – PB] I'm also not sure why some of the Notes refer to your sources' sources.[please specify, I don't know what you mean – PB] Author names are not consistently formatted: sometimes you do first last and sometimes last, first.[already revised, please look again in case I missed some – PB] There are a number of book sources, in both Notes (see #27 for example) and the References section missing ISBN numbers; book sources without ISBN numbers should have an identifier of some sort, and I recommend OCLC for this purpose. This seems a good time to mention that I have no idea what criteria are used to place references into the "References" section with short-format Notes instead of full-format references in Notes. Oh, and the References section is, to be blunt, an unordered shambles. Note 79's date(s) make no sense, and the format used, with copyright symbol, isn't standard practice. Toward the end of the Notes are several that are basically just bare links with a title (#125/131/135), and a couple others with a totally dissimilar format (#133/134). The problems with the Notes extend to the References as well; many of these are missing information or display it improperly. There are 10 external links, with some duplication -- even on an article topic as important as this one, I'm hard-pressed to justify this many external links, and very little context is provided for why they are necessary or useful. Because of the state of the references, I spent comparatively little time on the prose, but I still see problems there as well. I'm not convinced the lead is an adequate summary of the contents. The organizational structure is sometimes awkward (it seems out of place for the "Death count" to be "After the war"; even though that's when the figures were discussed, it's not when the death count happened). In the "Killing process" section, one passage discusses people arriving from outside Poland with train tickets and travel supplies, but it's not made clear how this came about. Likely other objections, but at this point, I've really no choice but to oppose promotion. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:17, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Your comments, Squeamish Ossifrage, are valuable and very well informed, which is exactly what I was hoping for as a result of this, however, they would be of little use if we stopped the article development right here assuming that nothing could be done to perfect it. Poeticbent talk 16:46, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Naturally. My goal in providing criticism -- sometimes strident criticism -- at FAC is ultimately to improve the content of the project. The FA standards are very strict, much more so than even GA, and I'm aware that doesn't make FAC a particularly welcoming place when it catches you by surprise. That said, I'm not sure I've ever seen an article nominated here that did not undergo some measure of revision before promotion. And if an article's not ready on its first nomination, that doesn't mean it can't be made ready for another go later. I oppose promotion here because I don't think it currently meets the standards, but that's intended as motivation to continue to push to meet those standards, not to stop the work and walk away. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I'm having a difficult time following your train of thought. Ultimately, opposing this nomination to go forward does mean "to stop the work" if rejected, rather than to "continue to push"... Poeticbent talk 17:50, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think Squeamish Ossifrage is suggesting that you withdraw the nomination. That in itself is an admission that Treblinka extermination camp is a pretty good article already. As it states at the top of the WP:FAC page "It is assumed that all nominations have good qualities; this is why the main thrust of the process is to generate and resolve critical comments in relation to the criteria, and why such resolution is given considerably more weight than declarations of support." The point of the process is to make the article even better. And if at the end of a month or two the consensus is that the article isn't ready for FA, you can renominate after a two-week waiting period and try again. There's no rule saying that once an article has failed FAC it can never be nominated again. Poeticbent, if you put in a lot of work improving the article in response to reviewers' comments, it has a pretty good chance of passing the first time around. Cheer up! AmericanLemming (talk) 19:03, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not asking for this article to be given the FA status in this nomination. I'm asking for it to be accepted for the FA review (WP:FAR) in order to "generate and resolve critical comments." Quote from source: "In this step, possible improvements are discussed without declarations of "keep" or "delist". The aim is to improve articles rather than to demote them... The ideal review would address the issues raised and close with no change in status." Poeticbent talk 19:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I understand your confusion. FA Review is for current Featured Articles that editors believe might need to be delisted, not for articles aspiring to get their star to begin with. FAC is the last step between an article and the gold star. Support and opposition here relates directly to promotion; I also responded on your Talk, but before noticing this. