Talk:Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War/GA2

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GA Reassessment[edit]

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This article has been subject to chaotic, uncontrolled POV editing from multiple sides for quite a long time. When I first looked at it today, it had distorted claims falsely attributed to sources right in its lead paragraph, which had been sitting there unchallenged since April. Furthermore, even the initial GA nomination back in 2012 was probably fatally flawed due to disruptive POV tagteaming between the then nominator and the reviewer. This article needs a thorough check for distorted/falsified sourcing and other disruptive elements.

At a quick glance, the following criteria fail:

  1. Well written: ✗ Fail. Quite obviously not.
  2. Verifiable with no original research: likely ✗ Fail, as there have been massive numbers of edits tinkering with previously sourced statements and changing their contents in an uncontrolled way.
  3. Stable: Obviously ✗ Fail, as it's been subject to permanent edit-warring.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:23, 25 August 2020‎ (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep, I guess The nominator has long been guarding and watching over the article, driving for quality. So I can only respect the frustration with quality here. Also some issues and concerns about the article were raised at the three failed FACs the article has gone through. Many of those issues also apply to GAs. I wouldvoted for a delisting if they still remained unaddressed. But, from what I would have seen, many of them were actually addressed, though not all. Any issue a reviewer may raise, I believe can be quickly addressed, and the GA status probably can be retained. Aditya(talk • contribs) 17:34, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Couple of additional observations about specific quality issues:
    • The lead section is currently extremely hard to read due to an excessive amount of hedging ("some writers believe...", "...are also accused to be...", "scholars have suggested...", "...apparently..." etc.) Apparently the lead section was first filled up with factual claims that were (in parts) of questionable reliability and relevance, and then somebody clumsily tried to tone them down with these hedging phrases. This is not how to do it. Either these claims are reliable and safe to assert as facts and central enough to the article that they should be in the lead; then they should be stated without such hedging; or they shouldn't be in the lead at all.
    • A particularly blatant example of this is the bit right in the beginning, about "a fatwa in Bangladesh was declared that the Bengali freedom fighters were 'Hindus'" etc., which is stated only in the lead but not further down in the article (as the cleanup tag rightly indicates, this contradicts the general rule that the lead should be a summary of the article).
    • The statements about rapes by other parties (Bengali nationalists and Indian soldiers) are poorly integrated in the text. There's also an issue about the claim about Indian soldiers, which (unlike all other claims in the same context) are attributed merely to one single scholar, by name. If that's really just a single author's opinion, does it belong in the lead at all? Or is it really more than that?
    • These claims about non-Pakistani perpetrators also need to be backed up in the main text, not just in the lead.
    • The bit in the lead about the motives for India's involvement ("Initially India claimed its support for the Mukti Bahini and later intervention was on humanitarian grounds...") seems extraneous to the topic of this article. This belongs somewhere in the main article on the war, not here.
    • Terms like "Razakar" and "Mukti Bahini" aren't explained and introduced properly on their first use.
    • In the "background" section, the phrases "...and this made them unreliable. To this extent..." make no sense.
    • In the same section, "It did not help that ..." is unnecessary editorializing.
    • In the same section, "According to the political scientist R. J. Rummel, [...] and that the Hindus" is ungrammatical.
    • Quite generally, this section as well as the next overuses named attribution to individual scholars. Claims of fact that are of central importance to the article should be sourced securely enough that it shouldn't be necessary to hedge them with "according to X". Those statements that can be assumed to be securely sourced and uncontroversial should be summarized in a more independent, high-level way, and then given in Wikipedia's own voice without these unnecessary hedgings.
    • The single "footnote" [a] is unmotivated. In an encyclopedia, we don't do footnotes that are just learned digressions or discoursive background discussion. Either this explanation is important enough to be in the main text (in which case, it should of course be summarized, not quoted verbatim), or it should be left out.
    • The "War Crimes prosecutions" uses over-linking, including renewed wikilinks to topics that are already contextually present throughout the article, such as 1971 Bangladesh atrocities and Bangladesh Liberation War.
    • The literal quotation in footnote 99 ("Mollah smiled...") is a sentence fragment that's ungrammatical in isolation.
    Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:43, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Quite a long list of issues, but most of that can be addressed with a quick bout of copyedit. Like I promised, I want to lend a hand to that. Let me see what I can do. I will able to edit the article, right? I am extended autoconfirmed. Aditya(talk • contribs) 00:47, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with most of the concerns raised by Future Perfect At Sunrise. But on the lead needing to summarise content in body I have to say there was a well referenced section on Hindu victims in the body. Future Perfect can you tell why you say they are "massively distorting/falsified edits"? Worldbruce (talk · contribs) has vetted the verifiability of the section and lead sentences on the Hindu victims making up the bulk.[Diff] I do think it deserves a special mention; both in the body and lead. Bangladeshi court cases have ruled the genocidal rape of Hindu women was perpetrated against them due to their membership of a specific religious group.[1] I added that content from the account I made in April (forgot my password, sorry). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.96.37.170 (talk • contribs) 11:38, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • When I saw that passage yesterday, it was sourced to two sources (Siddiqi and D'Costa), both of which blatantly failed to support that point. I admit I didn't notice at first that that was the effect of yet another disruptive intervening edit, by 103.25.250.228 [2] (that wasn't also you by any chance?). It had originally had two other sources, Bartrop and Islam. However, those two don't support the statement either: What both sources state (in very similar words) is that "Hindus were targeted the most". That is simply not logically the same thing as saying that "most of the victims were Hindus" (given that Hindus were only a minority among the overall population that was subject to atrocities.). Also, the section in the text body was misquoting Siddiqi (1998) and (again) D'Costa, in its statement that "A fatwa from West Pakistan during the war asserted that women taken from Bengali Hindus could be considered war booty". What Siddiqi is actually saying is that the fatwa "called Bengali freedom fighters 'Hindus'" and then went on to declare their women war booty – in other words, it legitimized the rape of women who weren't actually Hindus. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:45, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • No, that IP wasn't me. As you pointed out, the 1st source clearly says "Hindus were targeted the most" and the 2nd source reiterates that in these words "The Pakistan Army and its local collaborators targeted mostly the Hindu women and girls for rape and sexual violence." The book repeats it a couple of pages later "to emphatically iterate that it was directed predominantly against the Hindu women and girls".[3] I disagree that it does not mean most victims were Hindus (what else does it mean?) Most of the refugees in India were Hindu.[1] TIME magazine said ""The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Muslim military hatred." So its clear Hindus were disproportionately affected by the violence.[2] But I don't want to argue too much over this. As a compromise we can just settle with paraphrasing the sentences as close as possible to as they are in the sources and leave it at that. Perhaps with this wording will be okay: "The Pakistani Army and their allies targeted Hindu females the most for rape." We can also modify the problematic sentence in the text body to allay your specific concern instead of removing its section altogether. I would do it myself but I see that the article is only for extended autoconfirmed users. Could you restore and fix them please? Thanks. 203.96.189.169 (talk) 04:16, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I believe the best way to retain the article's GA status is by addressing the issues raised. If there's a room for improvement, and if someone points that out, the best way is always to improve. Fut.Per has made life easy for an editor trying to improve the article by actually detailing the areas of improvement. Aditya(talk • contribs) 10:15, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, the distorted passage in the main body has now been reinserted wholesale, by an editor ignoring this discussion [4]. The two links discussed above are by no means the only problem here. There is the general issue of redundancy, as this section now contains another long and lurid enumeration of atrocities, repeating the descriptions in other sections, although most of these do not really seem to be specific to this one victim group. These repetitions seem to have been inserted more with a view to rhetorically reinforcing the accusatory message than for their factual information value. There are also several other misquoted statements, with references pointing to sources that do not in fact describe violence directed specifically against Hindu women. For instance, D'Costa 2011:102 is quite clear about describing violence that was in fact not concentrated on actual Hindus, but affected Bengali women indiscriminately, including those that identified as Muslims, on the mere prejudice that their culture was somehow influenced by Hinduism.

