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Wikipedia:Featured article review/Ian Smith/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was delisted by Nikkimaria via FACBot (talk) 5:27, 25 April 2020 (UTC) [1].

Ian Smith

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Notified: Renamed user df576567etesddf, WP Africa, WP Aviation, WP Cold War, WP Milhist, WP Politics, WP Rhodesia

Review section

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I am nominating this featured article for review because it's clear that it's doesn't abide by the need to represent a neutral POV. This is accomplished by the fact that the overtone window has been shifted away from the mainstream consensus which is overwhelmingly negative into a faux debate unrepresentative of mainstream academic discourse. Large portions of the article labour to try and explain away any one of his racist statements and there is little acknowledgement over the fact he presided over a segregated state. The wording of the article itself is designed to avoid emphasising that and to give a misleading impression regarding his government.

The mere feature of the article being thorough isn't enough to make it a featured article nor is the appearance of showing both sides of the debate when it's clear that fringe perspectives are overemphasized.

I have tried to notify users but am unable to figure out how to format the notification. Zubin12 (talk) 01:50, 24 March 2020 (UTC) [reply]

Notifications done
Zubin12 I will do the notifications for you; you can follow my edits to see how it's done. First, though, there is supposed to be a week between notification on talk and nomination to FAR. The RFC closed only yesterday. The @FAR coordinators: will have to first opine whether it is too soon for this FAR to proceed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:23, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@FAR coordinators: SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:24, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
IDK the point of going through that. There are clearly entrenched disputes that won't be resolved any other way. buidhe 16:23, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
After reviewing previous discussions on the article's talk page I think we can proceed with the review at this time; Sandy, if you're willing to do the notifications that would be very helpful. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:30, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Done, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:47, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I plan to comment further but am not sure at this time. I don't think that the web/news sources cited by SharabSalam on the talk page claiming that the article is biased are that good. The Rhodesian system was quite different from the SA system, or for that matter, Jim Crow-style segregation. Whether most sources actually describe him as a white supremacist as claimed is something that needs further investigation. buidhe 08:34, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
sources

