Talk:September 11 attacks/GA4

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Khazar2 (talk · contribs) 01:21, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll be glad to take this review. Initial comments to follow in the next 1-5 days. Thanks in advance for your work on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 01:21, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Initial comments
Okay, reviewing the GA Reassessment, clearly this is a more politically fraught GA than I anticipated it was going to be. But that's all right; having a previous consensus from the GAR may actually be helpful in this regard.

The main concern I see at a glance is that it doesn't appear that the reason for the previous delisting--"lack of any mention of alternative theories"-- has been sufficiently addressed. But I haven't done a close readthrough of the article yet, is it possible I've overlooked this? So far I only see the sentence "9/11 conspiracy theories have become social phenomena, despite negligible support for such views from expert scientists, engineers, and historians". Could you speak to the rationale on this? -- Khazar2 (talk) 01:50, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with you that the omission of alternative theories from the article hasn't been reasonably addressed. Until it is, I don't recommend that this article pass GA. Cla68 (talk) 23:39, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
 * On this point I would actually disagree somewhat on GA status. A section about the conspiracy theories would be desirable for FA status, but the mention here seems sufficient. However, there are many other aspects of this event that are not sufficiently mentioned. For one, there was a decent-sized section about warnings and intelligence regarding an impending attack by al-Qaeda on the United States but that was deleted because certain editors strongly associated all such talk with conspiracy theories, even though it was all sourced to serious reporting about legitimate concerns from mainstream media. As it stands, there is not sufficient detail about this aspect. It also suffers from neutrality issues by not making mention of the various civil liberty consequences of government responses save for a single sentence about the Patriot Act. This also has just a single mention of how the attacks lead to the war in Iraq, with the only mention of allegations about Iraq being that Rumsfeld tried to find evidence of Iraqi involvement in the immediate aftermath. A lot of the important history associated with this event is thus being left out.-- The Devil's Advocate tlk.  cntrb. 00:15, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks to both of you for adding input here. Devil's Advocate, I'm tempted to agree with you re: the conspiracy theory aspect, but what's tying my hands here is the previous GAR that delisted the article for the specific reason of not covering conspiracy theories. I'm not entirely sure that the one sentence that's been added is enough to cover this aspect. I'd at least suggest that a paragraph or two be added to cover these; given the prevalence of these theories, it seems a shame to not really address them. Though technically and temporarily the decision to promote this to Good Article rests with me, there's no point in my single-handedly defying a previous consensus at GAR. Devil's Advocate's suggestion that the consequences of the attacks be explored in a bit more detail also seems worthwhile to me.
 * In any case, since it's been a week and the original nominator hasn't commented on this (despite being very active on Wikipedia during that time and a direct request to do so), I'm going to close this now, without prejudice to future renomination. My personal suggestion would be that the conspiracy/alternative theories (US foreknowledge, US involvement, Israeli involvement, etc.) be briefly noted in a paragraph or two, and that regular editors of the page and participants in the article's GAR open a discussion as to whether this meets the GA criteria. Given that the previous RfC and the previous GAR appear to have reached opposing conclusions on this issue, this is a uniquely challenging situation to navigate. Still, I think a common ground here--a brief mention of alternative theories while otherwise describing events in the widely accepted version)--could be reached. Thanks to everybody working on this important and complicated article; sorry I couldn't be more help. -- Khazar2 (talk) 01:02, 24 May 2013 (UTC)