Wikipedia:Featured article review/Katyn massacre/archive2


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was delisted by Nikkimaria via FACBot (talk) 5:53, 30 May 2020 (UTC).

Katyn massacre

 * Notified: Piotr, Volunteer Marek, Poland WikiProject, Soviet Union WikiProject, Death WikiProject, Russia WikiProject, Military History Project, talk page notification 2020-04-15

Review section
I am nominating this featured article for review due to concerns with close paraphrasing. I have identified a few examples of this on the article talk page, and I suspect there might be more that can be found upon a closer review. I'd also like to point out that I took part in a FAR of this article a while back (almost ten years ago), the atmosphere of which I have no intention to recreate. Even though many of the issues pointed out then were indeed valid (ref. formats, image cluttering, lack of HQRS, MoS, etc.), the discussion degenerated to a very hostile and very heated argument. It also lasted waaaaay to long; let's keep it a bit more focused and constructive this time, please. Eisfbnore (会話) 07:30, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Since the main issue raised is close paraphrasing, in other words, something that can be solved by copyediting, I'll ping User:Nihil novi, who has a great record of copyediting many articles related to Polish history. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:12, 20 April 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm also very concerned by the sourcing. I'm not convinced that it meets "well researched" criterion. Among the issues that I'm seeing:
 * Dubious sources, such as news websites which aren't necessarily reliable for history. We should not be citing Rzeczpospolita or "britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk" and even warbirdforum.com (!) for historical facts.
 * Article would benefit from basing the memory section on scholarly sources, of which there are no lack eg
 * The article ought to be based on Cienciala and Sandford from the further reading section, and other scholarly secondary sources. Right now it's a patchwork. Furthermore, a lot of the sources cited are only tangentially about the Katyn massacre. The article would really benefit from sourcing directly from the experts who are specifically researching and writing about the subject.
 * Inconsistent and careless ref formatting
 * I'm also seeing what looks like original research: "The Katyn massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which used it to discredit the Soviet Union." is cited to Goebbels' diary
 * I think the article would need substantial work to be saved. In fact, I think it would take a lot of work just to pass GA. buidhe 19:33, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Other issues include failure to follow MOS:IMAGELOC and the "In art, entertainment, and media" which should be sourced, preferably to a secondary source discussing media representations of Katyn such as this one, and prosified. buidhe 21:29, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

John M Wolfson
 * Earwig's tool gives a 57.9% confidence here of plagiarism from the CIA here (there's a 97% chance of violation from timenote.info, but it's them that copied from us, as indicated at the bottom of the page). The CIA's non-classified work is in the public domain if I'm not mistaken, but the affected areas are plagiarized and should still be attributed.
 * There's also quite a bit of Further Reading. FAs generally don't have those sections because Further Reading sources should ideally be incoprorated into the article as a source, and looking through that section there are quite a few sources that should be consulted, including some more of Sanford and any of Allen Paul's work.
 * – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 22:10, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Piotrus
 * While I think the plagiarism-related copyediting is not a major issue (see also ), I agree this needs a reference cleanup. PS. I'll try to work a little on ref of this, but it may take a while. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:41, 21 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Move to FARC unfortunately, progress seems to have stalled. b</b><b style="color: White">uidh</b><b style="color: White">e</b> 21:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Not sure where the FARC is, but the article has enough issues to barely qualify for B-class, it is certainly not a FA or even GA class right now, and I don't have the time and will to fix it up in any reasonable timeframe. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:32, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

FARC section

 * Issues raised in the review section include paraphrasing and sourcing. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:27, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Nikkimaria (talk) 15:53, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delist per above. <b style="color: White">b</b><b style="color: White">uidh</b><b style="color: White">e</b> 12:28, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delist - although some copy-editing and MOS work has been carried out by Buidhe, we're not quite there yet. Eisfbnore  (会話) 13:46, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Delist. Unresolved cleanup tags. DrKay (talk) 09:49, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.