Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/NATO/2

NATO

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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

Result: No consensus to delist. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 08:35, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Editor added {{GAR request}} tag on t/p last month. 2006 listing has valid cleanup banners and citation issues. Unusually, updating doesn't seem to be an issue. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:39, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm so confused. Why was this listed for review, who performed the review, and who decided "not enough improvement"? What does "not enough improvement" even mean? What did the article need to improve? Which specific sections should we be looking at? I don't even understand the English in this section, what does "unusually, updating doesn't seem to be an issue" mean? You made zero effort to contact editors, or engage with the large community on this page and related WikiProject. This is terrible! -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 18:50, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Patrickneil, this was listed for review because the article "has valid cleanup banners and citation issues". Relevant sentence of the GA criteria: An article can be failed without further review (known as a quick fail) if, prior to the review it has, or needs, cleanup banners that are unquestionably still valid ... All content that could reasonably be challenged ... must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph.

I decided "not enough improvement", because the article still has "cleanup banners and citation issues". Relevant sentence of the GAR instructions: After at least one week, if the article's issues are unresolved and there are no objections to delisting, the discussion may be closed as delist.

The sections you should be looking at are the ones with the "cleanup banners and citation issues" i.e. Kosovo intervention, Membership, and Structure. "Unusually, updating doesn't seem to be an issue" means that the article is well-updated, which not an issue but is unusual. Are any other of my English phrases unclear?

"You made zero effort to contact editors, or engage with the large community on this page and related WikProject. This is terrible!" This is a verifiably incorrect claim: see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vital Articles, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject NATO, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 170, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject International relations, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Organizations, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics, User talk:Morgoonki, User talk:Fw-us-hou-8.bmc.com, User talk:FutureTrillionaire, and User talk:H1nkles. I would appreciate if you would strike this unjustified accusation, Patrickneil.

You have reverted my closure of this discussion against the GAR instructions: A GAR closure should only be contested if the closure was obviously against consensus or otherwise procedurally incorrect...Before disputing a GAR closure, first discuss your concerns with the closing editor on their talk page. Am I to understand that you wish to improve the article back to GAR standard? In the future, please leave a note on the relevant GA reassessment page; that would save us all a lot of bother. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:15, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

There is one clean up banner and five Template:Cns, yes, I see that. If that's the issue, then say that. I'll work on finding citations today, or removing the unsourced claims, but "Not enough improvement" is not a GA review.

How on earth did you pick those editors to notify? User:Fw-us-hou-8.bmc.com has 14 edits total, from two days in 2001, none of which have anything to do with this topic. User:H1nkles and User:FutureTrillionaire have both been inactive for around four years, and again, have never edited this article. And User:Morgoonki was only active for a month, just enough to engage in a pro-Vladimir Putin edit war. And when you say "Editor added {{GAR request}} tag" again, I have to question how much you looked into this, because by "editor" you mean User: Real4jyy, an editor whose only Wikipedia activity so far has been to indiscriminately list GAs for review and add talk page headers.

Here is a list of active editors. If you want good faith here, the best I can give you is that, in this specific scenario, you weren't doing some basic due diligence with this GAR and the users involved. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 19:48, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

The GAR script automatically notifies all previous GA reviewers (if it can find any), in addition to previous reassessers, Patrickneil. I then notified six WikiProjects, in addition to linking on the the article talk page (and tidying that up, incidentally). I don't particularly know why User:Fw-us-hou-8.bmc.com was notified, however.

"There is one clean up banner and five Template:Cns, yes, I see that. If that's the issue, then say that." I ... did?

"by "editor" you mean User: Real4jyy, an editor whose only Wikipedia activity so far has been to indiscriminately list GAs for review and add talk page headers" I don't see anything in there that requires the word editor to be put in scare quotes? If they want to gnome around, I don't see why they should be denigrated for that. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe you shouldn't be using a GAR script then. What percent of the article did you read prior to delisting? What percent of the talk page and it's archive? Which of the five Template:Cns did you feel were the issue that put the article over the top? -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 20:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I read all of the article personally Patrickneil, hence I could say "no update needed". Same could be said for the talk page (diff of my archiving), even though that is not necessary. If you look at the structure section, you will see the citations needed banner; a large percentage of this section is uncited and grounds for delisting. Is anything else unclear? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:24, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

This article is no where near Good article status. Only 5000 words on a topic this important? There is a massive lack of deep coverage. Every source, but one, in the Works cited is cited only a single time. There is a large Further reading which doubtlessly has content that should be in the main article. There are at least 30 sources published by NATO itself instead using any of the works cited or the vast amount of scholarship on this topic no where in the article. The Military operations section is a mess, with rambling paragraphs and no clear division of weight on its respective subsections. I see numerous topics in List of NATO operations not even mentioned.

