Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Treblinka extermination camp/archive1

Archived comments from Squeamish Ossifrage

 * Oppose. It's a topic of extraordinary historical significance, but I just don't think it's ready for FA. There are quite a few referencing problems. Date formats are inconsistent. Reference templates for some sources in the Notes seem off, especially the way that you deal with sources that do not have an identified author; crediting the publishing organization is not the typical practice here, and, that aside, using organizations' initialisms as the author probably isn't best practices. I'm also not sure why some of the Notes refer to your sources' sources. Author names are not consistently formatted: sometimes you do first last and sometimes last, first. There are a number of book sources, in both Notes (see #27 for example) and the References section missing ISBN numbers; book sources without ISBN numbers should have an identifier of some sort, and I recommend OCLC for this purpose. This seems a good time to mention that I have no idea what criteria are used to place references into the "References" section with short-format Notes instead of full-format references in Notes. Oh, and the References section is, to be blunt, an unordered shambles.  Note 79's date(s) make no sense, and the format used, with copyright symbol, isn't standard practice. Toward the end of the Notes are several that are basically just bare links with a title (#125/131/135), and a couple others with a totally dissimilar format (#133/134). The problems with the Notes extend to the References as well; many of these are missing information or display it improperly.  There are 10 external links, with some duplication -- even on an article topic as important as this one, I'm hard-pressed to justify this many external links, and very little context is provided for why they are necessary or useful. Because of the state of the references, I spent comparatively little time on the prose, but I still see problems there as well.  I'm not convinced the lead is an adequate summary of the contents.  The organizational structure is sometimes awkward (it seems out of place for the "Death count" to be "After the war"; even though that's when the figures were discussed, it's not when the death count happened). In the "Killing process" section, one passage discusses people arriving from outside Poland with train tickets and travel supplies, but it's not made clear how this came about.  Likely other objections, but at this point, I've really no choice but to oppose promotion. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:17, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Your comments,, are valuable and very well informed, which is exactly what I was hoping for as a result of this, however, they would be of little use if we stopped the article development right here assuming that nothing could be done to perfect it. Poeticbent talk 16:46, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Naturally. My goal in providing criticism -- sometimes strident criticism -- at FAC is ultimately to improve the content of the project. The FA standards are very strict, much more so than even GA, and I'm aware that doesn't make FAC a particularly welcoming place when it catches you by surprise. That said, I'm not sure I've ever seen an article nominated here that did not undergo some measure of revision before promotion. And if an article's not ready on its first nomination, that doesn't mean it can't be made ready for another go later. I oppose promotion here because I don't think it currently meets the standards, but that's intended as motivation to continue to push to meet those standards, not to stop the work and walk away. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I'm having a difficult time following your train of thought. Ultimately, opposing this nomination to go forward does mean "to stop the work" if rejected, rather than to "continue to push"... Poeticbent talk 17:50, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think Squeamish Ossifrage is suggesting that you withdraw the nomination. That in itself is an admission that Treblinka extermination camp is a pretty good article already. As it states at the top of the WP:FAC page "It is assumed that all nominations have good qualities; this is why the main thrust of the process is to generate and resolve critical comments in relation to the criteria, and why such resolution is given considerably more weight than declarations of support." The point of the process is to make the article even better. And if at the end of a month or two the consensus is that the article isn't ready for FA, you can renominate after a two-week waiting period and try again. There's no rule saying that once an article has failed FAC it can never be nominated again. Poeticbent, if you put in a lot of work improving the article in response to reviewers' comments, it has a pretty good chance of passing the first time around. Cheer up! AmericanLemming (talk) 19:03, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not asking for this article to be given the FA status in this nomination. I'm asking for it to be accepted for the FA review (WP:FAR) in order to "generate and resolve critical comments." Quote from source: "In this step, possible improvements are discussed without declarations of "keep" or "delist". The aim is to improve articles rather than to demote them... The ideal review would address the issues raised and close with no change in status." Poeticbent talk 19:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, I understand your confusion. FA Review is for current Featured Articles that editors believe might need to be delisted, not for articles aspiring to get their star to begin with.  FAC is the last step between an article and the gold star.  