Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Bengal famine of 1943

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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.

No consensus to promote at this time - AustralianRupert (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 02:06, 29 April 2017 (UTC) « Return to A-Class review list[reply]

Bengal famine of 1943[edit]

Nominator(s): Lingzhi (talk)

Bengal famine of 1943 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

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No one is really certain how many innocent Indian peasants died, but the most recent and authoritative estimate (2.1 million deaths) is more than double the total combined military and civilians WWII deaths of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. No one agrees on what caused it – some blame a cyclone and floods, fungal infestation, the fall of Burma, or Winston Churchill personally. What scholars do agree on, however, is that the Bengal famine of 1943 is emphatically a wartime famine.

The article is large, but it merits the size. Thank you for your time and trouble.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 12:01, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. - Dank (push to talk)

  • "Bengal's rice output in normal years was barely enough" (and other quotes): WP:INTEXT has been disputed a bit, but I think we can live with it. If it isn't important to mention who said something, then the exact wording probably isn't all that important, either. - Dank (push to talk) 18:13, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • Dank, as I mentioned on your talk: There are some quotes that I strongly think should be left as quotes. The example that comes immediately to mind is about not being able to bury the dead, but others are that type as well. But there are other quotes that are not so...personal... that I feel could be converted to paraphrase. I gave two examples (copied from Clarrityfiend's comments) on your talk page as well... As a rule of thumb, think "vivid, personal" versus "dry, impersonal".... I can try to convert a few to paraphrase, but you are welcome to do so as well. Thanks!  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 22:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      • That's not what I'm saying ... I'm fine with the quotes. But the guideline WP:INTEXT recommends that if you quote, or even paraphrase, it's best to mention who you're quoting in the text, rather than relying on the citation to do that. - Dank (push to talk) 23:28, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
        • I think that providing the names of the witnesses and contemporary commentators would add excessive (and more importantly, unhelpful) detail/info. In a somewhat similar (but far more egregious) case, I'm looking at an article right now where the nominator is basically saying, "F*ck the guidelines, it isn't explicitly forbidden, so I'll do whatever I want, ha ha."  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
          • Not my call, I'm just doing my job. - Dank (push to talk) 23:57, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
            • Sorry, I certainly don't mean to give you trouble.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 00:00, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(←) Dank, I tried to chop down the thicket of quotation marks a little. May do more tomorrow.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 13:20, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • "24–Parganas", "24-Parganas", "24 Parganas": consistency.
    • fixed tks
  • "This killed 14,500 people": I'm not sure what "This" refers to.
    • fixed tks
  • Check throughout for repetition.
    • yes, the famine codes bit.
  • In reviews where I can't sign off on INTEXT, I also can't sign off on the use of quote marks in general.
  • Support on prose per my standard disclaimer. These are my edits. - Dank (push to talk) 18:55, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • Dank, so forex we have:We couldn't bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch." So are you saying I need to add One survivor said, before the quote? Or even give the survivor's name (it was just a survivor, non-notable otherwise)? And if so, do you think that helps...?  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 21:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      • Generally, other reviewers handle this. Well done. - Dank (push to talk) 22:26, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Lingzhi:@Dank: I've only just become aware of this. I have some general advice. This article is certainly very well written, and I don't expect many issues of syntax and style (beyond some prose niggles). I have only very, very, cursorily read the article. My first thought is this: It was developed in a sandbox and introduced into mainspace in one edit. It took the author a year to write it. The others who were editing the article earlier, who, granted, were doing a poor job, need to be given a chance to criticize it on the article's talk page for a reasonable length of time, a couple of months, perhaps. It needs to be advertized in