Talk:Shark Island concentration camp

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Hermann Göring in German South-West Africa ?
Where is the written proof that Göring lived in the German colony, or at least visited it?

His father, Heinrich Göring, who was the first German governor of German South West Africa, left the colony in 1890. Hermann Göring was born in 1893. Heinrich Göring was not linked to the extermination policy which started during the urprising, 15 years later.
 * There was no "extermination policy" in the first place. --41.151.41.168 (talk) 06:00, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Heinrich Göring died in 1913. So how did he transfer his non existing colonial extermination ideology or practice to his young son when he was a consul in Haiti and Alexandria and his son in Germany?

So what?

There is a unacceptable mixture between a monsterous policy in GWSA and the very light historical work done in this article. --Ft93110 (talk) 13:43, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The connection is made in the Madley article cited, which is an excellent academic source. Having said that, the information is better added to German South-West Africa than to this article. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:09, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * As is most of the information in the section currently entitled "Presaging". This article has to stick to the topic of this particular extermination camp. There is a great deal of solid information in the sources for this article. Much of it can and must appear in the encyclopedia, but in the right places, else it loses its value and credibility. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I have been digging into the Fischer connection a bit more. I find the following in a book chapter by Dominik J. Schaller. Schaller is a historian at Heidelberg, the book Perraudin and Zimmerer, German Colonialism and National Identity was published by Taylor & Francis 2009. Chapter author and book editors are prominent in genocide research:
 * "In the Hereros' claim statement (as, quite often, in the less reflective academic writing on the colonial war in Namibia), the infamous German anthropologist Eugen Fischer serves as living proof of the causal relationship between the two genocides."
 * The author then quotes from the 2001 Herero claim for reparations in the US courts against German companies, available at :
 * "German geneticist Eugene Fischer commenced his racial medical experiments in the concentration camps in South West Africa. He used the Herero and mulattos-- the offspring of the German settlers and Herero women-- as guinea pigs. Fischer tortured Herero men and women to explore his horrific theories about race. A book he wrote about his findings, The Principle of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, was a favorite of Adolf Hitler. Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians, including Josef Mengele."
 * Schaller then comments:
 * "From a historian's perspective, this construction of causality is too crude. It is true that Fischer conducted research among the Rehobothers in Namibia, though not during the war, and not in concentration camps. ... ideological and even personal continuities between German colonial rule in Africa and the Nazis' policy of occupation and extermination certainly exist ... but these are complex connections requiring sophisticated approaches, and are not elucidated by political polemics."
 * This is serious historical research, and we can't ignore it. It's not the only serious source, but it shows we should work very carefully in this area and not extend our claims further than what is said in scholarly study. There is currently a primary source cited in our article, and I will comment on that below.Itsmejudith (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
 * We have a primary source cited for collection of skulls from Shark Island. This is from a journal article of 1913. I can only get the first page in JStor at the moment, but that's probably irrelevant at the moment. This university website, about sending skulls back to Namibia is much better. It refers to the 1913 paper and says what is known and not known about the use of those skulls in research. And it is directly relevant because it says that 18 skulls came from Shark Island. Itsmejudith (talk) 18:43, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Karl Peters and Lettow
These two have been added to the list of supposed links between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust. However Peters did not have any connection to German South West Africa, that I am aware of, and died in 1918, while the Nazi party was formed in 1919. Lettow was also in East Africa and doesn't appear to have been sympathetic to the Nazis. Shouldn't the list be on the overall genocide page, and not every concentration camp page. --Dudeman5685 (talk) 02:39, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

pure atrocity propaganda
The article is pure atrocity propaganda like found in the "Blue Books", who were admittedly a pile of lies. The article should be scrapped completely. --41.151.41.168 (talk) 05:59, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

From the title down, this article is dubious in its conclusions and its facts.

