Wikipedia:Featured article review/Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia/archive1

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

The article was removed by Gimmetrow 04:59, 3 April 2010 [1].

Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia[edit]

Review commentary[edit]

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Notified: Johnleemk, ... WikiProject Malaysia, ...

I am nominating this featured article for review because in my view it does not meet the criteria for a featured article, and I don't hold out much hope for salvage. It was originally listed in 2006.

Lets look at the article against some general criteria (synthesising the FA criteria).

1. Well-written

The prose is generally long-winded and unwieldy. The opening sentence is 45 words. There are also grammatical errors:

  • "In 2005, the issue of the Constitution and its provisions were also brought up by several politicians within the government itself." - Incorrect plural were.
  • "While the Gerakan party issued an apology the next day, UMNO announced a counter-procession starting from the head of Selangor state Dato' Harun bin Idris on Jalan Raja Muda." - how can you have a procession (ie a protest march) starting from a person? and is the head of the state the Sultan of Selangor or the state's Chief Minister?
  • Incorrect use of hyphens and em dashes.
  • Overlinking, eg: "politician Lee Kuan Yew", "Malay tycoons", "Malay middle class and improving Malaysian standards of living"

2. Sourcing

  • Entire paragraphs, and many contentious claims, are totally unsourced. A FA article should not have "citation needed" notes scattered throughout. See for example:
    • The entire first three paragraphs of the "Controversy" section. This contains many facts and assertions that are totally unsupported by inline citations, and are not a lead-style summary of the subsections that follow.
    • "In the end, Lim stated that the Malay press had blown his comments out of proportion and misquoted him." - no citation for this.
    • "The social contract is a term used to describe the Constitution's provisions with regard to the different races' privileges—those who defend it and Article 153 often define the social contract as providing the Indians and Chinese with citizenship in exchange for the Malays' special rights or ketuanan Melayu." - no citation
    • "The Constitution of Singapore contains an article, Article 152, that names the Malays as "indigenous people" of Singapore and therefore requiring special safeguarding of their rights and privileges as such. However, the article specifies no policies for such safeguarding." - Constitutional interpretation without any sourcing.
    • "In particular, it was not entirely clear if Article 153 was predicated on the Malays' economic status at the time, or if it was meant to recognise Bumiputra as a special class of citizens." - again no sourcing for this analysis of Constitutional history.

3. Images

  • The image of Khir Toyo is totally gratuitous.

I've focused on a few glaring issues here. The examples I've highlighted are my no means exhaustive; they are a mere selection. --Mkativerata (talk) 21:15, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • A quick response to some of the sourcing issues: in academia, you don't cite things which are common knowledge to scholars in your field (you don't need a citation for the fact that the sun is bigger than the earth in physics; actually, you probably don't even need one in any general circumstance). The social contract is easily verifiable -- it has its own article with a ton of citations. What is stated in the article is uncontroversial (see here for example), and in any case, can easily be fixed if you so desire since the social contract article is well-cited in itself. Likewise, Article 152 is easily verifiable, and the article makes no interpretation other than paraphrasing exactly what it says here. Lim's statement is in fact sourced in footnote 44, which though it is not on the Bernama website any longer, can easily be found on Archive.org. The statement on the purpose of Article 153 is supposed to communicate that there are two different points of view on the issue. It can easily be reworded. The picture of Khir Toyo originates from concern when the article was going through FAC that it did not have enough pictures. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't when it comes to pictures in FAs, it seems. Johnleemk | Talk 04:16, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note about images; in the old days in 2006 and early, FAC was totally different to now, most FACs just had 10 pile-on, one-line supports, quality wasmuch lower, but then often people didn't ask for improvements on proper stuff like better content/prose etc and just did a token thing, on more pictures, looks more entertaining, that kind of thing. Nowadays, no pictures are totally fine and opposes on that basis are being ignored, so no need to be worried about complaints from opposite sides of the fence YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 01:07, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Also, a lot of the statements which lack citations actually do have them; the citations were removed contra to the policy (or at least, it was policy the last time I checked a year or two ago) that even broken links must remain, because there needs to be a record of where the statements were originally cited from. This removal of broken links as supposed non-citations is annoying and unfortunately egregiously common. If you look at a revision of the article from 2006 or 2007, a lot of the [citation needed]'s have perfectly fine citations. Now it's just a question of adding links to archive.org where they are broken, or otherwise finding a replacement source. Simply deleting such citations wholesale and replacing them with {{fact}} is, AFAIK, completely in error. Johnleemk | Talk 04:25, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary[edit]

Featured article criterion of concern are prose, sourcing, images YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 00:50, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist as nom. None of the concerns have been fixed. I would also add that I find it strange that there is no coverage of this Constitutional provision from a legal perspective. Has article 153 ever been considered by a court? Or by legal academics? --Mkativerata (talk) 03:14, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist for bloated prose and citation issues. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Many otters • One bat • One hammer) 18:48, 27 March 2010 (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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