WT:INDIA and WT:BANGLADESH. Should it really come first for a military history review, and so soon after it was introduced? In an academic field as contentious as the Bengal famine of 1943 (BFo1943), there are many salient issues, which are not likely to receive scrutiny in such a venue. This is in part because BFo1943 is only obliquely military history. In fact to cast it as military history is to buy into a POV out there that exceptional war time conditions allowed the famine to fly under the radar of British responsibility. My second thought is: it is packed with details, but yet strangely sanitized in both in prose and pictures, making the article vulnerable to accusations of missing the forest for the trees. If I were to use an image pattern recognition program to guess the article's topic, it is unlikely to come up with "famine." (Aside: I've lately been adding images to Timeline of major famines in India during British rule which I created some ten years ago (as I did all the famine articles in it, with the exception of the two Bengal famine articles); contrast some of the images in the timeline with the ones in this article.) It is the same with the prose. I perfectly understand Wikipedia NPOV, DUE guidelines, but, still, we are looking at a famine in which there were at the very least an estimated 1.5 million Indian deaths, a significant proportion from starvation. Yet not a single Briton died from starvation. I've lately been struck by this fact. It is the same with all the other famines between 1770 and 1943: some 50 million Indians died in famines. That's a lot of millions. Yet not a single Briton in India did. It could not have happened in a European settler colony of Britain (Australia, NZ, Canada, South Africa, or for that matter these here the United States). I'm not suggesting even remotely that the article take on the polemical tone of a Mike Davis or Nick Dirks, or even the quantitative slant of an Amartya Sen, but I have the sense that your tone is too muted. I could very well be proved wrong upon a more detailed reading, but that is my first reaction. Lingzhi, you've done an admirable job, and I congratulate you, but I think this is not the time for any review that assigns an imprimatur of Wikipedia quality. It really needs to simmer for a while, and it needs to be advertised in other venues. I'm sure we can take care of the occasional IP trolls. Again, I'm thrilled that you've done this, and I'm looking forward to reading it in the coming weeks when I find the time. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:30, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • These are reasonable concerns. FWIW, it almost never happens that people get upset when an article is promoted to A-class; it's just not a process that a lot of people care about. Input is always welcome. Promotion here tends to take a long time, longer on average than at FAC, so there's lots of time for input. - Dank (push to talk) 12:50, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • Re: "buy into a POV out there that exceptional war time conditions allowed the famine to fly under the radar of British responsibility": For myself, I'm just a gnomish copyeditor, and even if I had a POV, it wouldn't generally make a difference to my work, but I can assure you this is not my POV, and judging from what I read here, it isn't Lingzhi's POV either. - Dank (push to talk) 12:54, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • {{ping| I deeply appreciate your lengthy comments. I also disagree strongly, even vehemently, with most of them. This article has been allowed to sit for a very, very long time as one of the most firmly and even outrageously POV-driven chunks of propaganda text in mainspace. I suspect that that is because the topic is just too huge for... pretty much anyone, except for people who simplify the topic by slicing and dicing things according to their POV. The article should have been deleted or blanked years ago, with only 3 or 4 sentences left as a placeholder. I'm very disappointed that you have swung the door wide open for the POV warriors to return and claim legitimacy.
  • You mentioned images, but images are a desperately huge problem. [You can ask Nikkimaria how much I've agonized over them]. Forex, I had to reprimand one well-meaning contributor who added two images from the previous century, and one from the Direct Action Day. here [1] All the images that people urgently wish to add are very, very dodgy, either in veracity or in copyvio problems. I did add the Chittaprosad sketch, which hardly looks sanitized, and the diseased child, and the dead/dying children and sorrowful woman in the infobox atop the page.
  • Speaking of "not sanitized", please rad the whole section about "Increased vermin and unburied dead" ("we just threw the corpses in ditches") or "Social disruption" ("...children picking and eating undigested grains out of a beggar's diarrheal discharge"). Etc.
  • And to say this is only obliquely a MILHIST issue is to fly in the face of every single source. Even Tauger, who might perhaps be described as (perhaps indirectly) a British apologist, asserts that British aid was sharply restricted by wartime shipping concerns.