References

  1. ^ Davidow, Jeffrey (2019). A Peace In Southern Africa: The Lancaster House Conference On Rhodesia, 1979. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-72569-2.
  2. ^ Mlambo, A.S. (June 2008). "'We have Blood Relations over the Border': South Africa and Rhodesian Sanctions, 1965–1975". African Historical Review. 40 (1): 1–29. doi:10.1080/17532520802249415.
  3. ^ Stuart, M. (6 September 2010). "A Party in Three Pieces: The Conservative Split over Rhodesian Oil Sanctions, 1965". Contemporary British History. 16 (1): 51–88. doi:10.1080/713999439.
  4. ^ Brownell, Josiah (22 May 2017). "Out of Time: Global Settlerism, Nostalgia, and the Selling of the Rhodesian Rebellion Overseas". Journal of Southern African Studies. 43 (4): 805–824. doi:10.1080/03057070.2017.1325621.
  5. ^ Onslow, Sue (January 2006). "'We Must Gain Time': South Africa, Rhodesia and the Kissinger Initiative of 1976". South African Historical Journal. 56 (1): 123–153. doi:10.1080/02582470609464968.
  6. ^ Cohen, Andrew (December 2011). "Lonrho and Oil Sanctions against Rhodesia in the 1960s". Journal of Southern African Studies. 37 (4): 715–730. doi:10.1080/03057070.2011.611286.
  7. ^ Coggins, Richard (18 August 2006). "Wilson and Rhodesia: UDI and British Policy Towards Africa". Contemporary British History. 20 (3): 363–381. doi:10.1080/13619460500407061.
  8. ^ Lowry, Donal (18 May 2007). "The Impact of Anti-communism on White Rhodesian Political Culture, ca.1920s–1980". Cold War History. 7 (2): 169–194. doi:10.1080/14682740701284108.
  9. ^ Evans, Michael (6 December 2007). "The Wretched of the Empire: Politics, Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–80". Small Wars & Insurgencies. 18 (2): 175–195. doi:10.1080/09574040701400601.
  10. ^ Alexander, Philip (18 August 2006). "A Tale of Two Smiths: the Transformation of Commonwealth Policy, 1964–70". Contemporary British History. 20 (3): 303–321. doi:10.1080/13619460500407004.
  11. ^ Watts, Carl (8 May 2007). "'Moments of tension and drama': the Rhodesian problem at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Meetings, 1964-65". Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 8 (1). doi:10.1353/cch.2007.0024. ISSN 1532-5768.
  12. ^ Watts, Carl (March 2008). "Britain, the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65". The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 36 (1): 75–99. doi:10.1080/03086530801889392.
  13. ^ Carl P Watts (2006). The Rhodesian crisis in British and international politics (PhD thesis). University of Birmingham.
  14. ^ Onslow, Sue (June 2009). "'Noises Off': South Africa and the Lancaster House Settlement 1979–1980". Journal of Southern African Studies. 35 (2): 489–506. doi:10.1080/03057070902920007.
  15. ^ Onslow, Sue (16 August 2006). "A Question of Timing: South Africa and Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 1964–65". Cold War History. 5 (2): 129–159. doi:10.1080/14682740500062135.
  • The remarkably well written, informative and unbiased article on Ian Smith was selected as a featured article *less than 20 months ago*. What has changed since such time? Not the quality of the article, or the reliability of its sources, and much less the "Overton Window" (for crying out loud); the only change has been in the success of the "cancel culture" on Twitter and other corners of the internet in bullying people into silence and imposing historical revisionism. Thankfully, Wikipedia largely has avoided such fate, and articles such as "Ian Smith" still maintain a NPOV and provide balance when informing readers about a complex figure who lived in a time that was diffeent from our own.
It is not "whitewashing" to present reliably sourced, contemporary views of controversial figures who happen to be white. The fact that the "Overton Window" regarding how people spoke about self-governance has (thankfully) moved over the past 50 years does not mean that we can gauge a Cold War political figure, who became the political leader of what then was known as Rhodesia back when countries as modern and progressive as the United States of America still denied the right to vote to most of its black citizens, as if he were a political leader in 2020. *Of course* someone who today espoused that the right to vote be reserved to citizens who pay considerble income taxes and have surpassed certain educational levels (which, in 1960s-1970s Rhodesia hapened to overlap fairly efficiently with Rhodesia's white population), with the majority racial group being limited to the election of a minority of parliamentary seats, would be a fringe figure with almost no support from anyone. But when presenting a historical figure, one must present him or her in context, without historical revisionism. Tha context includes what other countries of the world had been doing for decades, the affiliation of the main rebel group in Rhodesia with Communist countries during the apex of the Cold War, and the lackluster record of recently independent countries no far from Rhodesia that implemented universal suffrage from one day to the next and, in nearly all cases, fell into tyranny and economic misery (and, sometimes, Communism) within a few years. Observers of the time understood that context, and one of the things that makes the "Ian Smith" article so outstanding is that it provides contemporary accounts--with different (and non-fringe) viewpoints--from reliable sources.
Editors who have criticized the way that the article depicts Ian Smith have their real beef not with the editors who wrote the article (which, again, used reliable sources and presented the subject, warts and all, in a NPOV), but with the lack of "Wokeness" of society--both white and black--fifty years ago. It simply will not do to impose 2020 standards on 1960s society (whether African, European or North American), and it is circular to claim that contempraries who spoke positively about Ian Smith were all "white supremacists" whose views are ipso facto "fringe" and should be stricken from public memory, and to use as evidence of such supposed "fringe" "white supremacy" (which is particularly silly when the person admiring certain traits or actions of Ian Smith happens to be a black African) that the person showed certain admiration of Ian Smith.
No figure from the past, no matter how admired by contemporaries, will escape unblemished when viewed through the lens of 2020 society. That does not mean, however, that the historical record should be rewritten by ignoring context and the views of contemporaries. This is Wikipedia, not Wokeapedia, and our goal is to provide readers with complete, properly sourced, NPOV information. The way to do that is not to tear down sublimely writen articles just because the subject matter makes us uneasy. The "Ian Smith" article is as excellent today as it was when it was honored as a featured article in August 2018, and such an honor should not be removed in the name of Woke culture. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 12:54, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ian Smith was firing figure even for his time being shunned even by western conservative leaders of that time and widely regarded as a racist. It is not workness to ask that an article represents a global view not the view of a small segment of the population and doesn't' attempt to explain away his flaws. Leaving meaningless words like claiming he "Understood uncomfortable truths about the African continent" without expanding on exactly what those uncomfortable truths is just attempting to white-wash his actions that were regarded globally as out of the mainstream. For god-sake his administration in Rhodesia was unrecognized by almost every nation on this planet barring Apartheid South Africa. The tone of the article is defensive to the man, acknowledging his faults only in rebuttal without sufficient weight and neglecting to account for the perspectives of Blacks who made up the vast majority of the populace who he presided over. Zubin12 (talk) 13:36, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note to all. This is not the place to relitigate the recent RFC. Please confine your commentary to how the article does or does not meet the FA criteria. What would be particularly helpful with regards to assessing the article's representativeness/neutrality is supporting your viewpoint with reliable sources. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:30, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment on FA criteria by Buidhe
  • I'm concerned 1d (NPOV) due to cherry-picking in the sources.
    • For example, "While acknowledging the privileged position whites had under Smith, several commentators have latterly agreed with his claims that many black Zimbabweans preferred him to Mugabe with hindsight, albeit a very low bar" is cited to several sources, making it look like it has a lot support. However, if you look closer most of them are obituaries in right-leaning newspapers.
    • Comments like "If you were to go to Harare today [in 2007] and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader—Smith or Mugabe—the answer would be almost unanimous", Boynton asserted; "And it would not be Mugabe." show the overreliance on sources sympathetic to Smith. This is cited to an expat journalist of Rhodesian origin. But if it's true, why aren't today's Zimbabweans saying so? Also, obituaries aren't the greatest source, because they often tend to be more positive than other coverage due to people not wanting to speak ill of the dead.
  • I don't think that it meets 1c given the overreliance on dated sources and lack of use of more recent, high quality sources (see above for a list of sources which could be incorporated).
    • One of the complaints made by AuH2ORepublican is that Smith may have been viewed more positively at the time than he is now. To give an example, Erwin Rommel was viewed more positively in the 1950s than today. However, we do not continue to rely on laudatory accounts in (out)dated sources when better research is available.
  • To Zubin's point on the divisions in the Conservative Party at the time, the article by Stuart 2010 listed above would elucidate this and improve comprehensiveness.

