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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/National Front (UK)/archive3

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Buidhe via FACBot (talk) 19 May 2022 [1].

National Front (UK)

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Nominator(s): Midnightblueowl (talk) 10:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a fascist political party that rose to become the fourth most electorally successful party in 1970s England. It has been a GA since 2018 and has been through FAC twice before (in 2018 and 2019), both times failing because it was just too long. Since then it has been trimmed down quite a bit, with sub-articles split off to enable that, and now pretty much fits within Wikipedia's wordcount guidelines (at just over 10,000 words). We only have one FA-rated article on a UK political party I believe (Referendum Party, which I brought through FAC in 2017), so it would be nice to bring that number up. Midnightblueowl (talk) 10:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Mike Christie

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  • Given that the article is under 10,000 words, I would not oppose on this basis, but the history section seems rather longer than it needs to be. For the summary article, the history doesn't need to give details such as how Tyndall's book changed Chesterton's mind about BNP members, or the arguments about exactly where ex-LEL members thought the headquarters should be, or a detailed accounting of the vote percentages at multiple elections in the 1970s, for example.
    I've cut the sentence about Tyndall's book; I've also tried to trim back the paragraph discussing the 1970s vote percentages. Midnightblueowl (talk) 11:22, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    OK, but I was really suggesting that more could be cut -- those were just examples. I'll leave this unstruck for now, but see my other comment below about what the subject of the article is. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:23, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • "From 1975 onward the party entered a steady decline": a bit vague -- do we mean that their vote share continued to drop? Or their membership? Or both? Both are mentioned in the next section, so perhaps we don't need this sentence at all.
  • A MoS issue: you have both unspaced em dashes and spaced en dashes; you have to pick one or the other. I also see some instances of spaced em dashes -- I would prefer that myself, but the MoS doesn't permit it.
  • You have a mixture of historic present and imperfect for the historians: e.g. "historians characterise it" and "Martin Durham stating that", vs. "Michael Billig noted" and "Stan Taylor argued". I would suggest sticking with historic present, unless you're specifically talking about a point of view that the historian no longer holds.
    I've made some changes here, as in this edit. Do you think that that reads okay? In some instances I'm not sure about it and feel that the imperfect read better. Midnightblueowl (talk) 12:15, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I'll reread and comment on the next pass. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:23, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • "In the late 1970s, the "Populist" faction challenged the ex-GBM faction's dominance": this is written as if we don't have the history earlier in the article. I think you could make this 'According to Thurlow, the members of the "Populist" faction that challenged the ex-GBM faction's dominance in the late 1970s were "pseudo-Conservative racial populists"'.
  • I see in the "Ethnic nationalism" and "White supremacism" sections you talk about the NF in the past tense as well as the present: "The National Front is a British Nationalist party" but "NF members typically referred to themselves as...", for example. The party still exists, but here it sounds like you're sometimes talking about the current rump, and sometimes about earlier incarnations. I think this needs to be more clearly delineated.
    This is a tricky one to tackle, because virtually all of the specialist literature only treats the NF in its 1960s to 1980s form; it ignores the small group that continues to use the name "National Front" today. At the same time, the fact that a small group under that name still exists makes it technically incorrect to only use past tense terminology. I would lean towards making the text consistently past tense anyway, at least in these sections; do you think that that would be alright? Midnightblueowl (talk) 11:55, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I should have realized that that's how the sources would be. That's a difficult question. It's almost as if the title of the article is misleading -- normally a political party article would be about the current state of the party, but in this case the current incarnation has few sources and would make for a short article. I suggested above that you shorten the history section some more, per summary style, but really the great majority of the article is a history section. One option would be to make the summary article History of the National Front (UK), with a couple of subarticles for the different periods of the history, plus individual (fairly short) articles for each incarnation, and a dab page for each version that called itself "National Front". I don't think I know the material well enough to make a confident recommendation, though, so I'll go ahead and finish the review, and come back to this point at the end. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:23, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to pause there in case any of these comments lead you to make prose changes e.g. to tenses, and will continue once you've replied. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:11, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for taking the time to look at this, Mike. I appreciate your keen eye. Midnightblueowl (talk) 12:15, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I decided to try to understand the overall sequence of mergers and splits, and figure out which groups can be referred to as the "National Front". Here's what I came up with -- is this accurate?

