Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Chelsea Manning/1

Chelsea Manning

 * • [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/Chelsea_Manning/1&action=watch Watch article reassessment page] • Most recent review
 * Result: Too premature. Regardless of controversy, I am speedy closing it since the bot... Ah well, I must re-open this reassessment in two weeks or more. George Ho (talk) 16:24, 23 August 2013 (UTC).
 * Too premature, eh? I am dying to see when it is premature just right.  This circus has now been extended to a misbegotten, completely inscrutable closure of yanking the Good Article status?  On what grounds?  Ah, yes, it's too premature.  --Mareklug talk 21:40, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

One of the criteria for GA is stability. I believe that, given the recent events, this article is nowhere near stable. --  李博杰  &#124; —Talk contribs email 09:08, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * WP:GAR says that requesting an assessment while dispute or edit warring still goes on, as well as move requests, is inappropriate at this time. Time to tag it for "speedy delete" with either db-g7 or db-g6. --George Ho (talk) 09:12, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The thing is a mess, people contributing and discussing it are far too emotive (I'm trying hard not to add to the mess with my two pence worth!) about the subject. De-recognise it with immediate effect and re-assess after a few months. We can't let this article represent the best of our community in the state it's in! Cls14 (talk) 09:29, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Great, we'll blame... that person's decision and administrators' controversial decisions for ruining the article's stability. Because of that, my request for speedy delete is impossible. --George Ho (talk) 09:34, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry about that, I completely missed reading the part about starting the assessment after the dispute. Though, I'd like to ask, wouldn't waiting for it to end be counterproductive? As the article currently stands, the content is highly inconsistent (mostly a pronoun problem), and it's not going to cool off for the next few days. Should we really be calling it a GA right now? --  李博杰  &#124; —Talk contribs email 09:57, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Who cares if it is counterproductive? De-listing it should be the last thing in people's minds. Waiting for a couple weeks is best recommended, but we'll anticipate the edit warring to heat up and then cool down. Trust me, I did "reassessments" before, and I realized too late that fixing the article, not punishing it, is the reassessment's main purpose. If, in the couple weeks, the article is beyond repair... then the article will risk losing Good Article status. --George Ho (talk) 10:07, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

The problem with such a rapid move to edit the Bradley Manning page and change it to the Chelsea Manning page is that it does not provide Wikipedia with any standard policy or process for doing that in the future in other situations. It's clear that there was a rush to do this as a way of supporting transgendered people, but that tips Wikipedia over into an advocacy role, which is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. A more neutral position would be to use both a person's legal name and that person's preferred moniker. Let's imagine a situation not involving a political cause like transgender, and ask how Wikipedia would respond. Imagine if a person in the news for a crime asks that we all refer to him as Jesus. How would wikipedia handle that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus There's a distinction between the self-selected moniker and the official name. How does wikipedia handle official name changes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_B._Free Those are good patterns to follow. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.74.236.41 (talk • contribs)


 * Since deletion is impossible, I might go ahead removing this reassessment from the WP:GAR page, and then will re-add it in a couple weeks, like the middle of September. --George Ho (talk) 15:58, 23 August 2013 (UTC)