Support and opposition here relates directly to promotion; I also responded on your Talk, but before noticing this. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 19:32, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clarifying that. I admit, this is my second FA nom in many years. Things have changed since the old days. Still, the FAC pages offer other solutions as well, not just Oppose or Support (quote): "Some reviewers enter Fixes needed and return in a few days to see if the issues were addressed, and may then switch to Oppose or Support. — It is not easy to sense your intentions, when at the same time, you Oppose and yet invest so much time and effort to actually naming the issues. Thanks for the message in Talk. Poeticbent talk 20:07, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I always try to be verbose with my concerns because every identified problem that gets corrected makes an article, and the project better. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:21, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * And yet, those who worked on your own "Calostoma" nom (i.e. Casliber) were courteous enough to start with the Comments, before posting their final vote. I guess, it's a matter of temperament... — Poeticbent talk  20:42, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Casliber had a few prose and MOS comments on Squeamish's article ... also, he may have had previous experience with Squeamish and anticipated that everything would get taken care of quickly. Squeamish is pointing to a bunch of FAC-criteria problems here. If it does turn out that there's a lot to work on, then we usually can't get everything covered in one cycle at FAC ... after changes get made, the FAC coordinators have no way of knowing if the initial comments and supports are still valid. People can generally get articles through FAC eventually, if they're patient and open to feedback, particularly for well-known subjects like this one. - Dank (push to talk) 21:16, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Calostoma cinnabarinum had something of a head-start also, because its GA review, by mutual agreement between its reviewer and myself, was held very closely to the FA standard as preparation for this process (and because there were a bunch of FA fungi articles for me to crib formatting from!) I always at least try to look back at FACs I've reviewed on a regular basis, to update my responses as their nominators work with the article (I don't think there's any way Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War is passing its FAC, but I've been very active there all the same). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 21:22, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
 * May I ask you to please structure your comments in such way, that I can start addressing them progressively one by one, instead of trying to fish them out from between commas? Also, the ref numbers will change almost immediately once I start working on them, so please add an author for easy recognition. Much appreciated. Also, if the above are your suggestions for further improvements, please name them as Comments. Thanks, Poeticbent</b> <span style="font-size:7.0pt;color:#FFFFFF;font-weight:bold;background:#FF88AF;border:1px solid #DF2929;padding:0.0em 0.2em;">talk 22:01, 30 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Date formats are inconsistent.
 * Check especially retrieval dates. Citation 3 (Young), 9 (Donat), 10 (Ząbecki), 23 (Vashem), 34 (Sypniewska), probably more -- stopped auditing at this point. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Still have a bunch of m,d/y dates: citation 72 (Browning), citation 80 (Rajzman), citation 88 (Roper), citation 113 (Harrison), citation 118 (Höfle Telegram), and the Rückerl entry in the References (although that's still the least of the problems with formatting in the References section). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Still have a bunch of m,d/y dates: citation 72 (Browning), citation 80 (Rajzman), citation 88 (Roper), citation 113 (Harrison), citation 118 (Höfle Telegram), and the Rückerl entry in the References (although that's still the least of the problems with formatting in the References section). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Still have a bunch of m,d/y dates: citation 72 (Browning), citation 80 (Rajzman), citation 88 (Roper), citation 113 (Harrison), citation 118 (Höfle Telegram), and the Rückerl entry in the References (although that's still the least of the problems with formatting in the References section). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Author names are not consistently formatted: sometimes you do first last and sometimes last, first.
 * Still missed some. I can't figure out which format you intend to be standard in this article. In the first 20 citation, you have first last in 3, 11, and 16, but last, first in 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17... Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Nope. This is another reason why standardizing your formatting with templates may be helpful. With a quick glance, I saw citation 28 (O'Neil and O'Neil), 33 (Sypniewska), 39 (Piecyk and Wierzchowska), 60 (Lanzmann). Might be more, I didn't spot-check everything.
 * Nope. This is another reason why standardizing your formatting with templates may be helpful. With a quick glance, I saw citation 28 (O'Neil and O'Neil), 33 (Sypniewska), 39 (Piecyk and Wierzchowska), 60 (Lanzmann). Might be more, I didn't spot-check everything.
 * Nope. This is another reason why standardizing your formatting with templates may be helpful. With a quick glance, I saw citation 28 (O'Neil and O'Neil), 33 (Sypniewska), 39 (Piecyk and Wierzchowska), 60 (Lanzmann). Might be more, I didn't spot-check everything.