  • In short, I disagree with almost everything you wrote. They are not reasonable concerns. Did I miss anything? I'll look again later.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 13:07, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. :) I see that you have spent a lot of time on writing this, and are understandably keen to see it become the stable version on Wikipedia. I wrote down what were my first reactions, allowing very much for the possibility that I could be wrong. When I said it is "only obliquely military history," I was referring to the contrast between 1 and 319. Any one who claims it is essentially military history has to explain the contrast in the keywords of the sources. To point to "a POV out there that exceptional war time conditions allowed the famine to fly under the radar of British responsibility." is not to imply that "it was not a wartime famine." To say that I've swung the door wide open is to sell your own exceptional contribution short. I won't get into any other issue at this time, given Dank's time frame, and the distinct likelihood that I will be opening instead the "trapdoors to a bottomless past." Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:04, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Many of the pictures had faulty licenses (or wrong information). I have removed them. That is not a bad thing because I believe there are much better and more relevant pictures around. It may take some time to find them though. The edit summaries explain the issues. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:33, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have added new sourced, public domain, pictures (see Talk:Bengal_famine_of_1943#New_images) which speak to the context with as much precision as pictures will do. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 02:29, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • The lead is poorly written. It presented itself in this shape a few hours ago. I have made the first three sentences smoother, docked the excesses and hopefully enlivened the prose.[2] Famine articles typically first tell us where the famine struck, in what parts of where it struck, and among whom and how many in where it struck. (The author has given us very little of that in the lead.) Only then do they venture into guessing how many it killed. The last sentence of the lead paragraph: "Millions of families were impoverished as the crisis disrupted and overwhelmed large segments of the economy and social fabric, accelerating pre-existing socioeconomic processes generating poverty and income inequality."I have tagged incomprehensible. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 06:02, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • TEXT: Oddly enough, three experienced Wikipedians – two of whom are well-known as copy editors – gave the text a once-over. [That would be Ceoil, Dank and Clarityfiend]. I'm extremely certain that at least one of them would have noticed this alleged incomprehensibility. I won't remove your {{incomprehensible}} template; it would be much easier for everyone if you foresaw the eventual result and removed the template yourself.
    • Images: From my perspective, there are 3 or 4 problems with your edits to the images. The biggest by far is that removing all the British military images is (presuambaly, according to WP:AGF, due to completely inadvertent oversight) POV. Second, most of the images you added are markedly inferior to the images you replaced them with. Third, and alas this will take a few days, apparently your goal is to emphasize and emphasize and emphasize the victims. <strikethrough>Well then, I have two images that are superior to yours. You will like them</strikethrough>.... It will take a few days to get to them. They are at work... Fourth, as for your licensing complaints, I suspect some complaints are valid and some are not. I was fully expecting the img with the TIME/LIFE watermark to be removed, forex. No problem with that removal. Perhaps I should have rmvd it myself, but it shows what are obviously "prioritized classes" (tho I wasn't gonna ssay that explicitly)... But many of your complaints will need to be scrutinized very carefully. Forex, the complaints about "this isn't a rice boat". That is... I have no words. I will quit now before I become {{incomprehensible}}.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 09:17, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      • Guys, per my standard disclaimer, I try to stay out of the kind of usage questions that people are most likely to disagree on. Language changes every day, and this is how it changes, by people disagreeing over it. Let's wait for more reviewers to help sort it out. Ceoil, feel free to jump in here. - Dank (push to talk) 11:41, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