 * 1) Just calling a place a death camp, although there is death, does not make it a death camp. There is conspicuously no mention of how people were herded together and killed.
 * 2) Harsh conditions. The Japanese worked prisoners to death during WWII but none of those POW camps are called extermination camps although survival rates were low.
 * 3) There is an attempt by the author of this article to slap it in the "see also" sections of pages concerning the Holocaust. This seems like POV pushing to me, and a clear violation of several Wikipedia policies. It also seems to be a ham-fisted attempt to gain some justification for the article name by associating this place with real death factories.
 * 4) Unless there can be a clear demonstration as to why this place was a death camp, it should be retitled and moreover removed any links from the Holocaust sections. Arguably, using the logic on show here, penal settlements such as French Devil's Island, the British Andaman Islands, or even the Kolyma region in Russia could also be construed to be "camps of death". But they were not.

And neither was Shark Island except in the imagination of the person who wrote this stuff..! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.148.207.209 (talk) 11:21, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Shark Island was not called an "Extermination Camp", to title it as such is pure bias and quite unWikipedian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.197.15.138 (talk) 04:09, 19 May 2012 (UTC)


 * The arguments here are fairly vague and not really accurate. As for the Japanese camps, there was the Death Railway, and the Japanese Hell ships, not to mention the Bataan Death March. None of these were "official" terms, they were used by the prisoners during and after the captivity. I believe the Bataan Death March was labelled well after the event, when the extent of the hardships became known. So, a retroactive label is not unjustified or unprecedented.
 * I'm not sure what you mean by "ham-fisted". Seriously.
 * Your analogy with the penal settlements of other countries is also poorly made. The French Devil's Island: If the French intent was to actively kill its convicts, then yes, calling it a "death camp", even retroactively, would be appropriate. But it wasn't, or at least it wasn't the policy of the government. And neither was it the policy on the British settlement in the Andamans. The intent was punishment, thus they are each called a penal colony. The British even closed theirs down, because too many people were dying. Shark Island was intended to eradicate intractable native groups. If genocide is what the camp was known for, then "death camp" seems appropriate.Boneyard90 (talk) 16:36, 2 June 2012 (UTC)


 * The Wikipage Herero and Namaqua Genocide cites Lieutenant General von Trotha as writing:
 * "I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. ... The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the 'long tube' (cannon). Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people".
 * So, while there is no specific reference to Shark Island, there seems no doubt of the genocidal intent. Arrivisto (talk) 15:53, 31 July 2012 (UTC)


 * No reference to Shark Island as an extermination camp can be found on Google News. Google Books includes a few instances of a single historian referring to it as possibly a precursor of the Nazi death camps, but nowhere is it referred to as such in absolute terms. Evidence of deaths at the camp do not show a policy of extermination at the camp. It is not enough to refer to a policy of extermination in general in German South-West Africa since this does not show that Shark Island was an extermination camp - as an example of why this is wrong, consider that only six camps out of the dozens of concentration camps operated by the Nazis (Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), Chełmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka) are agreed to be extermination camps. Gross-Rosen concentration camp was a camp at which tens of thousands of people were worked to death but is correctly labelled a concentration camp and not an extermination camp because it was not designed for the express purpose of extermination as Auschwitz II was.


 * No evidence has been presented either here or within the article as to why this camp should be referred to as an extermination camp, no evidence has been given showing that it was known as an extermination camp at the time or has been referred to as such by reputable sources since. At the most, what is shown is that it is a camp at which large numbers of people died. Unless more evidence is presented justifying the title, the title should be changed. FOARP (talk) 16:37, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Blue Book
Where can I find a copy of the Blue Book? Are there just a few remaining? Arrivisto (talk) 15:59, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Everyone thinks that WP:COMMONNAME supports their version, which probably means it doesn't support any. I'd suggest trying an WP:RFC to attract more attention from previously uninvolved editors in hopes of reaching a consensus. Nathan Johnson (talk) 15:33, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Shark Island Extermination Camp → Shark Island Concentration Camp – The validity of the current name has been convincingly called into question above, yet during the ~ year following expression of doubts over the title no grounds for referring to the camp as an extermination camp have been produced. Evidence of deaths at the camp, and of inhumane treatment of the prisoners, as well as established practice of labelling other camps involved in the Herero and Namaqua Genocide as concentration camps, supports the moving of this page to Shark Island Concentration Camp. No evidence of the camp commonly being referred to as an extermination camp, or of any logical reason to call it so, has been produced.