 * Note 79's date(s) make no sense, and the format used, with copyright symbol, isn't standard practice.


 * Toward the end of the Notes are several that are basically just bare links with a title (#125/131/135).


 * ...and a couple others with a totally dissimilar format (#133/134).


 * Citation 6 and 21 are both to pages at www.treblinka.bho.pl (which I believe is the official website of the Siedlce Regional Museum?), but are formatted and cited completely differently. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * There are 10 external links, with some duplication -- even on an article topic as important as this one, I'm hard-pressed to justify this many external links, and very little context is provided for why they are necessary or useful.
 * With external links, less is more. I generally offer ELs to official websites and the like, but, in general, external links shouldn't be used as "potential references that didn't get cited for anything". If reliable sources say things that add to the topic's understanding, the article should reflect that; if they don't, then there's not much reason to offer the readers links. Some of the current ones may be better than others. I haven't really had (and probably won't have) the time to audit them myself. You may wish to peek at other historical FAs to see what they've done in terms of an EL section, if any. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * With external links, less is more. I generally offer ELs to official websites and the like, but, in general, external links shouldn't be used as "potential references that didn't get cited for anything". If reliable sources say things that add to the topic's understanding, the article should reflect that; if they don't, then there's not much reason to offer the readers links. Some of the current ones may be better than others. I haven't really had (and probably won't have) the time to audit them myself. You may wish to peek at other historical FAs to see what they've done in terms of an EL section, if any. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)


 * In the "Killing process" section, one passage discusses people arriving from outside Poland with train tickets and travel supplies, but it's not made clear how this came about.
 * I've made explicit the fact that people arriving from outside Poland came in passenger cars, but as far as why they came in passenger cars goes, you'll have to ask PoeticBent, Squeamish Ossifrage. AmericanLemming (talk) 21:02, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Not sure what to suggest here, in part because I don't know what the sources say, but that section is pretty much the only place the transport of prisoners to the camp from southern Europe. This feels like a topic on which there is more to say (why here and not Belzec or Sobibor, for example). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Not sure what to suggest here, in part because I don't know what the sources say, but that section is pretty much the only place the transport of prisoners to the camp from southern Europe. This feels like a topic on which there is more to say (why here and not Belzec or Sobibor, for example). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and moved my original version of these comments and the threaded response to Talk. All of the article issues I originally raised are present below, in a somewhat refactored form for easier expansion and response. Poeticbent, as this technically also refactors your comments, if you object to the change in format, you're free to revert, but I hope this makes things easier for you. The original issues are not directly timestamped; anything I add later will be.