            • Have not looked into the specifics here, but Fowler&fowler is an editor whose opinion I highly respect, and has some expertise in this area. He can be blunt, yes, but we are adults and I would take him IGF. Only answering with generalities because I was pinged; will look later in more dept tonight. Ceoil (talk) 12:03, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good morning everyone!  :) I see I've been writing mean things, and creating ripples that are reaching faraway shores. Let me reiterate again: Lingzhi, I have great admiration for your rewrite. Is it great? Yes. Is it perfect? No. All my remarks are meant to push it farther down the road to perfection. We have had a decent relationship on Wikipedia thus far (I think). Let us not set it back over a few images and parts of speech. I haven't had my coffee yet, so I won't bother with the image stuff yet, but what I meant about the sentence, which my enfeebled condition last night prevented me from clarifying, was this: the reduced relative clause "generating poverty and income inequality," is an elliptical form (shorthand) for something. It is not clear to the reader what that something is: Is it "that generate," (i.e. referring to a general- or more permanent state) or to something more timebound, such as "that were generating," "that had been generating," ... even "that had generated." In the absence of that clarity, the reader is unable to figure out what sense of "pre-existing" is meant: "existing" (i.e. present earlier and continuing to be present) or "present before a certain time in the past." In general, as the sentence becomes more complex, reduced relative clauses create more ambiguity. Now I have to get some coffee, feed the animals, and (only then) take the first fledgling steps toward waking the better half. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:08, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for your comments. You have "The Bengal famine... was a famine", redundant surely ("The red ball was a ... ball"). Perhaps somewhat worse, people seem to be dying twice: "people died in the famine, first from starvation and then from diseases". This seems as though we have a zombie attack on our hands, doesn't it?  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 18:22, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      • Good catch. Have fixed, I hope. Yup there is repetition, but the second is a major famine, similar to Britannica: East India Company (was) an English company formed for the exploitation of trade with East ..." My point was about smoothing out the prose. I don't know what WP policy is about this sort of repetition. Will defer to whatever is the wisdom. Not even attached to my rewrite of the first three sentences. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:56, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
        • I don't know whether i should put this comment on this page or on the article's Talk, but it seems we are discussing the lede's text here and the images there, so I'll mention this here and... images... there.. So about the lede: at one point it was a freaking monster that had (I am certainly not kidding) more than twenty cites in it. I made it that way for two reasons: first, nearly every single statement is controversial! Seriously! The only noncontroversial thing you can write is that "The bengal famine was a fmine. At least 1. million people died." So I cited everything. And as for length, apparently many people read only the lede, and this famine has many many many many important details. Even which details you choose to leave out is an exercise in POV-ness. I am not kidding. Every editing decision is hazardous. So... OK I chopped it down somewhat to a medium-sized (but still much longer than current) version here. If you thing anything is missing from the current lede, there is a good chance you can find it there.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 05:39, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, I dont like the wholesale change in image selection, and would urge a reversion. Ceoil (talk) 06:46, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Ceoil: But also for the record, you have no problems with the inexorably wholesale change wrought when lingzhi did a top-to-bottom rewrite in one fell swoop, against everything that I know the spirit of Wikipedia to be about. Are you aware what sort of task it is for a reviewer who has to check these edts for reliability, and not just of facile grammar? I already see statements here and there that don't jibe with my overall knowledge of Indian history (and I wrote the history section of the FA India), statements that will need to be checked not just for reliability but also for DUE. Seriously, Ceoil, he had supposedly worked on these images for a year, and came up with doozies; I appear less than a week ago, and find properly licensed public domain images, and lingzhi is hemming and hawing about now finding the images on Monday? I wasn't born yesterday. And we haven't even got to article content yet, the sentence by sentence check of the edits, of whether they represent some kind of consensus view or are just using a source here or a source there to make a blanket statement. Those are the things I typically worry about. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:37, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The images I added are not blurry, they had been deliberately magnified because I was trying to get rid of half-tone effects, which I have now. Here they are: File:FatherSonCowRummagingFoodBengalFamine1943.jpg, File:Destitute mother and child Bengal famine 1943.jpg, File:OrphansWhoSurvivedBengalFamine1943.jpg, File:MotherWithShredsOfClothingAndChildCalcutta1943.jpg, File:BelongingsSoldAwayBengalFamine1943.jpg, File:BengalSpeaksJackalsVulturesEatingCorpsesBengalFamine1943a.jpg (only the last one, I haven't been able to fix properly yet). They are a lot more in focus that Lingzhi's: File:India and daily life in Bengal (1912) (14596006410).jpg, which is currently in the article, which is not only blurry, not only has full-blown half-tone effects, but is also nonsensical and incorrect. It shows a boy herding cattle in Bengal in 1912! What is it supposed to illustrate? Well, it is supposed to illustrate the section October 1942: Unreliable crop forecasts The other pictures present earlier either had bogus