The results for searches on Google Books are as follows:

"Shark Island Concentration Camp" - 33 results including in reputable sources such as David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen's "The Kaiser's Holocaust".

"Shark Island Extermination Camp" - 6 results (only one of which actually appears to be talking about the Shark Island in question, and only then when describing it as a forerunner of the Nazi camps and not as an actual extermination camp)

"Shark Island Death Camp" - 0 results for books.

"Shark Island Camp" - 44 results (however, of these the majority appear to be referring to the modern-day camp site, with the remainder being historical texts that also refer to the camp as a concentration camp. Simply referring to the place as a camp may cause confusion)

Whilst none of these numbers is exactly large, it is very clear that the description of Shark Island as a concentration camp and not an extermination camp per se is the one with the most currency amongst reputable/reliable/verifiable sources talking about the historical camp in which large numbers of people were worked/starved to death or allowed to die of disease, and should be the one used by Wiki as per WP:COMMONNAME --Relisted Tyrol5   [Talk]  04:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC) FOARP (talk) 15:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose - the proposer of the move has removed huge chunks of text from the article on fairly dubious grounds, and the move to the new name seems to be the final part of this whitewashing. JoshuSasori (talk) 06:06, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I provided my reasons for each edit - primarily that the citations did not substantiate the claim that Shark Island was an extermination camp per se, or that the information was not about Shark Island but instead about the indisputable genocide in GSWA in general and already mentioned on the page related to that. For example, Von Trotha's proclamation is clearly proof of an intent to commit genocide in GSWA on his part, but equally clearly is irrelevent to whether Shark Island was an extermination camp and does not justify describing it as such. As you can see from the Google Books results, the most common, creditable name given to the camp is "Concentration Camp". The name "Extermination Camp" appears to be an invention of the previous editor. As you can also see above, substantial concerns have been raised about the neutrality both of the article and of the title, including proposals to change the name. I have merely put those proposals into action, and am not seeking to white-wash the deaths at Shark Island or the genocide in GSWA. FOARP (talk) 10:57, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * PS - Until November 2011 this article was called Shark Island Concentration Camp at which point it was moved without discussion as a technical edit by User:Maunus. If you review the edit history for Shark Island, Namibia you'll see that the reference to it as an extermination camp was added by someone who appears to believe that it is possible for a place to have a 121% death rate. Even if the number of dead was high - this does not support the title, as has been pointed out multiple times above, since it is not the commonly used name for the camp as per WP:COMMONNAME. FOARP (talk) 13:06, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Please explain what you mean by a "technical edit". Boneyard90 (talk) 12:13, 13 January 2013 (UTC)


 * See the section on technical moves in WP:RM. Technical moves are ones which do not require discussion, but should not be used for a controversial move like changing the name of a concentration camp into a extermination camp simply because the editor feels the latter to be 'more accurate', this is because someone could reasonable disagree with the move and questions had been asked about the description of the camp as an extermination camp. Instead the procedure for potentially controversial moves should have been used - this is the procedure being used here FOARP (talk) 18:12, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

At the time of the move, Maunus was trying to engage a particular editor, at my request. I'm fine with "concentration camp", although from what I've read it was a concentration camp from which hardly anyone came out alive. Itsmejudith (talk) 18:37, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Support due to common name. XavierGreen (talk) 15:37, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose: Common name seems to favor "extermination camp", according to quick Google search: "SI Extermintion Camp" minus Wikipedia use = 17,500; "SI concentration camp" minus Wikipedia = 2,630. Proposer has removed huge amounts of material (+20,000 bytes), and though some of it was justifiable, I'm not sure all of it was. Finally, the proposal is heavily dependent on what the proposer decides are "reliable sources". Boneyard90 (talk) 18:11, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It should be based on what are actually reliable sources per our guidelines. The recent histories that have exposed the atrocities use "concentration camp", while also suggesting that it was a forerunner of the extermination camps. Itsmejudith (talk) 22:57, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Seach |here. As per WP:SET and WP:RM You should also look at the results returned by the search and the search engine conducted. You're using Google (not Google Books or Google News), which means that the mentions are only an approximate count that may actually be out by a factor of 100, do not actually have to mention the phrase, and that all the bot-created copy/pastes from this page (i.e, the faux-wikis which are prominent in the first ten results) are included in the search. The first ten results are -


