Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Homosexuality/1

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Homosexuality[edit]

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page
Result: Delist. The length has been improved considerably by a helpful spinout, but it is going to take some time to bring the article up to GA standards, with multiple issues remaining (e.g., WP:LEAD). In the meanwhile it can't be listed as a GA. Geometry guy 19:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm nominating this page because there are several citation needed tags, as well as cleanup banners asking for more references and a worldwide view of the subject. These sorts of banners usually lead to Good Article nominations being quickfailed, so I don't think they are appropriate for a Good Article. Nikki311 19:08, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ay! I had no idea this article was here. I'm in the middle of an FAC, and a huge project. If I work a little bit at it are y'all going to keep the article to a deadline? --Moni3 (talk) 23:31, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I can get to it today or tomorrow, Moni. Finally, a subject I know something about, if only as an amateur and not a professional :) - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:56, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, what I need. A gay superhero. Thank you, Dank55! --Moni3 (talk) 18:16, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for bringing this to WP:GAR, Nikki, it's clear that there are some things that can be improved.
  • Moved See also endsection up, per WP:MOS and WP:Layout.
  • Added some links in the See also section. We may want to make an argument when this gets to WP:FAC to reduce the number of links, but at the WP:GAR level, it's more important to be clear about which things belong in which articles. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 21:36, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I grabbed some information from LGBT parenting concerning the European Union and Canada and removed the "not global" tag in the parenting section, but this section could use some work. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 10:53, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Regarding the short section on religion, I put this on the talk page:
I think an alien just landing from Mars would say, "Love and compassion, except when they have sex? Whaaaa?" But this position is both the official position and where many heads are at (or at least, where a lot of people say their heads are at...I can't quite make sense of it), and that's as good a way as any to report it in this article...if we try to make sense of it in one short section of this article, we'll get stuck in a quagmire.
  • That's generally true for this article; there are very many spinoff pages that treat specific topics in more depth, and those are the pages where the effort should be made to try to make sense of nonsensical things, when possible. There's a difficult balance on many of these issues between treating all people and positions with respect, and reporting them accurately, and WP:SPADE. I hope you guys won't delist this article over its cursory and apparently odd treatment of, for instance, religion...from long experience, I know that you just have to treat this stuff lightly and move on, unless you've got a lot of time on your hands. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 11:45, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't know what to do with Homosexuality#Middle East, South and Central Asia. I changed the tag to "refimprove", since there was one citation in the section and I added another. I poked around in related articles, but couldn't find any sources that were online and that I felt comfortable with importing; the information might not be representative, for all I know. The tag asking for references had been there since April of last year; perhaps it's time to remove some of this material, either for being unreferenced or off-topic, but I'm uncomfortable removing material about other cultures and times just because I don't know anything about it and can't find out quickly. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:01, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've left the "worldview" tag for now in Homosexuality#Sexual orientation and the law, because I'm not sure what people want to see in this section. There are two good articles on the subject given in the "See also" hatnote in this section, and certainly information could be pulled in from those articles, but when we have perfectly good articles devoted to the subject, I'm not personally a fan of copying a lot of information; my preference would be to make the section shorter rather than longer. Discussion? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:06, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I added two sentences to the lead, but more work is needed. There's a discussion on the talk page about keeping the first 3 paragraphs roughly as they are, and if we want to do that, that doesn't leave a lot of room for the kind of material that usually goes in the lead, a summary of the main points of the article. Again, I'm not happy about radical changes in an article like this without talking with a lot of people first about what they're looking for, and I don't have the time to devote to this. The folks in WP:GAY may have a better sense of what to do with the lead.
  • I didn't copyedit the article, because there's a lot of editing going on every day. Someone on the talk page said that meant the article is not "stable", the implication being it should be delisted, but I don't see why lots of activity is a bad thing. It just means that I should put off copyediting.