licenses, as I've already stated above, or were also wildly out of context. It is the same with the picture File:Smallpox child.jpg which is supposed to somehow tell us something about the diseases rampant in Bengal in 1943. The picture is taken from the CDC's website in Atlanta, but says nothing about which county the girl is from, which year the picture was made. It could be a Pakistani girl from the 1990s. So, what gives us the gumption to think that she is a legit illustration for the 1943 famine in Bengal, but that our own midwestern herding boys a man from the US midwest, also from 1912, as seen in File:SmallpoxvictimIllinois1912.jpg, is not? Do we really need a token South Asian looking face (anon in place and anon in time) with smallpox to illustrate the smallpox epidemic in Bengal in 1943? That's pretty shameful, and an insult to people from Bengal who will spot such subterfuge from a mile away. You're a good guy Ceoil, and I respect you, but seriously the pictures that were present in this article earlier were a sorry lot. Good night. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 07:44, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
And I have just read Lingzhi's attempt at lame sarcasm in the divination of my POV, in the Images post above. For everyone's information, I had removed the earlier images because they were either completely off-topic (i.e. File:Royal Air Force Operations in the Far East, 1941-1945. CI444.jpg showing a pilot in the Northwest Frontier province on the border with Afghanistan, at the opposite end of the subcontinent, attempting to illustrate the military buildup in Bengal in 1942-43) or were abysmally poor in quality, not to mention without proper license (e.g. File:HMS Cornwall - 1942 - WWII.jpg) (PS I have just discovered from other evidence that the RAF pilot may have been training to be deployed with Chindits support in Burma. We still can't use that image, but we probably can another which I will soon upload. In any case, it is not my job as a reviewer to uncover this. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:46, 23 April 2017 (UTC)) When I was able to find time, I did add the pictures, some good ones too: three from the Imperial War Museum and one from the US National Archives:[reply]

If you think I am getting irritated, you are right. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 14:32, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

      • Finally, I have just taken a look at the history of the page Bengal famine of 1943. Lingzhi claims that the page is full of POV, and that it left him with no option but to do the top-to-bottom, one-fell-swoop, rewrite. For someone who is railing against the longstanding POV on the page, Lingzhi made his first edit there only on 2-5-16. On the talk page? Also on 2-5-16. Is there any indication that he attempted to work with any previous author there or at least call them on a POV? Nope. People can look at the pages themselves. Where is the evidence of criticism of POV or of making small probing edits that we all make? There one set of dozens of small edits on 2/5 and 2/6, and thereafter only a few chunky additions (5K or greater), which were obviously prepared beforehand somewhere else. There is nothing of the sort of engagement with other editors that you will see me make on Talk:India, Talk:British Raj, and a host of others. There is also, as far as I can tell, no history of Lingzhi making India-related edits earlier, not even India-famine-related edits. There are a host of India famine pages (see Timeline of major famines in India during British rule). Of course, that shouldn't matter, but it does seems to be going against the grain of Wikipedia. However, since the time he made his all-at-once edit in April, Lingzhi has been busy like nobody's business on that page. I am not saying that what he has done should be reversed, or that his edits don't deserve our admiration, but I am saying that what was there earlier, if legitimate, needs to be incorporated. We can't take his word that he has done that, for there is no history of his working with anyone else on this page. In other words, an article this new, written by someone with no history of editing in the area, written all at once in a manner for which we are being asked to assume good faith, but not assume it for the others before him, and reviewing which places an inordinate burden on any reviewer who wants to take his job seriously, needs to simmer for a while outside of a review setting, where other people need to be given a chance to challenge the individual edits. As far as I see, this review is dead in the water in Milhist. Besides, it is not clear it is military history anyway, for it's a long way from here to Tipperary. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:09, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
        • So, I oppose, an A-rating, for the reasons I have given, but importantly, I oppose the very idea of a milhist review for an article such as this, also for the reasons I have given. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:52, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments. I suppose i could scare up a few specific points of POV in the previous version of the article. let's see this version:

  1. "Bengal’s winter 1942 ‘aman’ rice crop, the most important one, was well below average." POV. This is fiercely debated, but Wikipedia lays it out as a flat and unchallenged assertion. This is the opening shot of the POV volley. The two POVs are (technical term here) 1 FAD (food availability decline) and by extension 2) limited British responsibility.