Oppose at current: 1a, 2a, 2b, 2c at least. I think there's a lot of work to be done here, but this is a major, historically important topic of the sort we all should want to see at FAC, so hopefully the issues can be hammered out. My first batch of specific problems focuses primarily on reference-formatting concerns. A more thorough prose review will have to come as I get time.
 * Reference templates for some sources in the Notes seem off, especially the way that you deal with sources that do not have an identified author; crediting the publishing organization is not the typical practice here.
 * Sources that don't have an identified author should just omit the author field from the citation template. There's no need to do "Staff writer" stuff like in citation 6 (although more on that source later, I think), nor to cite the website/publisher itself as an author, like in citation 12 (Diapositive.pl). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * There are still a lot of these that are not done correctly. Looking at the markup, much of this problem is that you the article sometimes uses citation templates like Template:cite book and sometimes just tries to format the citation information manually. Now, reference templates aren't required, but consistency is (it's criterion 2c), and I think sorting everything into citation templates would at least ensure we didn't spend a lot of time chasing down individual spacing and order-of-terms errors in the references. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * There are still a lot of these that are not done correctly. Looking at the markup, much of this problem is that you the article sometimes uses citation templates like Template:cite book and sometimes just tries to format the citation information manually. Now, reference templates aren't required, but consistency is (it's criterion 2c), and I think sorting everything into citation templates would at least ensure we didn't spend a lot of time chasing down individual spacing and order-of-terms errors in the references. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * There are still a lot of these that are not done correctly. Looking at the markup, much of this problem is that you the article sometimes uses citation templates like Template:cite book and sometimes just tries to format the citation information manually. Now, reference templates aren't required, but consistency is (it's criterion 2c), and I think sorting everything into citation templates would at least ensure we didn't spend a lot of time chasing down individual spacing and order-of-terms errors in the references. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Using organizations' initialisms as the author probably isn't best practices.
 * Still in citation 21 (MWiMT) at least.
 * See citation 25 (JVL) and 34 (ARC). While it happens occasionally, 95% of the time, organizations are not authors, either. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * See citation 25 (JVL) and 34 (ARC). While it happens occasionally, 95% of the time, organizations are not authors, either. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * See citation 25 (JVL) and 34 (ARC). While it happens occasionally, 95% of the time, organizations are not authors, either. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm also not sure why some of the Notes refer to your sources' sources.
 * Mostly pointing at citation 7 (Młynarczyk) here. May be part of a broader need to trim in-citation comments. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Mostly pointing at citation 7 (Młynarczyk) here. May be part of a broader need to trim in-citation comments. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * There are a number of book sources, in both Notes (see #27 for example) and the References section missing ISBN numbers; book sources without ISBN numbers should have an identifier of some sort, and I recommend OCLC for this purpose.
 * (Steiner 1967)
 * In the case of Steiner's Treblinka, it was originally published prior to the introduction of the ISBN system, but just about everything has an OCLC number. The 1967 US-edition harcover is OCLC 394953. However, in the References section, you currently have the Steiner reference as ISBN 0-452-01124-8, which is the ISBN for the 1994 Plume reprint edition of the work. I can't tell you what the right information is here, because I do not know which reference you are working from; regardless, you must cite what you use. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 18:01, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * ISBNs are more generally useful than OCLCs, so where books have an ISBN, use that (standard practice is only one identification number at a time). But when there's no ISBN: WorldCat Search is your friend! Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This is one of many problems still outstanding regarding the References section. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This is one of many problems still outstanding regarding the References section. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This is one of many problems still outstanding regarding the References section. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I have no idea what criteria are used to place references into the "References" section with short-format Notes instead of full-format references in Notes.
 * 


 * The References section is, to be blunt, an unordered shambles.
 * This is still a mess. Many of these aren't formatted correctly, there's no evident order to the References, and there is not always a  clear relationship between the sources cited in the actual Citation footnotes vs. the References section (as there would be with the Harvard format, which is sometimes in use here). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This is still a mess. Many of these aren't formatted correctly, there's no evident order to the References, and there is not always a  clear relationship between the sources cited in the actual Citation footnotes vs. the References section (as there would be with the Harvard format, which is sometimes in use here). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Less a formatting concern and more a referencing (criterion 1c) concern, you've got an awful lot of historical information cited to museum/memorial web sources. I'm not 100% sold on the reliability of some of these, but more importantly, WP:HISTRS suggests we shouldn't be using sources of this nature for key historical facts. I'm looking at the use of citation 6 (one of the Siedlce Regional Museum references), but this applies more broadly. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * That specific source aside, I really am still concerned about whether this article represents a comprehensive survey of sources, especially sources that may not be immediately available online. There's an awful lot of content cited to probably-reliable but fairly thin websites that probably could instead be supported by more scholarly references. WP:HISTRS is only an essay, but it's probably worth considering from as sourcing standpoint. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * That specific source aside, I really am still concerned about whether this article represents a comprehensive survey of sources, especially sources that may not be immediately available online. There's an awful lot of content cited to probably-reliable but fairly thin websites that probably could instead be supported by more scholarly references. WP:HISTRS is only an essay, but it's probably worth considering from as sourcing standpoint. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Other than the reference formatting, a quick reading revealed some prose issues.
 * I'm not convinced the lead is an adequate summary of the contents.
 * You've got at least one or two sentences verbatim repeated from the lead to the body. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The organizational structure is sometimes awkward (it seems out of place for the "Death count" to be "After the war"; even though that's when the figures were discussed, it's not when the death count happened).

I will try to provide some more details and give a closer look to identify other areas of concern. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 13:50, 31 October 2013 (UTC)