 * 1) A Daily Mail article alternately refering to concentration camps and 'death camps', but in which no-where is the phrase "Shark Island Extermination Camp" actually to be found (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314399/Hitlers-Holocaust-blueprint-Africa-concentration-camps-used-advance-racial-theories.html|Link),
 * 2) www.esthermlederberg.com - A personal website,
 * 3) A bot-created reference as a meta-tag in the Times Of India,
 * 4) www.finaldestination.herobo.com - a bot-created cut and paste of this article,
 * 5) a bot-created page on www.kinglink.com,
 * 6) www.berryindo.com - a bot created cut/paste of a previous version of this page,
 * 7) www.qwiki.com - no comment necessary,
 * 8) www.en.translatethings.com - a bot created page of possible translations,
 * 9) www.sensagent.com - A bot-created list of anagrams of "Shark Island Concentration Camp",
 * 10) www.esthermlederberg.com again.


 * Your number of 17,500 results for the above search is, as mentioned above, an estimate automatically created by Google. The real number of results, omitting identical results as Google does, as you'll see if you go through the results, is 62. Meanwhile the actual number of results for "Shark Island Concentration Camp" is, if you page through to the final page of results, 97. That is, even according to a test that favours automatically-created results, "Shark Island Concentration Camp" is the more common result. FOARP (talk) 12:00, 17 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Merge all 4 stubs into 1 article as de:Konzentrationslager in Deutsch-Südwestafrika; merging this, Okahandja Concentration Camp, Windhoek Concentration Camp, and Swakopmund Concentration Camp. Or write all 4x properly. But this article rename is the least of the articles' problems. In ictu oculi (talk) 07:05, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think there's enough material to support this article, but the other 3 should probably be in a general article. Itsmejudith (talk) 20:56, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Caspar Erichsen's "The angel of death has descended violently among them" is supposed to contain a lot of information on the camp that might be useful, alongside other sources, in creating an article on Shark Island Concentration Camp (which, just FYI, is how he refers to the camp throughout the book - the references to an "Extermination Camp" you can see in the pictures supposedly taken from the book were added by the uploader, see here: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/4646 ). It also adds some information that might be useful in creating an in-depth article for each camp. However, there is anyway a need for an over-arching page covering the camps, either on the Herero and Namaqua genocide page or on a new page. The problem with the old content of these pages was that it was either original research, or irrelevant to the subject (mostly copied/pasted from the page on the genocide but not actually related to the camp in question), or questionable and unsourced - remove this content, and all these pages become stubs. FOARP (talk) 15:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Support per WP:COMMONNAME. Google books: 34 and 3 Google scholar: 16 and 1. Clearly reliable sources prefer "concentration camp".--Staberinde (talk) 20:23, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Death Toll
Well, here goes the most controversial part. Currently the page says "Three thousand Herero and Namaqua rebels in the German–Herero conflict of 1904–1908 died there". To do this it relies on four sources:

1) "Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality", pages 85-86. This is a book on the struggle amongst the African (by descent) population of Cuba. A look at the Google books copy shows no reference to Shark Island. Clearly this source should be removed unless some reason can be found to keep it.

2) "Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers 1898–1902". This book is very obviously this is about US soldiers of African descent, doesn't cover the period in which Shark Island was in operation, and is very unlikely to be a credible source on this, More to the point, a search on Google Books for mention of Shark Island in it returns no results. Clearly this source should also be removed unless some reason can be found to keep it.