  • That's it for now; is there any particular section someone wants me to address? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:38, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I just wanted to add some bold font to the discussion in case any shy reviewers feel this is forbidden :-) I'll try to look at the article more closely soon and add more substantive comments if I have any. Geometry guy 23:15, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Bold font comment (;-)) the banner at the top stands out; something should be done about that if this is to be kept. Actually, the banners on the article generally cover well what will need to be done prior to my being able to vote keep. —Giggy 09:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Which, on reflection, makes my comment somewhat useful. So get to work! —Giggy 09:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment People have responded to these points on the talk page, but the editing is still very active and the article is still going in several directions at once. I'm not sure what you guys want to do on this page; anything would be fine with me, but I don't want to step in and insist that certain arguments on the talk page be settled one way or the other. I'll wait til things calm down a bit. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:00, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I intend to comment at length shortly. Geometry guy 20:38, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist. Tremendous work has gone into this article and it is a great resource for readers. However, it has a number of deep-rooted problems which convince me it must be delisted, restructured, worked upon, and renominated. One of the fundamental issues here is the fact mentioned above that the article is too long. Length per se is not a GA issue, but it usually reflects other problems. Basically, this article tries to do too much, which leads to issues with the broadness/focus, encyclopedic tone/neutrality, the lead, list incorporation, and so on. This deserves a long review. For an executive summary, a good place to start is the policy on lead sections.
    • "The lead serves both as an introduction to the article below and as a short, independent summary of the important aspects of the article's topic." It could equally say "The lead serves both as an introduction to the topic, and a short, independent summary of the important aspects of the article below." It is impossible to write a lead that does both unless the rest of the article is good. I suggest to those working on the article: write an article for which you could write a good lead.
I agree with the view on the talk page that homosexuality covers at least three aspects: same-sex attraction, same-sex relationships, and homosexual orientation, and that the last of these, like the first two, needs a separate article. Fixing this would change the article substantially and editors need the freedom to do this.
However, this is not the only substantial problem and so I will detail others below, which I sincerely hope will help in developing the article.
  • The current lead does not meet WP:LEAD at all. It discusses little more than etymology and usage, demographics, a touch of history, a couple of issues from society, and animals. Causality gets no mention, nor does art, literature, sex, religion, or even psychology. Instead the lead gets stuck on what homosexuality is and what it isn't. For instance, the last two sentences of the third paragraph ("In a narrow sense...") don't seem to be summarizing anything at all — a waste of precious lead space which no newspaper editor would tolerate :-) The lead is also quotation heavy.
  • An overview section should not be necessary in an article on a general topic like this. It seems to be trying to make up for the weak lead. Some of it (e.g. the first sentence) really belongs in the lead. The rest should be integrated into the rest of the article: a lot of it is history and psychology, which is not developed elsewhere.
  • The history section is very mixed. The whole labeling issue is irrelevant here and I suggest cutting it. The idea that homosexual behaviour did not exist before 1869 is as absurd as the idea that electrons did not exist before 1894. The argument over whether modern terms such as "gay" and "lesbian" make sense in a historical context can easily be avoided by not using them. Ironically, the rest of the section shows how prevalent homosexual behaviour has been throughout history. Indeed it may focus too much on prevalence at the expense of other historical aspects. There is also an underlying suggestion that homosexuality is a natural behaviour which was wiped out by Christian colonials; I am sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I still see it as a viewpoint. The sections on Africa, the Americas and the South pacific illustrate both these issues. There are also sourcing issues: several sections contain uncited opinion, not just the Middle East section, and even there, not just the tagged sentences. The Europe section develops a more rounded history, but still contains uncited opinion. (I realise that the Europe section is undoubtedly better due to the easy availability of source material.)
  • Beyond the history section, there are issues with global viewpoint. This is already present in the lead "trend towards acceptance" sentence. The religion section concentrates largely on U.S. issues connected with Christianity and Judaism, and the tag on the legal section is justified in my view.