As the article is now again deteriorating rather than improving, and we have not yet seen any concrete perspective emerging here about how to address the fundamental, structural problems with the article (not all of the issues can simply be solved by a round of copyediting, as meritorious as such an effort might be), I have little choice but to close this review with a fail. The article can be renominated for GA once it's been thoroughly overhauled. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:26, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Though I think I am doing the wrong thing here, writing after delisting. But, I guess, I can be forgiven for wondering if there were a way to get a Wikiproject or two to keep this straight. Since this has a high PR potential against the accused, it needs WP:BALANCE and WP:NPOV right now. Or may be someone could merge the salavagable part into the general article on Bangladesh war atrocities. Aditya(talk • contribs) 19:09, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I saw this was delisted and it piqued my curiosity. I agree fully with FPaS. The last FA assessment is already telling--something that fails FA so clearly is not likely to be a GA either. Looking at the GA review, and the version that was promoted, provides proof that the initial GA pass was already unjustified: the review is cursory and looks more like a chat, and the promoted version is very poorly written, in more ways than I care to enumerate here. Drmies (talk) 15:50, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ https://global.britannica.com/place/Bangladesh/The-Pakistani-period-1947-71
  2. ^ https://news.rediff.com/column/2010/mar/26/the-genocide-we-and-the-world-forgot.htm
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