Talk:Plav–Gusinje massacres (1912–1913)

Move

The topic of the article involves a very dark period for the people of Gucia/Gusinje and Plava/Plav. There were four execution points in total and several other massacres. The article should be moved to include all of these events in one instead of having small articles for each one.--Maleschreiber (talk) 00:03, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

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: rejected by Yoninah (talk) 00:19, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
Rejected for lack of reliable sourcing

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• Article history

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• ... that in the course of the Plav-Gusinje massacres up to more than 1,800 Albanians and Bosniaks were killed and 12,000 were forced to convert to Christian Orthodoxy? Milosević (2013) Bosniak organisations claim that more than 1,800 Muslims from Plav and the nearby municipality of Gusinje were killed and more than 12,000 of them forcibly converted to Christianity during the 1912-13 Balkan wars.

Created by Fa alk (talk) and Maleschreiber (talk). Nominated by Maleschreiber (talk) at 23:48, 30 April 2020 (UTC).

Reviewed: Organ transplantation in Tamil Nadu

NOTE TO REVIEWER: This article is the subject of a deletion discussion currently in progress, see: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Plav-Gusinje massacres (1912-13). Amanuensis Balkanicus (talk) 16:56, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

The deletion discussion has ended, so the nomination can continue.--Maleschreiber (talk) 07:30, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

• Comment - The claim about the number of religious conversion and killed muslims is exxegerated and controversial as explained here - link. --Antidiskriminator (talk) 14:43, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

  The 12,000 figure is from the official report which I added to the article after I placed the nomination for DYK.--Maleschreiber (talk) 15:19, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

No. Its what "Bosniak organisations claim". That claim is disputed. No RS independent from the subject supports it. The attempt to present disputed claim as a fact and bring it to Wikipedia frontpage is not constructive.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 11:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing: - Not all sources are RS
• Neutral: - Questionable, and probably not fixable due to the lack of RS which cover this topic (see AfD discussion)
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing: - A paragraph appears to be copied from here

Hook eligibility:

• Cited: - Hook is presenting a partisan claim as fact
• Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Recommend withdrawal of this DYK. buidhe 15:17, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@Buidhe: I obviously haven't copied anything, you should check the dates. If you click that link, you'll see that the website has copied the article from wikipedia. As for the hook, I wrote up to more than 1,800 in order to reflect this part of the article: A contemporary report by Djordje Šekularac, head Orthodox priest of the military administration noted 12,000 conversions.[13] Bosniak organizations maintain that more than 1,800 were killed in the course of the massacres and 12,000 were forced to convert.[14] Mark Krasniqi of the Academy of Sciences of Kosovo has placed the total number of Albanians killed during the massacres at 8,000.[15] Nobody has taken any part of the bibliography in the article to RSN and the AfD discussion is over - it didn't conclude that "there is no RS", if it did we wouldn't be discussing about it on DYKN, because it would have been deleted. If you think that the hook is partial I could go with a different hook from Pacariz (2013):