3) "Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg 1904 - 1908". This book is at least about the subject in question, and contains the following passage written by Casper Erichsen:

"Wann die ersten kriegsgefangen in lüderitzbucht ankamen, kann nichts mit gewissheit festgestellt werden. Missionsquellen weisen darauf hin, dass das lager spatestens seit Mai 1906 in gebrauch war. Bis zu dessen auflosung im April 1907 sind dort schätzungsweise bis zu 3000 gefangene umgekommen."

Which translates roughly as:

"When the first prisoners of war arrived in Lüderitz cannot can be stated with certainty. Mission sources indicate that the prison was in no later than May 1906 in use. Up to its dissolution in April 1907 it is estimated that up to 3,000 prisoners died there."

This does appear to support a maximum estimate of 3,000, but not 3,000 as a solid figure and did not say what the source for that figure was.

4) "In der Hand des Feindes: Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg", P.291. Like 3) this does address the subject at hand, but does not support a specific figure of 3,000. Instead, on Page 292 it appears to report the interim figure of 1,032 out of 1,795 prisoners having died.

The same estimate is seen also in "Germany's Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers" by Jeremy Sarkin on P. 125, which further goes on to cite an estimate of only 245 out of nearly 1,800 prisoners surviving. "German Colonialism and National Identity" cites the figure at "thousands" on page 236.

Horst Drechsler's "Let us die fighting" is quoted by Jeremy Sarkin as giving an official figure of 7,682 Herero and 2000 Nama dead for all GSWA camps. However, "Let us die fighting" is also quoted as saying that the 7,682 figure applies to Shark Island only in Peter Curson's "Border Conflicts in a German African Colony". Without being able to see the original it is impossible to decide whether this figure applies to Shark Island or GSWA in general.

An additional problem is that many/most of those imprisoned at the camp were not 'rebels' in any meaningful sense, since they were women and children.

At least from the above sources, it appears that a better way of describing the death-toll should be something like:

"As many as 1,550 or even 3,000 Herero and Namaqua died in Shark Island Concentration Camp between its opening in 1906 and its closing in April 1907, including women and children" FOARP (talk) 14:17, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * We should have a section Death toll estimates. Naturally there are only estimates, no precise figures. It should be written more or less the way you have done above. Drechsler, Erichsen and Sarkin are all reliable sources and we should give all of the figures that they do. Their figures aren't incompatible with each other. In the lead, I'm not sure about "as many as 1,500 or even...", because it weighs in too heavily in Wikipedia's voice. I can't quite think of the right wording at the moment. It may be easier when the section is written. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:56, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * OK - I chose the 1,032 estimate given for part of the period the camp was open as the minimum, and the 3,000 as the maximum. The 245 out of 1795 surviving figure was phrased as "as few as" so using it as the minimum esimate would be wrong. I figure if this page is going to be re-written the best model would be something like the page on Bergen-Belsen, and to that end I've added one of the standard concentration camp infoboxes. Right now I'm think that a background section about the situation in GSWA immediately before the founding of the camp would be a good opener, a section on operations with sub-sections for various periods of the camp's existence, and a final section on death toll would be the best way of dealing with it. FOARP (talk) 13:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * All sounds sensible. I'm going to take out most of the photos. Some might be suitable for other articles, but they can still be found on Commons. Itsmejudith (talk) 13:08, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * There, re-wrote it as discussed. I figure it still needs a good degree of polishing - I've relied very heavily on Casper Erichsen's essay because it is the most complete source I had to hand, but there may be more in "Let us die fighting" and other sources which might give a fuller picture. At the very least, I hope this has done something to change the piece to have a more NPOV voice and maybe we can get the tag removed FOARP (talk) 16:42, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Request for comment: what is the common name of the historical camp at Shark Island? (change to Requested move)

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved to Shark Island Concentration Camp. There is a clear consensus to move to this new name.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 23:26, 11 October 2013 (UTC) Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 23:26, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Shark Island Extermination Camp → Shark Island Concentration Camp – As discussed above and below, Shark Island Concentration Camp is the common name for the historical camp at Shark Island. Not only is it how it is referred to in all the history texts covering this terrible period, but it is also the title with the most hits both on Google Books (66 vs 29 - none of which are about Shark island), and on Google if mirrors and cuts/pastes of this page are excluded FOARP (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

