Talk:Al Khawalid/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: LT910001 (talk · contribs) 09:35, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

If there are no objections, I'll take this review. I'll note at the outset I've had no role in editing or creating this article. I welcome other editors at any stage to contribute to this review. I will spend a day familiarising myself with the article and then provide an assessment. Kind regards, LT910001 (talk) 09:35, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking the article. There are three main sources which require subscription. I can provide access to two of them (Gengler and The Wall Street Journal), but I can only provide screen shots for the third (Tree of Al Khalifa). I plan to nominate this article later at FAC, so I'd prefer if you would give more input than required for a GA, but don't feel pressured to do so.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  10:05, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for waiting. In conducting this review, I will:
 * Provide an assessment using WP:GARC
 * If this article does not meet the criteria, explain what areas need improvement.
 * Provide possible solutions that may (or may not) be used to fix these.

Commentary
Thanks for waiting and for your edits to this article. I'll provide some provisional comments here and update the table when they are addressed:--LT910001 (talk) 22:46, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Firstly, this is for the most part a wonderful and comprehensive article.
 * Thanks.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  13:55, 23 December 2013 (UTC)


 * That said, this article needs some context. I would really value some information on 'Al Khawalid' as it stands integrated into the lead. Including: how large the family is, how the family operates, and what regions of Bahrain and/or other places the family is situated in, and whether non-family members have been adopted into the group.
 * I've tried to explain more in the lead about the use of the term. I don't think I can expand more about how they operate and the rest, as this type of information is rarely spoken of. Much of what we know currently is the "moderate" and "hard-liners" factions analysis, with Al Khawalid brothers leading the hard-liners.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  13:55, 23 December 2013 (UTC)


 * An image describing the family would be valuable in the lead.
 * Unfortunately, no free images are available, and WP:NFCC prohibit us from using non-free images (including fair use) for living persons.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  13:55, 23 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I find treating the group as a single actor a little confusing, and this impacts on readability. By this I mean sentences like "During the Bahraini uprising, Al Khawalid objected to compromise ", "Still, Al Khawalid were kept " and so on. This family group surely has leaders and internal divisions, and I find these statements very difficult to read, when a group is treated like a single individual. This recurs several times throughout the article, and I'd be interested to hear your opinion on this.
 * I've tried to make it clearer when referring to specific members of the Al Khawalid, as in your first example, and when referring to the family branch as a whole, as in the second example. My understanding is that most post-2011 sources use the term "Al Khawalid" to refer to brothers Khalid and Khalifa, which the article now refers to as "Al Khawalid brothers" to distinguish from the rest of the family branch.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  14:40, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

I'll await your response on these matters before I continue the review. Given now is the festive season in many countries, I'd be happy to wait a couple of days for a response. Kind regards, --LT910001 (talk) 22:46, 22 December 2013 (UTC) ：Thanks for your edits. Given that it's the festive season, I'll return on the 26-27th with a full review. Kind regards, --LT910001 (talk) 22:17, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * No problem. Happy holidays!  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  22:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Conclusion
Right. I've tried very hard to understand this article, and re-read it several times, but I still can't make head or tail of it. I'm still unclear as to what the article is referring to. This article lacks an infobox and a lead image, which are some tools usually used to provide context to the reader. I've had a look through other good articles to try and find similar articles for comparison. I feel the most similar articles are the 'House of...' articles, which are structured around familes. If that is the case, I think this article would benefit from a rewrite structured around 'History' and then 'Members', with prominent sections for the different members.

The lede of the article could be made much more concise, as it is currently overloaded with names and information that is very hard to follow. This article, I feel, also needs its scope defined. See for example "The term is used to describe descendants of Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, but it also refers specifically to brothers Khalid and Khalifa, sons of Ahmed bin Salman bin Khalid (Al Khawalid brothers). In the 1920s, sons of Khalid Al Khalifa (Al Khawalid)". The alternating focus on the brothers and family makes it hard to construct a coherent narrative from the article. Additionally, this article lacks a section discussing politics and relations within the group, treating it only as a monolithic mass.

The article still makes many references such as this: "During the Bahraini uprising, Al Khawalid brothers", which is still unclear: (1) how many brothers (2) which brothers objected, and (3) whether AKB is the name of an organisation or not. Addition of the word "the two" would go some way to ameliorating this.

In conclusion:
 * I feel this article doesn't meet "well-written" criteria of the review.
 * This article would strongly benefit from an infobox and some relevant images
 * I feel the lead should be more focused and re-written, with less information. I feel the lead should be more fleshed-out
 * I feel this article could be better structured to deal with this, through a "History" and "Members" sections
 * I feel this article would benefit from a discussion of relations between members, perhaps in a renamed "Ideology and political allies" section.
 * I feel this article may benefit from a rename along the lines of "House of..." to help define scope.
 * I feel this article would benefit from a peer review from a user or friend of the nominee. This may need to be a physical friend, as currently PR requests are quite neglected.
 * For comparison, additional GA articles are available at good articles.
 * This article is otherwise stable, neutral, and does appear to be very well-sourced

