Wikipedia:Peer review/List of journalists killed in Russia/archive1

List of journalists killed in Russia
This peer review discussion has been closed.

I've listed this article for peer review because the descriptions of its status no longer fit the contents. Starting as a list, the text is now a fully-referenced article that incorporates the latest reports (June and September 2009) by established and respected bodies on the subject.

No previous entries, comments etc have been deleted but all were checked and integrated into the new article

Thanks, Voronov (talk) 00:28, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

SGGH
 * "The dangers to journalists in Russia have been well known since the early 1990s" - is that really true? I'm slightly concerned that such a statement is cited by research prompted only by Politkovskaya's murder in 2006 and thus may suffer somewhat from WP:RECENTISM. I don't know if such a statement would be accepted by many readers.
 * "While international monitors spoke of several dozen deaths, some sources within Russia talked of over two hundred fatalities" since when? Who are these international monitors?
 * "The evidence has since been examined and documented in two reports, published in Russian and English, by international organisations." which evidence is this and who are these organisations?
 * "In its September 2009 report the Committee to Protect Journalists repeated its conclusion that Russia was one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists and added that it remains among the worst at solving their murders." another controversial statement that needs qualifying and putting into context.
 * "They died or were killed, the CPJ is convinced, because of the work they were doing and in only one case, it notes, has there been a partially successful prosecution." another controversial statement - this needs a citation.
 * "А wide-ranging investigation" by what quantification are we guaging it as "wide-ranging"?
 * Much of the lead appears to be weighted towards the recent death in 2006 and the investigations into that, but then applies such trends to long periods before that date - as if the article itself is a response to the sudden soaring interest as opposed to a neutral account. There also appears to be a somewhat unexplained and uncited slant towards the idea that these people have been killed because of what they were investigating, which may be a slight case of well-intended The Truth without further citation.
 * There is a slant towards what the International Federation of Journalists has found. Remember that this party has an agenda of its own when it comes to speaking about their own. It would be ideal to nuance the article with reference to other sources and counter-points. How, for example, do we distinguish between a murder victim who is a journalist and a journalist killed because they were a journalist?
 * "and the persistent failure to prosecute or convict those responsible for murders linked to the work of journalists." also needs a citation.
 * The vast majority of this article is not a list of journalists killed in Russia. The list is the 7th item in the article. Perhaps it would be better to have the first 6 in a seperate article about journalism deaths in Russia, or rename this article to that. I see that this has already been attempted on the talk page but there was no consensus. I suggest a retry.
 * "The first set of yearly figures in the table above records the incomplete Wiki totals (see end sections of this article)" what does this mean? Are you referencing another Wiki article or another part of this one? It is inadvisable to cite a wiki article with another one, but it's not clear what is being done here.
 * The Yeltsin years, some are bullet pointed, some are numbered, there is no reason to capitalise surnames. Perhaps it would be better to have this in a table?
 * The Chechnya section is much better, and can be used as a reference for fixing the other parts of the list.
 * External links should be after the footnote section.

Overall, the article is, I feel, overly slanted to the opinions and research of the IFJ, which have an agenda to push journalism deaths in order to criticise Media freedom in Russia and this article reflects that sentiment somewhat. It also appears to hang a little too much on recent events in the lead. This isn't a comment on your writing, it is the result of the sources you have available. With greater research, I expect the topic can be tailored to a more NPOV standpoint. At the moment, however, I suspect it may suffer from too much POV/Undue weight to progress up the assessment ladder. My two cents

Regards, SGGH ping! 19:15, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

DonaldDuck DonaldDuck (talk) 06:00, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Some journalists, like Roddy Scott, are listed twice. First in general section by year, second in separate section about Chechnya. There are good reasons to describe deaths in Chechnya in separate section, because it was de facto independent/area of military conflict, but then deaths in Chechnya (and probably, Ingushetia and Dagestan) should be removed from general list.

As the main contributor to the revision of this article, and a newcomer to Wikipedia, I shall endeavour to study some of the principles invoked by SGGH before, perhaps, offering a more detailed response.

It does seem to me that the comments were made as he/she was reading, and not as a result of considering the article as a whole. There was a considerable contrast between the state of the article before it was updated, expanded and revised, and the way it reads now, but that's perhaps irrelevant (I also have in mind a comparison with the Wikipedia article on Anna Politkovskaya which already had a high, even exemplary, Wiki rating before a considerable number of innacuracies were removed and, for instance, the latest trial and appeal results were added - that article remains bitty and uneven by most normal standards, so it does seem that different standards are being applied here).