There are two arguments:

1) The common name is Shark Island Extermination Camp because lots of people died there and some historians have described it as a predecessor/forerunner of the Nazi Extermination Camps

2) The common name is Shark Island Concentration Camp because that the way historians like Casper Erichsen, Jeremy Sarkin, Horst Drechsler, Peter Curson, etc. consistently describe it.FOARP (talk) 11:03, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Survey

 * Support Shark Island Concentration Camp - Every source that isn't a cut/paste of this page describes the place as Shark Island Concentration Camp, this includes the historians who compare it to the Nazi Extermination Camps. FOARP (talk) 11:03, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Shark Island Concentration Camp - per FOARP. United States Man (talk) 17:56, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Shark Island Concentration Camp; having done some searching of my own, I've reached the same conclusion as FOARP. -sche (talk) 16:58, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Concentration Camp'. If nothing else, the original move away from Concentration camp wasn't done via a Requested Move, so the "no consensus" close before should have restored the Concentration Camp name.  SnowFire (talk) 22:22, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Contentration Camp. The Herero suffered a genocide but at the time the purpose of camps were not to exterminate the population but to concentrate them to control them. An extermination camp refers to a camp where a process of extermination (killing, gassing) is set up. This was not the case here and that's why the reliable source do not refer to this camp as an extermination camp. Pluto2012 (talk) 10:15, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Support per FOARP and others. The camp may in fact have exterminated its inmates but it wasn't set up as a death factory. Richard Keatinge (talk) 11:17, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Support "Concentration Camp" as common name.--Staberinde (talk) 14:58, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, both because it is the common name, and because "extermination camp" is misleading. Paul B (talk) 09:53, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Comment
The real argument here appears to be the purpose of the camp - this should be addressed in the article, not in the title. Undoubtedly it is reasonable to say that the Germans knew about the death rates at the camp and did nothing for two years. It's also reasonable to say that there's evidence implying that German officials may have hoped to kill off Herero and Nama people by sending them there - but this doesn't make the camp an extermination camp any more than Gross-Rosen concentration camp or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp FOARP (talk) 14:15, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Comment: It appears there was a RM on this very topic just a little over a month ago. Bringing this up again so soon appears to be an attempt at WP:FORUMSHOPPING. Volunteer Marek 22:33, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Marek, I think there are different people involved now and it can do with wider attention. I personally think it was a very early example of a concentration camp, in which the authorities were utterly reckless as to the death rate, but it was not the same as the extermination camps of the 1940s where the only purpose of the camp was killing. 23:08, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I understand the argument (and the difference) and I'm not actually opposed to describing it as "concentration camp" (might have supported it if I saw the original RM), it's just that this RfC seems like a very quick follow up to the previous RM. Volunteer Marek 00:28, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Marek - The closer of the RM was the one who proposed opening an RfC - that is, the RfC was the outcome of the RM. What difference would waiting to open it have made? FOARP (talk) 12:52, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, what steps have been taken to get the input of more "previously uninvolved editors"? Volunteer Marek 16:47, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * We should post on WikiProjects for more attention, but it doesn't always do the trick. Itsmejudith (talk) 17:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I posted on the History WikiProjects page a while back, but judging by the posts there, the project is a bit dead at the moment. Obviously I'm cautious to do too much because it's likely to lead to accusations of WP:CANVAS. FOARP (talk) 18:37, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Whatever wiser heads than mine think of the question being put here and now, the article name should be Shark Island Concentration Camp per User:FOARP. Richard Keatinge (talk) 12:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi all - having assessed this page, the reviewer asked me to turn it into a move discussion to see the response. FOARP (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm in favour of the move. Itsmejudith (talk) 20:14, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Copyright issue
This article was created by a serial copyright infringer. See the investigation page. While it's been changed greatly since his contributions, some of his content remains. There seems to be copying at least from ; there may well be other sources, given his pattern. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this article needs to be stubbed or rewritten to remove his text, unless we are able to prove that he didn't copy it from somewhere else (not an easy task). --Moonriddengirl (talk) 01:16, 17 November 2013 (UTC)


