Misplaced Pages

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History of Japan

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result pending

In August this article went through a massive, one-user rewrite with almost all of the sources being replaced and much of the wording of the article being altered. It passed GA ten days later having been reviewed by a user who had never edited this area before and apparently didn't examine the article very closely (see below), with the only other input being from the user who rewrote it and nominated it. The sourcing of the article was only briefly touched on in the context of whether every sentence should have a citation. This seems like failure to properly assess for GA purposes, given that one of the criteria for GAs is that they be "verifiable with no original research".

There are many sourcing and verification problems with the article, as demonstrated by the examples below:

In the space of three weeks there have been several protracted edit wars, a lengthy talk page dispute and even two ANI threads over this article. This in my opinion should not be the case with a GA-class article.

Pinging involved users: @CurtisNaito: @Nishidani: @Sturmgewehr88: @Curly Turkey: @Rjensen: @Calvin999: @Vivexdino: @MSJapan: @Phoenix7777: @TH1980: @Signedzzz:

Virtually every sentence the above users and I have checked was found to contain a factual error or a misrepresentation of a cited source. It would be an enormous project to check every such instance and bring the article to legitimate GA status. Not pretending it already is a GA is the simplest and most realistic place to start, especially given that preserving the text as it was at GA review was likely an impetus for the recent edit-warring.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:32, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

• The GA review was totally inadequate. Obviously a lot of work has gone into the article, but it has issues with focus and scope—it's a long article on an topic that has a lot to be covered, and the editors don't seem to be able to agree on how much detail is too much at this scope. The article should give a birdseye view of the topic and not dwell on details such as disputed numbers that belong in the (many, many) subarticles; such detail at this scope only hampers readability and detracts from much more important details. The prose needs a very thorough copyedit: as a random example, there's "Following the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, Emperor Taishō acceded to the throne."—which is at least twice as long as it needs to be, and perhaps is another big reason the article is so long Note: this is a single random example to demonstrate a kind of problem the article suffers from in general. The lead has gotten a lot better than it was, but it needs more than tweaks—it needs to be rethought and refocused. I won't comment on the sourcing issues as I haven't looked at them, and judging sources at that level is beyond my expertise. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:41, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
• It does need work, as it seems the GA was somewhat "forced." I am in the process of combing my library for material, and I know we have editors asking for access to JSTOR, etc. for other materials. We can definitely reassess this ourselves, but I have a feeling the final product is going to be very, very different, so it might be wise to delist anyway, because it's not going to be a short process. Ideally thisd should be a survey-type article, and it isn't at the moment. MSJapan (talk) 16:20, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Keep - No one has yet found any actual problems with the sourcing used in the article, neither the current sourcing nor the sourcing that was used when the article passed good article review. Most of these alleged errors are actually just the inevitable result of summarization of the sources' content. Henshall dated The Tale of Genji to 1004, so I simply opted to go with that date rather than explaining the other possible dates which are already discussed in the novel's own Misplaced Pages article. Such a minor issue, which has already been changed through editing, is no reason to downgrade the article. Though the overwhelming majority of Hijiri's criticisms are just these sort of minor quibbles, others can't even be explained by this. Hijiri objected to the article saying that "the Yayoi culture was established by invaders from the Asian mainland", even though both Jared Diamond and Kenneth Henshall, the sources which were cited, concur with this. Henshall says, "Around 400 BC... Japan was effectively invaded. Immigrants arrived in number from the continent, immigrants different in appearance and culture from the Jomon people." Regarding Jared Diamond, a majority of users on the talk page, including Hko2333 who was not pinged, concurred that his article was a reliable source. Given how blatantly inaccurate or trivial all of Hijiri's criticisms are, we have to ask whether he nominated this article for reassessment more out of anger than reason.

Hijiri's initial declaration that he would reassess the article was appropriately dismissed with the comment Deliberate harassment of Curtis by Hijiri88. Even before Hijiri88 had even checked the references he had already somehow concluded that "I'd bet that every single reference to Japanese literature in your rewrite of the article contains an obvious error or misreading of a source that I could point out". He made harassing comments on the article talk page concerning the good article nomination.

Because of his behavior, Hijiri was explicitly warned that "the goal of a reassessment is to not to punish those responsible as you may be hoping, but rather to improve Misplaced Pages by helping the article deserve its GA status."CurtisNaito (talk) 17:44, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages good article reassessment