All I can say in reply to a number of points by SSGH is that the situation in Russia HAS long been known. It has been documented since the early 1990s, for example, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the most widely-cited and trusted source (outside Russia) on this subject. If SSGH and other readers venture beyond the "eye-catching" first paragraph and look at the sources they will see that the CPJ has claimed up to 50 deaths. The big question mark arose after Anna Politkovskaya's murder when it became clear that since 1993 Russian monitors had recorded over two hundred deaths. It was to establish the reasons for this divergence that the IFJ worked with the Russian monitors and the Russian Union of Journalists for the last few years, producing a report and creating a unique database that attempts to resolve the crucial but far from always clear question as to whether these deaths were linked to the journalists publications and investigations or not.

In April 2009 the Prosecutor General's Office gave a response to the IFJ partners on the progress of investigations into over 60 of these killings and assaults. In autumn 2009 the v important Investigations Committee met with the CPJ to discuss particular cases and concerns. Official Russian bodies, in other words, seem to take the two reports (IFJ with RUJ, and CPJ) seriously and do not dismiss them as "agenda-driven" and biased.

The bland request for (yet) "more research" (!!) suggests that the reader has not looked at the extensive annotations to the article - surely part of any serious peer review? - and has therefore missed the significance of the intensive and ongoing work of the past 2-3 years, by media monitors inside and outside Russia. On the other hand, we could just wait until it's been publicised ("verified", "approved") in the major Western media, I suppose. That will happen over the next year or so and then we can "safely" quote those sources. Is that really better?

I'm still bemused by the accusation of bias. These are recorded deaths. In all but 30 cases no one disputes that it was a violent death, and of the 160 homicides in this list RECORDED BY RUSSIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT (sorry for the caps, but that seems to need emphasis) some forty cases have now come to court. The biggest problems with this subject has been the dispute about the figures (now clarified in the IFJ-sponsored database); about the certain, probable or possible motives for the killings (assessment provided by IFJ database); and the constant, uncritical, second-hand quoting of newspaper and other sources that, in the end, all come back to the evaluation made by reputable Russian media monitors who have been in operation since the early 1990s, either as organisations or as individuals.

The slant towards the IFJ is, in fact, a slant towards the fullest sources of information on the subject, i.e. the Russian media monitors who follow the Russian media, do their own investigations and have experts in most parts of the world's largest country. The IFJ report merely acknowledged, publicised and summarised their work, in both Russian and English, for the first time. All international media monitors have relied on their Russian colleagues - they have until recently been less ready to admit their crucial role in gathering and assessing information, thereby obscuring the sources of information and evaluation.

The work of the CPJ is also acknowledged in the article (though they too "have an agenda"), so is the work of Reporters Sans Frontieres and the relative newcomer the International News Safety Institute. Are these all biased sources? Again I'm puzzled by SSGH's approach on this. What would qualify as trustworthy alternative sources? There is a section in the article, for instance, on Other Voices and Legal Issues that lets alternative viewpoints be stated, enabling readers to make up their own minds and not force conclusions on them. This article already has more detailed annotation, particularly to Russian articles in good English translation, than many (most?) I have seen on Wikipedia. Or do people want to be told what to think, without examining readily available, carefully hyper-linked sources for themselves?

There aren't many useful quotations from former President (currently Prime Minister) Putin on the issue, if that's one of the things at the back of SSGH's mind. President Medvedev has made a couple of remarks since his inauguration and these can certainly be added in and referenced somewhere. For the record, in June 2008 a month after his inauguration he told a group of German businesspeople and politicians that attacks on journalists in Russia "should be thoroughly investigated and brought to court NO MATTER WHEN THEY OCCURRED [my emphasis]" (i.e. waiving the Statute of Limitation for the various offences concerned).

Voronov (talk) 06:59, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

In some cases the article leaves the reader in the dark - was the murder directly linked to the journalists' activities, or was it - have to say this - another day on the streets? Some cases are clearly not related to the victims' business. Consider the most recent case when a violent drunk locked in a cell was raped to death by a cop. It matches the title, but the connection to journalism is quite weak. On a side note, since the article inevitably crosses into crime in general, I'd recommend augmenting the timeline with overall crime statistics and discuss the relevance and reliability of any stats.

Ultimately you must decide if it's an article or a list. Right now the content is split here and there without apparent logic (Vladimir Sukhomlinov is mentioned in the text but not in the list, others vice versa). NVO (talk) 06:14, 29 January 2010 (UTC)