 * No surprise to read this - the same guy was the main driver behind trying to add POV to this article by photoshopping captions into photos copied from elsewhere. FOARP (talk) 14:07, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Problems
Over the course of this semester, I have made it my focus to fix some of the problems I have addressed in the Shark Island Wikipedia page prior to my edits. I decided to focus on:

1. The overview: It was two sentences. It told you the name of the camp, who it was used by, and the year. It also stated how many people died. I wanted to extend this overview to include why people were brought here, what were methods of death, ect. Two sentences does not give an accurate overview of a topic. The overview I have edited now provides a more accurate summary of the content included in the Wikipedia article in an organizational order. I have added information about the geographic area of Shark Island, the development, who the prisoners were, a broad death toll estimate, and what Shark Island is today.

2. I wanted to fix the history/background section as it was also lacking important information. It discussed eliminating Herero people from the borders of German South-West Africa, but it did not say why. There needed to be more information regarding why the Herero people were chosen in the first place. It also needed to be lengthened as again, this section was too short. For this section, I decided to incorporate information regarding the Herero Revolts which occurred. In this section, I provided more detail about von Trotha's policies by providing a quote in which he described the Herero people. It provides a public statement for the intentions of Shark Island.

3. The remainder of my edits to this page consisted of expanding on information presented in the article or adding miniature details. For example, in the Establishment section, I added the last sentence which is an account from someone who witnessed a group being told they were being sent to Shark Island. I thought it served as a good transition into the Conditions section which I added detail to as well. I added more accounts from witnesses who described conditions on Shark Island such as the woman who was so weak, she was shot. I also added a short paragraph on photographs because there are only a handful of photographs from Shark Island that remain. These photographs often portrayed the German domination over the humiliated and powerless Africans. I searched for information on specific rape cases, but could not come across any. Finally, I added information to the closing and the death toll sections. In the closing section, I included the names of the German officials who were in power prior to von Estorff because he was the one who decided to close the camp. In the death toll section, I added more accurate numbers from one of the sources I received most of my information from. I also added the prewar and postwar populations for the Herero and Nama people.

4. My final edits were minor. For example, I added links to terms I decided were important to connect to other Wikipedia articles. I included: Battle of Waterberg, Kalahari Desert, Okahandja, German South-West Africa, schadenfreude, and Friedrich von Lindequist. I fixed minor grammatical mistakes. I also added three sources from my Zotero library collection. These sources include:

- ADHIKARI, MOHAMED. “‘Streams of Blood and Streams of Money’: New Perspectives on the Annihilation of the Herero and Nama Peoples of Namibia, 1904-1908.” Edited by JEREMY SILVESTER, JAN-BART GEWALD, CASPER ERICHSEN, JÜRGEN ZIMMERER, and JOACHIM ZELLER. Kronos, no. 34 (2008): 303–20.

- Bartrop, Paul R., and Steven Leonard Jacobs. Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. ABC-CLIO, 2014.

- Erichsen, Casper, and David Olusoga. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. Faber & Faber, 2010.

I believe I have made this article not only more reliable, but filled with more detailed information that is verifiable. The only element I did not get to focus on was the Nama people. Many of my sources I researched focused on the Herero. I would have liked to include sources which provide more detail on the Name uprising and life on Shark Island.

--TG802810 (talk) 02:15, 9 December 2015 (UTC)TG802810


 * 1) The introduction is short for a reason: it is only there to introduce the subject. There is no point writing detail there that is going to be discussed later on.


 * 2)This article is on the subject of Shark Island, not the Herrero genocide in general which is already covered on the page for that subject.


 * 3)Again, this is not an article on the subject of the genocide in general.


 * 4) Some of this links (particularly Schadenfreude) are unconnected to this subject.


 * Finally, a lot of the edits appear to be unreferenced editorialising/mind-reading - for example we don't know that "schadenfreude" was a motive for anythingFOARP (talk) 21:26, 25 April 2016 (UTC)