Talk:Rhodes blood libel

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Rhodes blood libel (reviewed version) has been listed as a good article under the good-article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do.
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An entry from Rhodes blood libel appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 31 October 2006.

A request has been made for this article to be peer reviewed to receive a broader perspective on how it may be improved. Please make any edits you see fit to improve the quality of this article.

[edit] GA Review

This article is on a 7 day hold. This means that it is close to achieving GA status, but has problems which mean it cannot achive it just yet. Those problems should be rectifiable given 7 days. The main problem is referencing. To see the criteria for a good article, click here.

Well written: Pass. Reads well and is encyclopedic. Has a logical and hierarchical structure. Some capitalisation issues though, 'Jews' occassionally written 'jews' etc. These do need to be sorted.

Factually accurate and verifiable: Fail. Unreferenced assertions appear throughout. Phrases like "documents refer to" make me suspect that there is original research (OR) in this article, which is of course banned from Wikipedia. A good example of a lack of referencing and suspected OR is in the first paragraph of the "Jewish Community of Rhodes" section. "An eyewitness reported: 'It was firmly believed that the child in question was doomed to be sacrificed by the Jews. The whole island was agitated from one end to the other.'" Did they? Which secondary or tertiary source did you take that from? "The first appearance of the blood libel under the Ottoman rule took place in the reign of Mehmet II". Says who? These kind of things must be rectified for GA to be awarded here, but it is doable in the 7 day hold period.

Broad in scope: Pass. Gives origins of the crisis in history, details of the crisis itself and how it ended.

NPOV: Pass. I detected no POV in the article.

Stable: Pass. The article does not change hugely from day to day.

Pictures: N/A. Pictures are not necessary for a GA, and this article can happily stand alone without any.

So, sort out those referencing issues, and in 7 days the article will be reassessed. Hopefully, it will then pass. Thanks for all your work so far. Chrisfow 17:48, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the referencing issues raised above:

"An eyewitness reported: 'It was firmly believed that the child in question was doomed to be sacrificed by the Jews. The whole island was agitated from one end to the other.'" The entire paragraph is referenced to Frankel, Jonathan (1997). The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840, p. 69 (the reference is at the end of the paragraph). More specifically, the footnote on the same page says that this eyewitness account was published in an article "Administration of Justice towards the Jews in the East' in the issue of The Times of 18 April 1840.
"The first appearance of the blood libel under the Ottoman rule took place in the reign of Mehmet II". This is from Lewis, Bernard (1984). The Jews of Islam, p. 158 (the reference is at the end of the next sentence) It is only because of formatting issue that the paragraph appears to break after this sentence (actually, it doesn't, as one can see from the code).

If there are any more places that do not seem to be referenced, I'll be happy to provide further explanations. Beit Or 18:51, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

A general note: there are several instances in this article where there is just one reference at the end of the paragraph. In all these case, the reference applies to the whole paragraph. Beit Or 20:37, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Beit Or. I thought that this was perhaps the case. It is standard for claims to be referenced immediately after the sentence that the reference relates to, rather than one reference for the whole paragraph. However, this is standard in Britain, and I do not know the conventions in other English speaking countries. Also, the Wiki guideline on referencing does not touch on the subject of where to reference. I think it is clear here what your sources are if anyone wishes to question your assertions.

So...

Chrisfow 23:37, 17 November 2006 (UTC)