Template:Did you know nominations/Shaitan Singh

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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: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:53, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Shaitan Singh[edit]

Improved to Good Article status by Krishna Chaitanya Velaga (talk). Self-nominated at 16:11, 22 January 2018 (UTC).

  • Article is new enough, long enough, mostly well referenced, but not neutrally written. In the "Sino India War" section, the sentence "Even after continuous protests by India over China's intrusion, the Chinese troops continued to occupy several hundred square kilometers of the Indian territory" is written completely from the Indian narrative unsupported by any neutral academic source. If you read neutral sources such as this US Navy report, you'll get a vastly different picture of the war's background. And why does this article about an individual soldier even need to discuss the cause of the war and Nehru's decision process? It should focus on the soldier's personal exploits, not how the war started.
As for the hooks, I find the main hook uninteresting; ALT1 is slightly better. But I think the article contains more interesting facts such as that he ordered his men to leave him to die, or that he was decorated by the Indian government, while his father was honoured by the British. -Zanhe (talk) 02:42, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
  • @Zanhe: Thanks for the review. I've neutralized the paragraph, and even trimmed it a bit. Please have a look. Alternate hooks are as follows:
Regards, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga (talk • mail) 05:25, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Thank you! ALT2 and ALT3 are much more interesting, although ALT2 is too detailed, could you trim it a bit? -Zanhe (talk) 00:08, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Both ALT2 and ALT4 are confusing and grammatically problematic because the final phrase refers back to Singh, but there's too much in between for it to read well, in addition to other wording issues. (I've struck them both because of these structural problems.) ALT3 works because the Param Vir Chakra comes right after Singh's name. If we want to include the incident for which he was given the award, how about:
  • ALT5: ... that a badly wounded Major Shaitan Singh, who was later awarded the Param Vir Chakra, ordered his soldiers to leave him behind rather than face heavy machine gun fire evacuating him?
Please note that the article is incorrect when it says "the Chinese brought a heavy machine gun to fire upon them", since the source states "the Chinese brought heavy machine gun fire on them": this would be close paraphrasing if it were accurate, but it isn't: the machine gun (or it could be several guns!) was already firing on them, according to the source; it wasn't a case of Singh sensing that a heavy gun was being moved into position and was about to fire. The article will need to be fixed whether ALT5 is used or not. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:53, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
ALT6: ... that a badly wounded Major Shaitan Singh, who was later awarded the Param Vir Chakra, ordered his soldiers to leave him behind rather than face enemy fire evacuating him?
ALT6 is verified. I've edited the article a bit more for neutrality. Good to go. -Zanhe (talk) 20:01, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Statue of Shaitan Singh in Jodhpur
Statue of Shaitan Singh in Jodhpur
  • I notice you have a very colorful image in his statue, which is freely licensed. I'm posting it here. The top half could be cropped out for the thumbnail image. Yoninah (talk) 01:14, 7 March 2018 (UTC)
Confirming that the image is freely licensed. -Zanhe (talk) 01:29, 7 March 2018 (UTC)