Overall, I do think that the article needs improvement to avoid delisting. buidhe 01:19, 25 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • I read over this article a while ago, and was concerned about the overly positive tone. Smith led a brutal racist regime in a doomed and bloody attempt to stop the inevitable success of majority rule, but this is frequently excused away. The "bones" of the article are broadly sound, but it needs a lot of work to return to FA-level NPOV. It's concerning that Smith's memoirs are relatively frequently cited (including for a dubious claim that Henry Kissinger greatly regretted the downfall of Rhodesia). Nick-D (talk) 09:28, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've been covering African 20th century topics for some time, and I also have concerns about NPOV for this article and inappropriate use of primary sources. The comment in the lead about his supporters seeing him as someone who "understood the uncomfortable truths of Africa" is a copy and paste from the BBC article its cited to, which is unexplained. Sounds like an excusing euphemism for white supremacist ideology (I dare someone to figure out what these uncomfortable "truths" about Africa were). Notice the even more subtle implication of the larger sentence in its juxtaposition of different views of Smith: "supporters venerate him as a man of integrity...while critics describe an unrepentant racist". The use of the pronoun "him" is included in the first part, but excluded in the second, as if to imply his critics were describing someone of a character so removed from the real Smith that Wikipedia can't even identify this description with "him". This sentence in the lead, "As Mugabe's reputation thereafter plummeted amid Zimbabwe's economic ruin, reckoning of Smith and his legacy improved." is cited to an op-ed in The Daily Telegraph. Even though this claim has truth to it, using an op-ed to cite a supposedly broad factual analysis in the lead of a Featured Article - or any article, for that matter - is unacceptable. Down under "Retirement" it is mentioned that he praised Nelson Mandela in his autobiography. This information is cited directly to Smith's memoir, which seems like a violation of WP:SYNTH in an attempt to show him as a non-racist leader. If his comments about Mandela in his book were of importance, this should be cited to secondary sources which say so. Otherwise its cherrypicking through a primary source. Later the article characterizes ZANU members trying to steal his farmland as "invaders", which is a word usually reserved for people waging military incursions into sovereign territories. The article also says "State press reported that [Smith] had "automatically ceased to be a citizen of Zimbabwe" on the passport's expiry", and cites that directly to a state newspaper. This is also a problem. -Indy beetle (talk) 03:53, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

FARC section

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Issues raised in the review section including neutrality and sourcing/coverage. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:26, 11 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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