Talk:Famine in India/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: SBC-YPR (talk) 17:05, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Preliminary comments

While I go through the article and assess it against the good article criteria, here are some preliminary issues that need to be addressed:

• The references section should be split into references (sources which are used in the article) and further reading (those which are not used in the article, but are recommended for a more detailed understanding of the topic). The two serve different purposes. Also, some of the references are repeated (e.g. Bose 1918, Davis 2001, Koomar 2009 etc.) and the duplication needs to be removed.
• Please clarify the scope of use of the term India since this is a historical article. The first sentence seems to suggest that it would generally cover South Asia, but this is not clearly brought out.

I will continue assessing the article in the meantime. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 17:10, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Updates

• I've started splitting references in to "References" and "Further reading" sections and am about half way through. Should be able to complete the task in a 2-3 days. Zuggernaut (talk) 06:57, 17 December 2010 (UTC)  The two sections are now separate Zuggernaut (talk) 05:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
• Will fix the scope ambiguity in the next 2-3 days. Zuggernaut (talk) 06:57, 17 December 2010 (UTC)  Scope is now defined in the lead Zuggernaut (talk) 05:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Final review

There is an ongoing content dispute in the article over the alleged use of certain sources to represent facts in a particular manner. Consequently, it fails criteria 5 (and possibly 4) of the good article criteria and I have to, regretfully, declare this nomination a failure. I have deferred this review in the hope of some consensus being arrived at through the talk page discussions, but that clearly doesn't seem to be happening. The article is otherwise well-written and should not have much difficulty in meeting the other criteria. I suggest that the existing dispute be resolved first, involving community processes if need be, before re-nominating the article at GAN. If you disagree or have any objections regarding this assessment, feel free to request a reassessment. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 09:34, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your time reviewing this. I feel failing the article for not meeting criteria 5 (Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute) is unfair because the article history clearly shows there aren't any edit wars whatsoever. Content disputes have been discussed per policies on the talk page in a mature fashion and have not impacted the stability of the article. The article is as stable as numerous other articles that have passed FA and GA criterion.

You can however fail it under criteria 4 since Snowded (talk · contribs) and Jamesinderbyshire (talk · contribs) have expressed concerns about this in the past. If you can point the specific diffs under which you feel the article fails criterion 4, that will help us fix those areas and re-nominate. Also, what community processes are you referring to? Zuggernaut (talk) 13:52, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

The article remains problematic with questions of balance being raised frequently over the last few months. Its not stable, and I suspect the reason we have not seen a repeat of edit warring or mass disputed edits is the desire to achieve GA status. Best to leave it a few months before looking at it again. --Snowded ^TALK 14:31, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Apologies for this delayed response. While edit-warring per se might not be technically present, there have been several series of back-and-forth reverts (diffs such as this and this) which in my opinion, result in the article failing the criteria of stability. Concerns regarding POV-related issues have already been raised in some detail on the talk page (but not satisfactorily addressed) and it is unnecessary to repeat them here. The community processes I was referring to are those mentioned here — editors could resort to them in case the present deadlock at obtaining consensus on the talkpage continues unresolved. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 14:48, 20 January 2011 (UTC)