Talk:Homage to Catalonia

Full Citation Improvement Effort
I've recently been reading through this book and wanted to use the Wikipedia page.

Given the previous discussions on the edition used in the summaries, I think it would be productive to add Italic text specific edition and page numbers. Up until the chapter summaries, this article does a pretty good job of referencing primary and secondary source material for corroborating claims on facts about the Spanish Civil War.

However, the Summaries of each chapter remain uncited. Each section here definitely has a corresponding page section to edition, with very specific facts being cited. I believe this could improve this article's classification.

This is a project I will work on slowly over the next few weeks. Improvement Machine (talk) 01:54, 1 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Given that this book is listed as B-class and mid/high importance in several categories, I am requesting an independent review of Homage to Catalonia. George Orwell is also referenced as an important writer on the English literature page. I am primarily concerned with the lack of in-text citations in the chapter summaries as well as whether or not the summaries themselves are useful here. The page for Homage to Catalonia is too long and could be trimmed up. I have requested a review from WikiProject Spain. Based on these edits, I believe this article may have the potential to be a featured page. Improvement Machine (talk) 00:17, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
 * If we're going to do that, I feel it would be appropriate to migrate the article over to shortened footnote style, so we can easily cite different pages from Homage. I've already gotten started on it, in addition to generally cleaning up the reference list, but would like to hear your thoughts. It also makes for a lot cleaner wikitext IMO. &mdash; Maddy from Celeste  (they/she) :: talk to me uwu  20:29, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Citation styles
I've gone through all the references and cleaned them up, adding authors and dates, etc. where they were previously missing. In the process, I converted the article to shortened footnote style, as I feel this suits the needs of the article better – citing different pages from the same source will be significantly easier. This is especially relevant if/when I or someone else were to add citations to the chapter summaries. However, in order to comply with WP:WHENINROME, I have not yet pushed these changes to mainspace. I am therefore asking for your opinions on whether we should carry through this change. You can see my version of the article at User:Maddy from Celeste/Sandbox/Homage to Catalonia. Please let me know what you think. lav:~ %  Maddy from Celeste  (they/she) :: talk to me uwu  11:54, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Plagiarism/copyvio in reviews section
I had a look at this article today and found some issues. From the reviews section, there is this sentence...

Hostile notices also came from The Tablet, where a critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, "the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM, but never mentioning the book".

This was supported with footnote end reading "Shelden, pp. 320–21", and marked with an inline "verification needed" tag. Though not in the bibliography or otherwise mentioned, it is a reference to Michael Shelden's biography of Orwell. I checked this: Sheldon does discuss the review in The Listener, saying it "barely mentioned the book itself, devoting most of its space to unsubstantiated attacks on the leaders of the POUM, whom the anonymous reviewer vilified as 'traitors'". It goes on to say that Orwell wrote a letter to the editor taking issue with the Listener reviewer. As far as I can tell from the brief check I made for the purpose of verifying the quote, Shelden does not discuss other reviews of Homage.

I checked wikiblame and here is the original edit which added the paragraph. Other than the addition of some links and other stylistic edits, it is pretty much unmodified, except for changing the reference. The original edit cites Bowker's autobiography, referenced throughout the article (and presumably many others on Orwell). Here is what Bowker's autobiography says at pp. 238-9:

There were hostile notices in the Tablet, however, from a Catholic critic who wondered why he had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, in the TLS, from a Party-liner misrepresenting what Orwell had said (prompting an indignant letter from the author), and in the Listener, also from an obvious Communist, attacking the POUM but never mentioning the book — producing another angry response from Orwell.

At risk of stating the obvious: the entire sentence started out as plagiarism—thanks to fourteen years of editorial chip-chopping, it is now misattributed plagiarism (and possibly copyright violation). I've reduced the sentence to one that is neither, and referenced it against Bowker's book. I leave it up to others to decide whether to add any more detail to this sentence, hopefully without plagiarism, copyvio or misattribution. Since the Listener review has been discussed in preceding paragraphs, I removed it from the sentence. I'd encourage people to check the rest of the article for similar issues. (Tagging in @Grnrchst as they've recently been editing the article.) —Tom Morris (talk) 12:06, 5 May 2024 (UTC)


 * @Tom Morris: Oh wow, thanks for catching this. I'd added the VN tag because I wasn't sure what the citation was referring to, that it was actually plagiarising an entirely different source wasn't something I'd thought to check for. It seems like the user that added this has since been blocked as a sockpuppeteer, but going through the article history, I've noticed that they were the primary contributor to this from 2010 to 2013. I'm not sure how much of the content they added still remains, but I'll have to check that as well, just in case. Thanks again for finding this and bringing it to my attention. --Grnrchst (talk) 12:31, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Very glad you did tag it! If there turns out to be recurring plagiarism, lack of attribution or copyvio, let me know (I'm not watching this article so probably won't notice). If it's more than just a one-off, it may need to be raised on WP:CCI or WP:CPN for others to investigate. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:07, 5 May 2024 (UTC)