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 19:32, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for clarifying that. I admit, this is my second FA nom in many years. Things have changed since the old days. Still, the FAC pages offer other solutions as well, not just Oppose or Support (quote): "Some reviewers enter Fixes needed and return in a few days to see if the issues were addressed, and may then switch to Oppose or Support. — It is not easy to sense your intentions, when at the same time, you Oppose and yet invest so much time and effort to actually naming the issues. Thanks for the message in Talk. Poeticbent talk 20:07, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I always try to be verbose with my concerns because every identified problem that gets corrected makes an article, and the project better. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:21, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And yet, those who worked on your own "Calostoma" nom (i.e. Casliber) were courteous enough to start with the Comments, before posting their final vote. I guess, it's a matter of temperament... [1] — Poeticbent talk 20:42, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Casliber had a few prose and MOS comments on Squeamish's article ... also, he may have had previous experience with Squeamish and anticipated that everything would get taken care of quickly. Squeamish is pointing to a bunch of FAC-criteria problems here. If it does turn out that there's a lot to work on, then we usually can't get everything covered in one cycle at FAC ... after changes get made, the FAC coordinators have no way of knowing if the initial comments and supports are still valid. People can generally get articles through FAC eventually, if they're patient and open to feedback, particularly for well-known subjects like this one. - Dank (push to talk) 21:16, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Calostoma cinnabarinum had something of a head-start also, because its GA review, by mutual agreement between its reviewer and myself, was held very closely to the FA standard as preparation for this process (and because there were a bunch of FA fungi articles for me to crib formatting from!) I always at least try to look back at FACs I've reviewed on a regular basis, to update my responses as their nominators work with the article (I don't think there's any way Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War is passing its FAC, but I've been very active there all the same). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 21:22, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
May I ask you to please structure your comments in such way, that I can start addressing them progressively one by one, instead of trying to fish them out from between commas? Also, the ref numbers will change almost immediately once I start working on them, so please add an author for easy recognition. Much appreciated. Also, if the above are your suggestions for further improvements, please name them as Comments. Thanks, Poeticbent talk 22:01, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Date formats are inconsistent.
  • [update: already consistent throughout in d/m/y format – PB]
  • [All of the above have been fixed. To be sure, I retrieved the online sources again today – PB]
  • Still have a bunch of m,d/y dates: citation 72 (Browning), citation 80 (Rajzman), citation 88 (Roper), citation 113 (Harrison), citation 118 (Höfle Telegram), and the Rückerl entry in the References (although that's still the least of the problems with formatting in the References section). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • [all done, and more, i.e. 64 (Sumler); btw, I admire your ability to spot all that - PB]
  • Author names are not consistently formatted: sometimes you do first last and sometimes last, first.
  • [already revised, please look again in case I missed some – PB]
  • [I think I got them all this time using last, first format. Thanks – PB]
  • Nope. This is another reason why standardizing your formatting with templates may be helpful. With a quick glance, I saw citation 28 (O'Neil and O'Neil), 33 (Sypniewska), 39 (Piecyk and Wierzchowska), 60 (Lanzmann). Might be more, I didn't spot-check everything.
  • [all done now. Thanks for your patience – PB]
  • Note 79's date(s) make no sense, and the format used, with copyright symbol, isn't standard practice.
  • [I think it is fixed. The number might have changed. I don't see it now - PB]
  • Toward the end of the Notes are several that are basically just bare links with a title (#125/131/135).
  • [Those bare links with a title are now reformatted using {{cite}} template. Check it out – PB]
  • ...and a couple others with a totally dissimilar format (#133/134).
  • [Per above, all done. Thanks – PB]
  • [Good catch. There was one more: citation 81. They are identical now, with the official name of the museum i.e. the Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom at Treblinka. Division of the Regional Museum in Siedlce. Thanks – PB]
  • There are 10 external links, with some duplication -- even on an article topic as important as this one, I'm hard-pressed to justify this many external links, and very little context is provided for why they are necessary or useful.