  • February 1967: League of Empire Loyalists and the 1960 version of the British National Party merge to become the first National Front. A faction of the Racial Preservation Society joins them though there is no formal merge.
  • June 1967: Greater Britain Movement disbands and its members are urged to join the NF.
  • June 1980: Tyndall forms the New National Front.
  • March 1982: The British National Party forms; presumably the NNF is disbanded at this point, as it doesn't appear to have been any sort of precursor entity to this BNP (which is unrelated to the 1960 BNP).
  • 1985: The opponents of the Strasserites split from the NF and form the Flag Group.
  • January 1987: The Flag Group adopts the name National Front. I'm not clear if it's name was "Flag National Front" or just "National Front", and "Flag NF" is just the way historians refer to it. Our Flag Group article says they didn't start using the "National Front" name till about 1989 (the 1989 Vauxhall by-election). That article references some other by-elections, and 1988 Epping Forest by-election says they were called "Independent National Front" at that point, for example.
  • Around the same time the Official National Front forms, I think as a rename of the NF. This leaves no organization just called the "National Front". Or does the word "Official" not appear in this groups name -- i.e. it's just an epithet?
  • 1990: The ONF disbands.
  • 1995: the Flag Group becomes the National Democrats, but a rump retains the name National Front. This is the current "National Front".

Is the above correct? If so, things that could be called the NF are:

  • (1) 1967 party merged from the LEL and first BNP. Becomes known as the OFficial National Front after the Flag Group split, and disbands in 1990.
  • (2) 1980 Tyndall's temporary NNF. Irrelevant or disbanded after 1982 formation of new BNP; this is really only a footnote in the history.
  • (3) 1987 Flag Group adopts the name NF. The ONF disbands in 1990, so the Flag Group is the only user of the name. Becomes the National Democrats in 1995.
  • (4) 1995 A part of the Flag Group refuses to go along with the change of name and is still known as the NF. This is the current version of the party.

If all this is correct, then I would say the NF/ONF lineage is (more or less) one party, and the Flag Group/Flag NF/current NF is another lineage. Out of all this, what is the topic of this article? If it's "everything that's ever been called the National Front", I don't think that's a good topic. If it's "the history of the British far right parties from 1966 to 1995", or something like that, then I think it doesn't have the right title at the moment. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:51, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Midnightblueowl what's your opinion on this? (t · c) buidhe 00:02, 24 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is a tricky one, because obviously it entails a fundamental reshaping of the article (and thus is not really the sort of thing normally discussed at an FAC). The article certainly does not represent "the history of the British far right parties from 1966 to 1995", because it does not include many of the smaller groups active at this time (Northern League etc), but I do accept Mike's point about the difficulties posed by a group that saw continual schisms. To be honest, I'm loathe to start splitting this article into multiple articles on different groups because I think that will cause more problems that it solves, but I'm also not sure how we can move on from here, at least not in the context of an FAC. Midnightblueowl (talk) 09:21, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I agree that the right approach is probably not to have the narrative carried by lots of small articles on the individual groups, though of course the articles on those groups do have to exist. You're the expert, but just based on what I see here, I think the right approach might be to have a "British far right politics" history article or set of articles, and have that be where the main narrative runs. The individual party articles can then take some of the detail away from the overarching narrative, per summary style. I think it'll be tricky to get the balance right, because it's tempting to pull all the party details into the narrative, but the current article seems to me to fall between two stools. How about expanding the scope to include other parties such as the Northern League, and splitting it chronologically, so you have e.g. History of British far right politics 1966 - 1984 and History of British far right politics 1985 to present? (I picked 1984 at random.) Some sort of split would be necessary for length reasons. I should add I have very little to criticize in the current content of the article -- the material is well-researched and well-written. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:43, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Coordinator comment - at three weeks in with no general supports and questions about the scope of the article, this one is likely to be archived in a day or two without significant progress towards a consensus to promote. Hog Farm Talk 14:19, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Midnightblueowl, can I get your thoughts on my comments above? I'm still not clear what the scope of the article is. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:05, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mike. Sorry for the delay on getting back to you about this, I've not been active on Wikipedia lately. While I think it could help to have additional articles with the titles that you suggest, I would not want to see the present National Front article dismantled. I think that it does a fairly good job of summarising the political parties that use this name and I feel that any substantial alterations to it would probably result in a loss of quality rather than an improvement. Midnightblueowl (talk) 08:18, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I can see your point of view, but I'm not convinced this is the right way for Wikipedia to cover this topic. If you were coming to Wikipedia to read about far right UK politics for the last 60 years, this article clearly gives you a lot of information, but it doesn't tell you everything, and I can't imagine a way we could complete our coverage of the topic in a way that would make sense, unless were to reshape this article. From what you say, the topic of the article is "all parties that have ever been called National Front"; in Wikipedia's terms that's a set index article and I don't think is a suitable definition for a non-list article. I haven't decided whether to oppose or not; if I do oppose it would be on the basis of criteria 1b and 4 -- it's has either too much detail or too little detail, depending on what one thinks the topic of the article is. For now I'll wait and see what other reviewers say. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:27, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Kavyansh

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Fantastic work on the article:

That's all in the History section. More to come soon. – Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 16:35, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That is it. A very well researched article! – Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 09:04, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging Midnightblueowl. – Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 09:05, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for taking the time to look at this, Kavyansh.Singh. Midnightblueowl (talk) 08:59, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support, with few minor quibbles above. – Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 13:17, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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