Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bogdanov Affair

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[edit] Bogdanov Affair

Seems like a lot of editors have spent a great deal of time working on the Bogdanov Affair, and sorting fact from fiction. -- Kendrick7^talk 09:41, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

• Object, loaded with external jumps and blogs as references. Sandy (Talk) 10:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
• Object. Clearly not settled down yet. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:59, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strongly object. Not even close. Not only should that monster cutline on the first image not be in a featured article, it shouldn't be in any article. I didn't even go on from that. But it looks like this won't be anywhere stable and NPOV for a very long time. Daniel Case 18:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
• Object. Not stable. Titoxd^(?!?) 08:35, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
  • There may be issues with this article, but as the page history shows, stability is not one of them. Raul654 21:14, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
    • Fair enough, but would the ArbCom consider removing such a tag? Would that entire mess start once again as soon as the tag is removed? It is too contradictory to have a "we can't control this thing" disclaimer next to a featured star. Content-wise, the article is disorganized, lacks the gory details of all the events that happened here and in frwp (WP:ASR doesn't apply here, as sadly, we're primary sources in the controversy), and which have to be described for the article to be comprehensive. Titoxd^(?!?) 21:36, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
      • I can't speak to the content (I haven't really read the article thoroughly), but I agree with you 100% that it's contradictory to have the disclaimer and the FA star, and if the time comes when it looks like it could be promoted, I'll bring it up to the other arbitrators and see what they think. Raul654 21:41, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. I have probably put more constructive effort into this article than anybody else, and it would please me greatly if my work and that of the others who cared to get the story right was rewarded by an FA star. I do not think the article is very disorganized (for a treatment of such a murky subject, I think it's pretty darn good). The long caption on the second image, largely the work of cosmologist Wikipedian Alain Riazuelo, seems to me a good idea. It summarizes the relevant science while leaving center stage for the "human drama", much like a sidebar in a magazine article. Others may, of course, differ with my estimation.

Few people have tried to write about this shady affair in anything like a scholarly way. I was, therefore, forced to do a whole bunch of "he said/she said" quoting and footnoting. WP:NOR forbids anything beyond that, and I think the content as it stands satisfies WP:NPOV and WP:V, since the quotations from blogs and other less-than-ideal sources are all of the type, "this is what so-and-so has said about the issue". I believe the content to be in line with the Source rules of WP:V and the Reliable sources guideline. I tried to pay attention to the self-published sources problem, and all in all, the result seems OK. Again, others are welcome to disagree.

I think it is a tad Wikipedia-centric to claim that the ArbCom ruling is the primary source for this "controversy", particularly when in its heyday, it received coverage in Die Zeit and The New York Times. Perhaps a couple more sentences on the ArbCom's decision might be warranted.

Now for the bad news.

By a strict reading of the stability criterion, this article will never qualify for Featured status. A small number of people with a vested interest in the problem have been very enthusiastic about damaging this article's integrity. Fortunately, they have been very predictable. My personal impression, based on watching their continuity of edit styles, is that probably only one or two people are responsible, and certainly not more than a handful. (You can sample these vandal acts by checking the contributions of the sockpuppets tabulated here. The short story is that they're a whole bunch of names all making the same few edits without even touching another article first.) Whether or not this constitutes a real instability is not my decision, and I think the ArbCom should look at the situation. I do know that at my request, Freakofnurture unprotected the article, and within two days the sockpuppet theater was back. We then terminated the experiment and restored the semi-protection.

My personal recommendation is to revisit this article a year from now and see if the situation has improved. (I am also curious how long we have before sockpuppets manifest to derail this page, too.)

I seem to be on indefinite wiki-sabbatical these days. I stumbled across this FAC discussion by accident; though I don't have much time to help out with anything, I'll try to check once a day or so.

Best wishes, Anville 19:29, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

That's exactly the problem I was concerned about. As soon as the article gets any significant visibility, the circus might start again.

However, here's some comments to improve the article:

• Try to shorten the lede significantly, and try to make it specific to the affair itself. While a bit of background is most of the time useful, too much makes the intro bloated. Move some details to the rest of the article.
• Convert a few "bare links" to footnotes. For example, convert the Bogdanov brothers' thesis to footnotes.
• Write an article about Niedermaier (even if it is a sub-stub), so you can get rid of the bare link as well.
• Format block quotes with <blockquote> or some other type of tag or markup; but do it consistently.
• Source all quotes. I cannot stress that one enough.
• Too much talking about Loop quantum gravity - move it to its own article, summarize it here. A reader doesn't need to know about the conferences surrounding LQG, but that article may be a good place to put that.
• Proper Internet references. Since you are talking about a debate that happened significantly on Usenet (and to a lesser degree here - I did not want to insinuate that the debate was primarily here; if it sounded like that, it was not my intent), then you need to reference those posts and those diffs in the article. Be sure to do it carefully, though: follow something similar to what is used on English Wikipedia, formatting the citations with {{cite web}} and using permanent links. Bypass the direct wikilink to the ArbCom case (due to WP:ASR), but reference it via URL, like any other reference.
• Feel free to use the same reference several times. Cite.php is very useful for this.
• Add details about what happened here and at French Wikipédia.
• Try making some of the external links into references.

Otherwise, the article is a good read (I personally don't like the extremely long caption, but that's my opinion), and with some cleaning up and tender care, can get closer to FA. Titoxd^(?!?) 02:27, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

These are all very good comments. As usual, FAC proves itself as a good crucible for articles on the make. I agree entirely on the superiority of Cite.php footnotes over bare hyperlinks, if for no other reason than because they have room for information like the date of last access. I also agree on bypassing the wikilink to the ArbCom decision (which seems to have appeared after I left — I first wrote that section using only external sources). I think the original point of the reference to loop quantum gravity conferences was to indicate that Motl's low opinion of LQG is not universally shared; however, looking at it with fresher eyes, I think it is fairly expendable.

All in all, very useful remarks. I shall try to make the time to address them (or bribe somebody else to do so). Thank you. Anville 16:21, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Update OK, while procrastinating on some important tasks, I was able to put a little work in here. The bare hyperlinks have been converted to footnotes using Cite.php and the citation templates. I redid the reference to the ArbCom ruling and cleaned up a few minor matters throughout. I have not shortened the lead, since that is a matter requiring more thought (and if I did, somebody will come along to complain that it's too short. . .).

Thanks again. Anville 18:03, 12 December 2006 (UTC)