  • [please indicate which ones can be removed safely. Thanks in advance – PB]
  • With external links, less is more. I generally offer ELs to official websites and the like, but, in general, external links shouldn't be used as "potential references that didn't get cited for anything". If reliable sources say things that add to the topic's understanding, the article should reflect that; if they don't, then there's not much reason to offer the readers links. Some of the current ones may be better than others. I haven't really had (and probably won't have) the time to audit them myself. You may wish to peek at other historical FAs to see what they've done in terms of an EL section, if any. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done. I double-checked extant ELs and utilized some of them in References. Everything else along with the entire EL section is now removed as not particularly relevant to our Treblinka study – PB
  • In the "Killing process" section, one passage discusses people arriving from outside Poland with train tickets and travel supplies, but it's not made clear how this came about.
  • I think it should be OK now. More feedback on article's talk page, unless you think the whole issue of fewer foreign transports warrants an expansion. Please make a suggestion – PB]
  • Not sure what to suggest here, in part because I don't know what the sources say, but that section is pretty much the only place the transport of prisoners to the camp from southern Europe. This feels like a topic on which there is more to say (why here and not Belzec or Sobibor, for example). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done. The issue of foreign transports is now slightly expanded and better explained with additional citations. I would also like to thank AmericanLemming for helping out with clarifications – PB
Archived remaining comments from first-pass review

I've gone ahead and moved my original version of these comments and the threaded response to Talk. All of the article issues I originally raised are present below, in a somewhat refactored form for easier expansion and response. Poeticbent, as this technically also refactors your comments, if you object to the change in format, you're free to revert, but I hope this makes things easier for you. The original issues are not directly timestamped; anything I add later will be.

Oppose at current: 1a, 2a, 2b, 2c at least. I think there's a lot of work to be done here, but this is a major, historically important topic of the sort we all should want to see at FAC, so hopefully the issues can be hammered out. My first batch of specific problems focuses primarily on reference-formatting concerns. A more thorough prose review will have to come as I get time.

  • Reference templates for some sources in the Notes seem off, especially the way that you deal with sources that do not have an identified author; crediting the publishing organization is not the typical practice here.
  • [changes made, please look again in case I missed something – PB]
  • Sources that don't have an identified author should just omit the author field from the citation template. There's no need to do "Staff writer" stuff like in citation 6 (although more on that source later, I think), nor to cite the website/publisher itself as an author, like in citation 12 (Diapositive.pl). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • [Required some detective work, but it's OK now. Actual authors can often be found at different subpages to source page – PB]
  • There are still a lot of these that are not done correctly. Looking at the markup, much of this problem is that you the article sometimes uses citation templates like Template:cite book and sometimes just tries to format the citation information manually. Now, reference templates aren't required, but consistency is (it's criterion 2c), and I think sorting everything into citation templates would at least ensure we didn't spend a lot of time chasing down individual spacing and order-of-terms errors in the references. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Citation "Template:cite book" is now used uniformly throughout I think – PB
  • Please elaborate on the meaning of consistency here. Wikipedia:Citation templates#Variations informs us that "Wikipedia does not dictate a particular way to insert citations into an article... there are multiple ways to structure citations..." The standard practise in all publishing industry (my pet-peeve) is to keep the material as user-friendly as possible, without the need for multiple searches (or multiple clicks in our case) on the same page, lower and than lower again like in search of a hidden easter egg. Not all refs are Google Books naturally – PB
  • Using organizations' initialisms as the author probably isn't best practices.
  • [again, please specify: some of the initials are the actual author's initials – PB]
  • Still in citation 21 (MWiMT) at least.
  • [Done. Info originated from a book now cited – PB]
  • Done. Thanks – PB
  • I'm also not sure why some of the Notes refer to your sources' sources.
  • [please specify, I don't know what you mean – PB]
  • [Młynarczyk is not available online. Timothy Snyder quotes him, thus confirming the truthfulness of data. That's why his work is linked in comments – PB]
  • There are a number of book sources, in both Notes (see #27 for example) and the References section missing ISBN numbers; book sources without ISBN numbers should have an identifier of some sort, and I recommend OCLC for this purpose.
