Talk:HumanLight/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Carabinieri (talk · contribs) 16:14, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi, I've only skimmed the article so far. I'm a little concerned that the article is based almost entirely on primary sources. Articles should be based primarily on secondary sources per WP:RSPRIMARY and WP:PRIMARY.--Carabinieri (talk) 20:07, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for taking on the review. As I recall, I did a survey of sources that discussed the topic and tried to use all available. This includes these publishers as secondary sources:
 * American Humanist Association
 * The Blaze
 * CNN
 * Huffpost
 * The Montclair Times
 * New York Times
 * Patheos
 * NPR (external link, but could be used as a reference as well)
 * If you feel there is still not enough secondary sources, I can look again to see if there are other sources now, or use the secondary sources to source more of the material, vs the primary source of the HumanLight Page.
 * Thanks again. --Airborne84 (talk) 01:17, 30 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for your response. I think it would be a good idea to shift the sources to secondary sources as much as possible. I wouldn't consider the American Humanist Association a secondary source, though, since it's basically a press release endorsing the holiday.--Carabinieri (talk) 07:08, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, I'll do that. It'll take a few days. I'll leave a note on your talk page when complete. Thanks! --Airborne84 (talk) 14:49, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Done. I re-sourced a number of the passages from primary to secondary sources. I believe the article is at the point that removing any more of the material drawn from primary sources will detract from it being "broad in its coverage" (GA Criterion 3). In some cases, I deleted the primary source passage—one helped with the flow of the prose but probably wasn't required. The remaining passages are related to facts that do not appear to be available from secondary sources, for example the background on the HumanLight symbol. In other cases, secondary sources almost work, but are incomplete. For example one secondary source lists what the ceremonial candles are for, but does not name the colors. --Airborne84 (talk) 03:29, 7 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, I really appreciate the work you've put into this article and the fact that more secondary sources don't exist. I still think that the article relies too much on primary sources though (more than half of the article is based on such sources, based on my count of the footnotes). I'll ask for a second opinion to see if others agree with my reluctance to pass an article based mainly on primary sources.--Carabinieri (talk) 03:31, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Second opinion
The article has not been reviewed thoroughly, but it relies mainly on primary sources. More secondary sources may not be available. WP:RS and WP:OR both tell us to be careful about using too many primary sources. I'd like to get another opinion on whether the article violates those guidelines.--Carabinieri (talk) 03:31, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Second Opinion I believe the article needs to be improved before I would recommend it being promoted as I think this article has significant WP:RS problems.
 * First is the use of self-published sources. From the RS policy (specifically WP:SELFSOURCE): "Self-published...sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves...so long as...the article is not based primarily on such sources." Meanwhile a quarter of citations are to self-published sources: 6 of the 25 citations in the article are to the HumanLight Committee's own website, a 7th is to a Facebook post.
 * The second issue, and perhaps the bigger one, is the general lack of independent sources. 7 of the citations in the article are to pieces written by Patrick Colucci, "one of the creators of the holiday" and vice chair of the HumanLight Committee, 6 of which are to pieces he published on the website of the American Humanist Association, who obviously are not independent of this holiday (the 7th citation is to the previously mentioned Facebook post). Speckhardt, 2012 (cited once) is written by the executive director of the American Humanist Association. Of the 25 footnotes in this article 14 (56%) are not independent secondary sources which gives me great pause.
 * The third issue is that the sources which remain are generally not of high quality. NPR gives it 4 paragraphs, but it reads suspiciously like a press release given it is almost identical to the FAQ on the HumanLight website. CNN gives it 3 paragraphs at the bottom of a 30+ paragraph article. The Aljazeera article's coverage of HumanLight is two sentences: "A humanist holiday, HumanLight was first celebrated in 2001. it [sic] is designed to celebrate and express the positive human values of reason, compassion, humanity and hope." The New York times gives it even shorter treatment, relegating its coverage to a single clause: "Many of Mr. Silverman’s fellow atheists celebrate the Winter Solstice, which occurs Thursday at 7:22 p.m. Eastern Time, or HumanLight, a humanist event created in 2001 by a group of New Jersey residents and observed this coming Saturday." TheBlaze is composed almost entirely of quotations to other sources cited here, most notably the RNS source while the HuffPost article seems to actually just be a reprint by the RNS author. So those two really just seem like duplicates of the RNS source. I don't know RNS well but it as an institution seems reputable (our page on it, Religion News Service, says it wires reports to the Washington Post, among others), and the article itself doesn't seem to be suspect. The problem is that it is the only source in the entire article that I find reliable as an independent secondary source. The other independent sources largely don't seem to actually synthesize or interpret the primary sources, rather just repeat them.
 * In my opinion more work, and particularly improved sourcing, is needed. I do appreciate the work, and if you can't find more sources online, try using GoogleScholar to find books and articles which may exist online or offline. Wugapodes [thɔk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɻɪbz] 20:54, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback, User:Wugapodes. I'm going to fail this nomination. If these are all the secondary sources available at the moment, there just may not be enough there to write a Good Article about this subject. I would encourage you to stay on the lookout for more sources that may be published in the future.--Carabinieri (talk) 00:52, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
 * @Wugapodes and @Carabinieri, I appreciate your time spent in the careful reviews and in commenting. I'm not that experienced with Good Articles, so I'll admit I haven't encountered this before. Is it possible for a topic to meet the notability requirement to be an article on Wikipedia but not have enough independent sources available to become a Good Article, no matter how well written regarding the six Good Article Criteria? Thanks again. --Airborne84 (talk) 01:10, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I think that may be the case. If an article only just meets notability criteria, it may be impossible to write a Good Article about it. According to WP:GRA: "Not every article can be a Good article. If the references to improve an article to Good article standards simply do not exist, then you should not overlook that part of the criteria."--Carabinieri (talk) 02:45, 11 July 2018 (UTC)