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) 4:31, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
[1].
Yeah, I don't think this is really fixable within the FAR context; it's a very marginal group that mostly gets "look at this guy saying X" coverage, which is difficult to spin into a comprehensive article without playing word games with "comprehensive". The whole talk history is an insightful read. I'll quote my bulletpoints from there for an idea of the scope:
Significant coverage concerns. The "Ideology" section makes up a substantial proportion of the article (~700 words to a ~250 word lead and ~1000 word remainder across three sections), making the largest part of the article by weight an uncritical and uncontextualized summary of the group's positions. "Reception" is structured as to lump virtually all incorporated negative coverage in a single paragraph, pulls
incrediblycherrypicked positive quotes from articles that in some cases (like the former) barely discuss the subject, and "rebuts" criticisms with quotes from the movement's founder.
Significant tone concerns. This mostly ties in and overlaps with the previous section -- the cherrypicking is particularly egregious -- but several examples stand out as especially tone-related, like the footnotes (A and B in particular) and the huge quotebox girding "Ideology".
Scope problems. The only (extremely outdated) estimates in the article for "how many people are actually associated with VHEMT" are a couple hundred people. The movement is (and is backed up by both included sources and more up-to-date ones) essentially a nom de guerre for Knight. This is shoved into the "Organization and promotion" section and quickly moved away from in favour of a self-promotional statement of "millions of people" -- Knight's guesstimate for "how many people are childfree"? The article tries very hard to present a mailing list as a mass movement, but it's disrupted by the actual numbers.
Comment. I agree that this is a very tricky topic to write a FA on, and agree that cherrypicking and accuracy are major concerns. That said... just as a general principle for when covering fringe, disliked groups... there's something to be said for having a section that presents their beliefs standing on their own and as they see things. Doesn't apply to just VHEM, but also, like, some new form of astrology or superseded scientific theories or the like. Basically I'm saying that having something like an "Ideology" section isn't strictly a bad idea, even if secondary sources are dismissive of it. To use the example of superseded scientific theories - it's okay to have a section that's "Okay, here's how they thought it worked", and then another section with "And here's why almost nobody buys it anymore." (But all the other problems are pretty big and certainly worth a FAR.)
SnowFire (
talk)
18:26, 23 August 2023 (UTC)reply