  • There are several broadness issues. The demographics section only discusses prevalence, spending most of its energy on the difficulty in collecting demographics. There's a hint of gender differences, but nothing more. Possibilities include variations by region, ethnicity, social class and so on, although this section shouldn't be very long. I found no material on the teaching of homosexuality in schools, even though this is an issue that has generated controversy. Material on the psychology of homosexuality is also scattered and a bit patchy. The Prenatal subsection is extremely brief: it could at least mention the hormones involved (testosterone and estrogen, I believe, but this needs to be sourced) and the links with the lists in other subsections (finger-length ratios and so on).
  • More important, given the length of the article, are focus issues. Does Military Service really need a section unto itself? Some of it could be integrated into history, the rest into employment issues. We also get the Knights Templar story twice, on this occasion with unsourced presumption. The Causality section is rather long and the table in the Anthropology section suggests OR to me.
  • Some savings could be made by restructuring. I have two suggestions.
    1. The article really needs a "Biology and psychology" section in my view, incorporating the mental health, causality, malleability, pathology (this is the wrong word in a medical context!), and some bits of the history and overview. I don't think it is helpful to separate biological and non-biological causes, as many aspects of causality involve both, and the question of a genetic influence needs its own subsection. The causality material could be shortened (it is rather long with listy sections; also why does Peter Bearman deserve an explicit mention? - his views seem overrepresented in one subsection).
    2. A section on homosexual issues in the workplace might be a more efficient way to handle material about equal opportunities, workplace discrimination, modern military, and corporate attitudes.
  • The Law, politics and society section is too long with listy subsections. The restructuring above may help. The opening paragraphs editorialize twice, reflecting weaknesses in the lead. The law section is clearly listy and overlinked. The prejudice section is loaded and the term "scapegoat" is misused. The first example is the Knights Templar story; here homosexuality is not being used as a scapegoat, but as justification for an action with other motives. In the case of Nazi Germany, homosexuals were used as a scapegoat for the ills of society, but the article does not explain this; instead it concentrates on masculinity and racial issues. In the Politics section, all but the last two paragraphs are uncited, and the Parenting section presents no opposing views whatsoever: it deconstructs an issue without constructing it first.
  • The above and the examples below raise questions over neutrality and encyclopedic tone. A good rule of thumb is that in a neutral article one should not be able to guess the viewpoint of the editors. This article does not pass that test! The article on Freemasonry is one of my favourite examples of what not to do. Freemasonry is undoubtedly misrepresented and misunderstood. However, the solution is not to try to set the record straight, as "Freemasonry" does, but to present the reader with facts and information. The key phrases are "show, don't tell", and "let the reader decide". This approach is far more effective at communicating issues than telling readers what to think and criticizing prejudices.
  • There are prose issues related to this. The phrases "has stated that" and "put out a statement" are ugly and raise distrust: if the statements are out-of-date, provide a date. Per WP:WTA, "However" occurs 14 times, and "(al)though" occurs 11 times: some, but not all of these uses, need to be removed. Scare quotes should be avoided as far as possible. Also initials such as LGB and MSM are not defined, but, in my view, their use should be minimized; LGBT is a cultural construct, and is best used when discussing cultural issues, not, for example, medical ones.
  • Finally sexual practice. The article avoids this to a large extent, and that may be justified. The facts about numbers of sexual partners could be used to present a more neutral approach to stereotypes about promiscuity, i.e., rather than say "there's no basis for your views", say "your views are understandable because of X, but are an oversimplification because of Y". Regarding AIDs, I think the article has an obligation to mention that (receptive, unprotected) anal intercourse has a high transmission rate (which is hardly surprising). This not only gives a medical rather than a prejudiced (promiscuity/religious) explanation for the prevalence of AIDs amongst gay men, but also provides valuable health information.
Examples from the article


  • "In cultures under the sway of Abrahamic religions,..." and "Christian dogma" are unnecessarily critical phrases.