  2. "... a fungus infection...believed to have had more serious effects on supply than the cyclone. The only evidence by an expert in the subject concludes, 'The only other instance [of disease damage]that bears comparison in loss sustained by a food crop and the human calamity that followed in its wake is the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. POV = FAD. This is presented as an uncontested "probable truth", with an expert as an appeal to authority. In truth, the degree of fungal damage is fiercely debated.
  3. "Carry-over stocks of grain, the stocks over and above the new crop, usually a protection against food shortages, were well below the normal two months' supply," POV (FAD again). Highly contested again, and yet presented as an uncontested fact again.
  4. "The Famine Inquiry Commission showed in detail that the people who stated that Bengal had plenty of food dominated the political and administrative decision-making up to mid 1943 at least, losing influence as the evidence accumulated that their assumptions were contradicted by observations on the ground, as their policies proved ineffectual, and as it became clear that a major famine was in progress. " This is a long sentence but it's POV again, flatly asserting that there was a grain shorage, and that people who said there was no shartage were just wrong. Again, it's FAD, and presented in Wikipedia's editorial voice.
  5. "The Famine Inquiry Commission was damning about the policies, actions and failures to act of the Government of India, of the Bengal Government, of other provincial governments and of the rice trade. It also called attention to the general corruption." POV the Commission has been highly criticized as a whitewash job. Many assertt hat their goals was to lay out just enough truth to be persuasive, then skirt around any and all blame on the UK (by extension, blaming the provincial government to some degree, and blaming catastrophe as well). FAD POV, exonerate Britain.
  6. "Inaction of the British Indian Government" section. That sounds very much like like it's gonna blame Britain.... but... it doesn't, not really. Does it mention the denial Policies' Nope! Not even word one! Does it mention inflation? there's a section about inflation later that is embarrassingly POV; e'll get to that. But the point is, if yo read the "Blame Britain section carefully, it only comes down to "No one officially declared a famine". But it is the Provincial government's role to declare famine, not Britain's. So again, even though the section heading looks like we're gonna blame Britain, we actually blame the provincial government.
  7. Let me repeat: Zero-point-zero discussion of the Denial Policies, which came from the UK.
  8. "It was widely believed by politicians, the Government of India, the Government of Bengal, other provincial governments, some administrators, some public servants and some of the general public that Bengal had plenty of food available and food shortages were due to hoarding, speculation and inflation " And some still substantially believe that (or believe that any shortage was minor), although the key culprit "inflation" is omitted. Why does Wikipedia's voice choose sides by tut-tutting one side?
  9. I'm still reading this section and it says some things that are true and some that are debated, but never does it really do anything to point at Britain. perhaps it suggests that Britain should not have permitted the provinces to set interprovincial trade barriers. Is that what it's saying? If so.. it's not making anything resembling a clear or coherent case. I actually think it isn't making any case at all.
  10. section: "Role of the British Government of Bengal" Here we finally have some clear assertions of blame! but wait, it's blaming the... provincial government. Precisely as the famine Commission report did.
  11. Section: "Hoarding" the section concludes there was no hoarding and no rice shortage."When these drives continually failed to locate large stocks, the government realized that the scale of the loss in supply was larger than they had initially believed" This is FAD POV.
  12. Section: "Speculation" Again Wikipedia casts doubt on the possibility that there was sufficient (or nearly sufficient) food. FAD POV. Forex, "Only if speculators had stored more than usual, and not released it during the famine year, would they have increased the number of deaths: there is ample evidence that they did not" Why is Wikipedia choosing sides in a debate and presenting only that side's evidence?