  • [This is a tough one with books that have not been reprinted in recent years. Please look at this example and make a suggestion I'd like to follow. Thanks - PB] (Steiner 1967)
  • In the case of Steiner's Treblinka, it was originally published prior to the introduction of the ISBN system, but just about everything has an OCLC number. The 1967 US-edition harcover is OCLC 394953. However, in the References section, you currently have the Steiner reference as ISBN 0-452-01124-8, which is the ISBN for the 1994 Plume reprint edition of the work. I can't tell you what the right information is here, because I do not know which reference you are working from; regardless, you must cite what you use. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • [I'm working from the only copy made available for searching inside by Google Books where the actual quotation can be put on display (i.e. the 1967 edition, per above, as oppose to later editions which would have to be accepted on good faith). Please tell, where did you find the OCLC 394953 for it? I'd like to reformat that reference all the way through. Thanks in advance – PB]
  • [done, thanks Squeamish Ossifrage, the link was quite helpful indeed, I found my online version there OCLC 567353215 and put it in – PB]
  • Rebuilt from scratch. Thanks – PB
  • I have no idea what criteria are used to place references into the "References" section with short-format Notes instead of full-format references in Notes.
  • [The "Notes" section was created by our GAN reviewer Khazar2 [2] who is usually very good at what he does. Please make a more detailed suggestion – PB]
  • The References section is, to be blunt, an unordered shambles.
  • [fixed that. Unused material that has been sitting there for years moved to External links with new formatting and some ext. links. I didn' have time to click on every one yet, but some seem interesting indeed, like the video secretly filmed. Thanks – PB]
  • This is still a mess. Many of these aren't formatted correctly, there's no evident order to the References, and there is not always a clear relationship between the sources cited in the actual Citation footnotes vs. the References section (as there would be with the Harvard format, which is sometimes in use here). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • All should be OK now. I looked at different FA samples for inspiration. The "sfn" Harvard formats (like the so-called "ibidems" in quality books) are often augmented in our FA articles by single-point "ref" citations in a very similar way. Just trying to get things done – PB
  • Less a formatting concern and more a referencing (criterion 1c) concern, you've got an awful lot of historical information cited to museum/memorial web sources. I'm not 100% sold on the reliability of some of these, but more importantly, WP:HISTRS suggests we shouldn't be using sources of this nature for key historical facts. I'm looking at the use of citation 6 (one of the Siedlce Regional Museum references), but this applies more broadly. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • [the museum director is a renown scholar Dr. Edward Kopówka, author of a lot of material published there. Reformatted accordingly – PB]
  • That specific source aside, I really am still concerned about whether this article represents a comprehensive survey of sources, especially sources that may not be immediately available online. There's an awful lot of content cited to probably-reliable but fairly thin websites that probably could instead be supported by more scholarly references. WP:HISTRS is only an essay, but it's probably worth considering from as sourcing standpoint. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I see what you mean. Treblinka is a subject of considerable interest to people of many nationalities. A lot of material originates from foreign languages which can only be accessed via selective translations (i.e. German, Hebrew; unknown to me personally). However, I did what I could to give books most prominence. Please try to be reasonable – PB

Other than the reference formatting, a quick reading revealed some prose issues.

  • I'm not convinced the lead is an adequate summary of the contents.
  • You've got at least one or two sentences verbatim repeated from the lead to the body. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The organizational structure is sometimes awkward (it seems out of place for the "Death count" to be "After the war"; even though that's when the figures were discussed, it's not when the death count happened).
  • [Took me some time to get used to yet another overhaul idea, but I did it. The two sections are now switched and paragraphs reorganized for relevant content, with the "Death count" preceding the "After the war" section. Thanks, Squeamish Ossifrage - PB]

I will try to provide some more details and give a closer look to identify other areas of concern. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 13:50, 31 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • All areas of concern from above have now been addressed. Sorry for taking so long. Thank you, Squeamish Ossifrage, for the pleasure of working with you. PB
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