This article became good status in 2006, when standards for GAs were considerably lower and more lenient. It has since had three article reassessment requests. Any article with that much repeated concern over its quality will need a substantial reconfiguration to remain good status, and not just end up at GAR again next year. An obvious delist Aza24 (talk) 20:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, that's at least something we can work on. I'll say that since 2006, the subarticles History of NATO and Enlargement of NATO have been created out of those sections when they became too sprawling. I might quibble with describing nine items in Further reading as "large", and that, yes, more citations than I would like are sourced to NATO itself. Those do tend to be uncontroversial statements, to source things more routine like "the Chair of the Military Committee is the head of the Military Committee." I'm not sure which operation from List of NATO operations needs to be added, but I'm happy to help if there is something major that's getting left out of the current sections and subsections. -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 21:10, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't think Operation Display Deterrence is mentioned and I really think Resolute Support Mission and International Security Assistance Force should be separate. These last two being conflated into one section makes both of their scopes confusing, and disrupts the otherwise chronological layout of the operations.

It is not the exact size of the further reading section itself, or specifically the preponderance of NATO citations which worries me, it is simply the lack of academic scholarship used in general. (As I mentioned) the single citations from the Works cited section are particularly concerning, and representative of this article's biggest fault. The thing with uncontroversial statements is that sure, we could cite them to NATO, but wouldn't it be better to cite them to reliable independent sources? Either way, the Military operations section is really the core of the article, and what needs to be better sourced. The Gulf of Aden anti-piracy section, for instance, is solely cited to NATO, which is certainly inappropriate – Aza24 (talk) 21:48, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I hear that. I do though want to keep this is as an overview article. I think that's always been an element here, that the scope can't go into too much detail given the 75 years of institutional history that need to fit in its sections. We do have these two reservoirs of sources, published international policy books and news articles about a NATO-related event that just happened somewhere, the trouble being that neither type of source is actually all that great at being a source for the basic questions readers come here for, like, "what is NATO?" or "why is NATO expanding?", that the article tries to give answers for.

Lastly, if I am a bit defensive, it might be somewhat that there is a literal cyberarmy out to manipulate Wikipedia, and we've been dealing with it for years on this topic. The most recent GAR request, last year, was because a user wanted to include a chunk what I see as pro-Russian propaganda. They were asked politely to not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point. The two previous GARs were 14 years ago, all three have, I would note, resulted in speedily keeping it as a GA. I'm well aware the article needs attention, perhaps WP:PR is more what the article needs or at least a thorough section by section review, because there are large chunks that are at a high quality, but other parts that let it down. It's just difficult to see almost 20 years of maintenance here boiled down to three words, "not enough improvement." -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 01:04, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Your defensiveness is certainly understandable. But I'm fairly certain where Airship is coming from. The GA process & community was only recently reinvigorated and prior to which although the standards had risen, older GAs had not. Thus, there is a lot of cleanup now taking place with older GAs, huge numbers of which are far below standards. See here for instance, where one author of 100+ GAs was discovered to frequently be using copyrighted material. Certainly the NATO article is nothing like the articles delisted by the now-banned user, but its importance as a topic gives it further scrutiny, since its so important to get right! Aza24 (talk) 03:44, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I'll note that all the citation needed instances have been resolved. The article is a bit on the short side, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - there are plenty of links to other articles that cover sections in greater depth, like Structure of NATO and Enlargement of NATO. I could understand the argument that the main article could use a bit more material, but for such a complex topic I think it's better to keep a relatively concise article and allow readers easy access to more in-depth and narrowly focused articles. To pick a topic I'm intimately familiar with, Train was promoted to GA in 2021 and is currently at 4273 words, 27331 characters, and I'd argue it could be expanded but is still comprehensive enough and gives sufficient links to other articles that it meets the criteria. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 22:28, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I tend to agree with this concept of an overview article. It's also better in my view to keep it this way because it's easier to update, change, or remove supporting articles than it is to hack through a massive parent article. So long as the citation issues have been addressed and there's solid overview information, I see no real reason to delist. Intothatdarkness 14:23, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I maintain a habit of avoiding closing GARS where I have opined, but I do not see a consensus to delist. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:37, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.