  • "Many modern style guides in the U.S. recommend against using homosexual as a noun, instead using gay man or lesbian... These style guides are not always followed by mainstream media sources." Tut tut! :-) Also answers an issue without raising it.
  • "The term homosocial is now used to describe single-sex contexts that are not specifically sexual." By whom? Sociologists I imagine - I've never heard it.
  • "metrosexual (referring to a non-gay man with stereotypically gay tastes in food, fashion, and design)" While the concept overlaps with gay stereotypes, a brief look at the sources in the metrosexual article (not the poor lead) confirms that this is not its primary origin or meaning. It could be argued that the article is breaking its own injunction by confusing issues of gender and sexuality here. In any case, this is somewhat off-topic.
  • "The lives of many historical figures, including Socrates, Alexander the Great, Lord Byron, Edward II, Hadrian, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo DaVinci, and Christopher Marlowe included or were centered upon love and sexual relationships with people of their own sex. Terms such as gay or bisexual have been often applied to them; some, such as Michel Foucault, regard this as risking the anachronistic introduction of a contemporary construction of sexuality foreign to their times,[24] though others challenge this.[25]"
  • "Though often ignored or suppressed by European explorers and colonialists, homosexual expression in native Africa was also present and took a variety of forms."
  • "However, the instances of same-sex affection and sexual interactions described in the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber seem as familiar to observers in the present as do equivalent stories of romances between heterosexuals during the same period." According to whom?
  • "But even as many of the male population were engaging in same-sex relationships,..." I counted 12 "even"'s in this article.
  • "The eclipse of this period of relative artistic and erotic freedom was precipitated by the rise to power of the moralizing monk Girolamo Savonarola." Nice prose and alliteration, but Wikipedia is not a term paper, nor the place to develop an argument.
  • "Ironically, politicians opposed to the scare tactics of McCarthyism tried to discredit Senator Joseph McCarthy by hinting during a televised Congressional committee meeting that McCarthy's top aide, Roy Cohn, was homosexual, as he in fact was."
  • "The bewildering death toll wrought by the AIDS epidemic at first seemed to slow the progress of the gay rights movement, but in time it galvanized some parts of the LGBT community into community service and political action, and challenged the heterosexual community to respond compassionately." Develops an argument.
  • "Yet as LGBT people slowly gained legal protection and social acceptance, gay bashing and hate crimes also increased due to heterosexism and homophobia (See Violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered)." Implies a connection, uses labels as causes, is unsourced and is the third link to the violence article.
  • "Homosexual acts are punishable by death in some present-day countries including Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.[70]" Including the death penalty under violence is POV (albeit one I agree with!); this is mentioned elsewhere anyway.
  • "Sometimes their own parents are not even informed." I'm scandalized at the idea that children might have secrets from their parents </irony>.
  • "...or even from former relationships." Why "even"?
  • "In some capitalist countries, large private sector firms often lead the way in the equal treatment of gay men and lesbians."
  • "Some religious groups have even promoted boycotts of corporations whose policies support the LGBT community."
  • "Since the Renaissance, both male and female homoeroticism has remained a common, if subtle and hidden, theme in the visual arts of the West."
  • "This discovery constitutes a major argument against those calling into question the biological legitimacy or naturalness of homosexuality, or those regarding it as a meditated social decision." Indeed, but...
Phew! This review took me nearly all day, and may take as long to read, but now I'm done. Geometry guy 17:00, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
PS. Given the length, please reply below, and leave this review self-contained. Thanks, Geometry guy 18:17, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very nice work, and I've brought up and linked this discussion on the talk page. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:23, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Broad in coverage? There should be a section which explains religious views about Homosexuality.--Seyyed(t-c) 09:09, 25 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
At present it has focused on Christianity and Judaism. I think it should expand to coverage other religions. --Seyyed(t-c) 16:00, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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