I'm consequently failing this review, as I don't think these issues could be dealt with in a limited timespan. I would encourage renomination when you are satisfied the above issues have been dealt with. I apologise for the delay. Kind regards, --LT910001 (talk) 01:15, 28 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm shocked, nevertheless I'll take all your points into consideration and I thank you for your review, BUT.. I've written 12 Good Articles, including 10 from scratch, so I should know what constitutes a Good Article. I think it would be better if you reconsidered your assessment after reading the following points:
 * I'm baffled by your comment that you "still can't make head or tail" even after re-reading the article several times. Your suggestion that this article should be renamed to "House of..." speaks tons about this, when the article is about the Al Khawalid branch of Al Khalifa family (a.k.a. House of Al Khalifa). I think this is a main reason for your decision, so I think it would only be fair if you read these two sources: Royal Factionalism, the Khawalid, and the Securitization of ‘the Shīʿa Problem’ in Bahrain + A Palace Rift in Persian Gulf Bedevils Key U.S. Navy Base.
 * I've decided to create this article after a brief chat with a Bahraini researcher, who told me when I was done that it was the best Wikipedia article I've written so far.
 * Al Khawalid brothers is not an organisation whatsoever. I only used this term to differentiate between the two meanings of the word Al Khawalid (when it referred to the whole family, I left it at Al Khawalid, when it only referred to the two brothers, I changed it to Al Khawalid brothers and both terms are introduced in the lead with clarification to what they mean - as you suggested, I can simply change the latter term to "the two Al Khawalid brothers" for further clarity). Virtually all sources only use Al Khawalid to refer to both meanings (which are, needless to say, very connected that you'd be a fool to make separate articles). This is why I've tried to get this clear from the second line of the lead and the first section in the article.
 * There is nothing to write about "relations between members", because there is nothing in reliable sources. Al Khawalid remained relatively unknown despite their major role in politics. They simply did everything in secret before 2011 and this article sums most of what we know about them currently.
 * Regardless of your final decision, I thank you very much for the review. I really hope that you'll reconsider and give the article another chance as it had been languishing in the GAN for months; I could make major changes within a day or two. Waiting for your reply before I undertake any major changes.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  02:37, 28 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Ping.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  08:51, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry if this came across as sudden, and I understand you had to wait a long time for the review. I've undone the fail and requested a second opinion. For those providing a secondary opinion, I'm finding this article confusing and difficult to process, and have documented this above. --LT910001 (talk) 23:23, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Fair enough.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  11:10, 30 December 2013 (UTC)


 * It may be worth taking a look at the House of Lancaster for a comparison article. I can't comment on the content of this article, but in terms of copyediting, the problem seems to be the way that Al Khawalid is being used; because we're lacking the usual clues we'd find in the presentation of an equivalent English term (e.g. the subtle variants between the "House of Lancaster", "Lancastrians", "leader of the Lancastrians", "Lancastrian cause" etc.), it is much harder to instantly see whether it is being used as a noun, a collective noun, adjective etc. I'd recommend working on this and trying out some variants: is there any way to use a distinctly different phrase for the different meanings? Another recommendation would be to work on the paragraph structure a bit - is it clear from the first sentence what the paragraph will be about? Typically it isn't in this article, and as a consequence the reader is having to work a bit harder already to follow the flow. Finally, keep the sentences short; shorter sentences make it easier for an Anglophone reader to make the conversion from Arabic to English and to follow the characters in the narrative, whose names will feel "foreign" and will get more easily confused than would be the case for an Arabic reader. Hchc2009 (talk) 11:15, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * House of Lancaster is different, because it's clearly distinct from the parent house, having its own coat of arms, etc. In this case, Al Khawalid are the hard-line wing of the same House of Al Khalifa. The problem I'm faced with is that sources aren't consistent with the usage of the various terms, one source would use "Khawalid" to refer to all decedents of Khalid, another would use it to only refer to 2 persons. Same with "Al Khawalid". That's why I've tried to make it clear in the lead: For the purpose of this article, immediate decedents of Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa will be referred to as "the Khalids", the aforementioned two brothers will be referred to as "the Khawalid" and the family branch collectively as "Al Khawalid". I'll work on the other recommendations.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  11:39, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Can you clarify more about the paragraph structure?  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  11:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The distinction I make is not entirely original research, as Gengler (2012) tells us that "descendants of Shaikh Khālid bin ʿAlī [are] referred to collectively as ‘Al-Khawālid’" (page 62) and al-Tajer (1987) used "the Khalids" to refer to immediate decedents of Khalid.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  11:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Conclusion mark 2
I have had a second look at this article myself and many of the points that I raised in my original conclusion have been addressed. This article is now very readable, extensive, and well-sourced. Some notes:
 * Firstly, I want to thank for not only persistent, but being so responsive and civil through this process, especially given my abrupt style in this review (thank you!)
 * Secondly, I have done a random check of the sources and they verified what was written in the article.
 * No problems with images
 * The article is now much clearer. I personally feel that it unnecessarily complicates the article to have "the Al Khalawids" written instead of "the Al Khalawid brothers", which is much more readable and understandable - likewise for "descendants of " but as it is this article certainly surpasses the GA criteria for readability.

I'm promoting this article and wish you well on your Wikitravels! I have updated the talk page and made the required changes. --LT910001 (talk) 03:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Yay! I'm so happy to see it promoted. Thank you for giving it another chance!  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  09:04, 20 January 2014 (UTC)