• ALT1:... that in 2013 the President of Montenegro addressed the Plav-Gusinje massacres as crimes which represent "the dark side of the Montenegrin history"? Pacariz(2013): President Filip Vujanović joined the cerenomy, where he stated the crimes performed in Plav and Gusinje are the dark side of the Montenegrin history --Maleschreiber (talk) 15:41, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
  • ALT1 would be OK, if the article were sourced well enough to pass muster. The article was a "no consensus" close with multiple editors arguing that the sources weren't strong enough to support the content. Peacemaker67 I hate to bother you, but what do you think about the article sourcing? Is it good enough for the main page? buidhe 02:01, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
    • The hook seems fine except it should refer to them as "crimes" not a "massacre" as that is the word the president used, but I'm afraid the Balkan Wars as a whole are outside my area of expertise. Some of the sources appear partisan or dubious, and I am struggling to find exact details of these killings in reliable publications in English, although there are several that talk about them in a vague way. The deletion discussion isn't terribly useful because nearly all the editors who participated are from one or the other side. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 06:30, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
      • I think this could be run with Peacemaker's suggested hook, but first please get rid of the scribd and Matica crnogorska-published sources in the article. Matica crnogorska is a cultural not a scholarly organization and isn't a reliable source for a sensitive topic. buidhe 13:36, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
        • I have changed the hook. I haven't used scribd as a source, scribd was just the only repository available online. It's also on Gbooks, but without even a snippet function [1]. Likewise, I haven't used Matica Crnogorska as a source. The source is the journal Almanah. I'm using the same journal from CEEOL (a website which hosts academic journals from the Balkans) too. This particular article is paywalled on CEEOL, but has been uploaded on Matica Crnogorska. It helps the reader to be able to have access to bibliography. I can change the links to gbooks and a paywalled version on CEEOL respectively, but how does that help readers? --Maleschreiber (talk) 16:12, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
          • Gbooks also says "publisher not identified", what makes this book reliable? CEEOL is a non-selective repository; it publishes grey literature and other unreliable sources. Is Almanah a peer-reviewed academic journal? If so why isn't it published by the Macedonian academy of sciences? buidhe 16:23, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
            • It is regularly used as bibliography by historians like Marenglen Verli, member of the Academy of Sciences of Albania in his work about Plav/Plav-Gusinje/Gucia (it has full bibliographical details - I used the same). Rexhep Dedushaj is a very well-respected historian from Gusinje and the book has been republished multiple times.
            • Why should it be? It's published in Montenegro, not in Macedonia. Honestly, in the Balkans something getting published by X Academy of Sciences is not a reason to consider a publication RS. But I don't think that we should be having the same discussion of an AfD that ended. It ended as no consensus, but that doesn't mean we should be repeating the same arguments about notability all over again. I changed the hook to one which refers to the President of Montenegro acknowledging the events.--Maleschreiber (talk) 16:56, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
• I cannot pass this nomination unless I am convinced that all the sources cited in the article are reliable, per the DYK criteria. What's the story about the book? Is it self published? What are the credentials of the author? As for the journal, you didn't answer my question. For example, in Slovakia journals of Slovak Academy of Sciences are highly reliable, those published by Matica slovenská are definitely not (because the former is academic and peer reviewed, the latter is a cultural association.) Again, why is the Matica a reliable publisher? buidhe 17:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

It's not - it's on its 4th edition by a publishing house called "New York" (it's called NYork because most people from Gusinje/Plav live nowadays in the states of N.Y. and Michigan) which in the 1990s published a series of books about the region by various authors. Historians have used it as a secondary source in their own works and it has become sort of "textbook material" because it's basically the only book written by a local historian and it has many details that would have been otherwise lost. Gusinje is a municipality of 4,000 people in a country of ~650,000. Bibliography in/from Montenegro or by people from Montenegro written in the native languages is not going to have the same coverage as that from wealthier regions in Europe. I've reviewed a DYK of yours and just the bibliography about that single book surpasses the available bibliography of about 1/3 of Montenegro. It's a sad story, but it's the reality of having limited resources in very poor and depopulated country.

Matica is not the publisher, I just found a full upload of the article of the Almanah journal on Matican Crnogorksa. They have an online library with many publications about the history of Montenegro. BRILL in its Yearbook of Muslims in Europe regularly uses Almanah in its bibliography.--Maleschreiber (talk) 17:26, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Sarkinovic appears to be a lawyer with no training in history [2]

Marijan Premovic is an archaologist, not an expert on recent history. His university isn't even ranked by Times Higher Education.

So that raises the question as to whether the journal has strong editorial controls or if it is more of an amateur history outlet (nothing wrong with that, but it makes it much less useful as a source). If I found the correct Worldcat item, it is published by Jevrejske zajednice Crne Gore = Jewish communities of Montenegro? In your link, it appears to be used to support statistics on mosques. I could believe that it's reliable for that, but we need much stronger sourcing for this subject.

I appreciate your efforts to improve coverage of an understudied area, but at the moment I am just not seeing that the article meets the requirements. buidhe 17:59, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

@Buidhe: Rexhep Dedushaj was a secondary school history teacher and political activist, not an academic, as I explained during this article's first deletion discussion. See [3] Also, there is another deletion discussion underway, so this DYK will have to wait. Amanuensis Balkanicus (talk) 18:11, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Amanuensis Balkanicus (talk) 18:11, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I think that you're adding other criteria than those described in WP:RS. THE ranking or the specific field in humanities are not criteria to decide RS. Nobody has ever approved or rejected a paper in any peer-reviewed journal based on whether the undergraduate degree of the author fits that particular subfield of humanities. If the author of a book, works as a school teacher says nothing about his reliability as a source.--Maleschreiber (talk) 18:18, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the fact does not say that he is reliable, which is what needs to be demonstrated. buidhe 18:21, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

•  On hold until second AfD is resolved. buidhe 18:21, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

• Second AfD was closed as "no consensus", as was a third; nomination and review can now proceed. Have struck original hook per comments above. BlueMoonset (talk) 13:32, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

• The article still uses unreliable sources and fails WP:DYK#4. I do not believe that this can be fixed, and therefore recommend that the nomination should be rejected. buidhe 13:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)