  13. Section: "Inflation" Oh God, read this and then read the current. They are worlds, worlds, worlds apart. Please. That section is a disgrace.
  14. Alas I have to go now! I will try to list more later. Bye.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 05:05, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am about half done listing examples of POV. I can list more (did I mention there's not even a single mention of the Denial Policies? Oh wait, I did), but just for now, let's do a thought experiment, please. If it took me an entire year (yes I worked on it for about 14 months, with a 1-month break... and I actually worked during all that time) to rewrite the article unmolested, undisturbed, undisputed, how long would it have take if I had tried to work with POV editors? The answer, of course, is that it simply would NOT have taken place. In this alternate, counterfactual thought-experiment version of reality, the article would at this moment have 2 or 3 changes from the version that existed just before I copy-pasted the userpage version in (the page with POV described above, and that's only about half the POV-ness). This article is just too darn big and too darn complex and has too many darn moving parts and every moving part is a potential POV trap... You say piece by piece is the only wiki-way; I say in this case only (as far as I know; there may be other similar exceptions to the general rule) that path does not exist...  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 09:04, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You don't get it my friend. Why should we take your word that it was all POV then, and all NPOV now? Why are you pointing to the old POV now, when you didn't lift a finger to discuss it on the article's talk page? It is not in the record. There is no evidence anywhere on Wikipedia that you showed interest in any famine, anything Bengal related, anything India related, before you appeared on Bengal famine of 1943 claiming to be the purveyor of 100% NPOV and dumped your text. Please don't insult my intelligence. I am not that stupid. Please also don't list any more points. I am not paying attention and others will not understand. I have nothing against you, nor is my admiration for such an attempt diminished. I am happy to work on the article with you—as I see we already are, after a fashion, on the article's talk page. At least I'm not reverting it to the previous version, nor pasting a version of my own, which I could whip up, over yours. (For the record I had not edited this article until a few days ago, so there is no POV of mine it formerly embodied.) Moreover, I'm watching the article, so no blatant POV pusher can undo anything valuable you have done. But this review is over. As I already said, the article needs to sit, figuratively speaking, in the Bengal sunshine and rain unshielded by a review process. The privilege you are asking for yourself needs to be given to others. You attempted to take a short cut. But there are no short cuts, no free lunches, no free kittens, no undisturbed writing or rewriting. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 09:31, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you for your time &trouble. You have expressed your opinion quite clearly.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 13:13, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Given the article's history, and the discussion of the re-write at Talk:Bengal famine of 1943 (where several editors expressed concerns over the process), I don't think that this can be considered sufficiently stable to be assessed as A-class. Moreover, I echo the concerns above over whether a Military History Wikiproject A-class review is an appropriate place to assess these changes: while the famine was closely related, and probably a consequence of, the Second World War War, British colonial policies and various intra-Indian issues were more significant and indeed are the focus of the article. Importantly, these issues are all highly contested, and there's a risk that military history-focused reviewers will in effect endorse this version of the article despite not having the background knowledge to assess how well it balances the competing arguments. I'd suggest a peer review as a first step here. Nick-D (talk) 23:40, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Nick-D:, @Fowler&fowler:, @Ian Rose:,@AustralianRupert:, @Auntieruth55:. Also ping all Milhist coordinators. Please close this review. I was nice and didn't take issue with the fact that Fowler&fowler's Oppose (this wasn't done according to my opinion of the "Wikipedia way") could be used as a dictionary definition of non-actionable. Now Nick's Oppose is of similar stripe. "risk that reviewers will endorse this version" is non-actionable. By the way, there IS no "this version". This one has zero-point-zero POV, unlike (as I wrote in great detail, and was not half done writing) the previous version. No Peer Review; peer review is a long process that offers very very little help. I'll go straight to FAC within minutes of this A-review being closed. Please do feel free to follow me there, but please consider the word "actionable" before you write.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 00:35, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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