Talk:Anita Raja/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Gentle Ink (talk · contribs) 09:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 09:07, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Lead

• The lead (summary) section currently contains 11 citations, none of which are repeated in the article body. Wikipedia leads are meant only as summaries of existing fully-cited material, so all the citations (and much of the text) need to be moved to the article body. You are permitted to repeat citations in the lead, but many editors dislike the practice as it makes it look as if "new" material is being introduced up there, rather than summarized. Best will be to move all the material to the article body, and to redraft the entire lead in summary form to cover all the material in the article body, briefly.

• The lead paragraph "In a much published lecture ... intense involvement." is not a summary of anything, is unsourced, and contains a direct quotation. The whole paragraph must be moved to the article body, and sourced.

• In addition, the specific claim about the lecture, that it is "much published", must be sourced independently, as that can't be proven just by citing the lecture itself.

• You may like to note that wikilinks are normally provided once in the lead and once at first occurrence in the article body, e.g. you link Elena Ferrante once in both places.

Article structure

• It is conventional to begin biography articles with "==Early life==" (or similar); then to move on to "Career". This can be divided into subsections, e.g. "===As translator===", "===As xyz===".

• You haven't said what else she does with her time, but since she says translation was on the side, it must have been on the side of something ... in short, the Career section needs development.

• It is conventional to provide a section "==Personal life==" to cover where she lives, family, and other activities. You can obviously add here that Starnone is her husband; it is remarkable that this isn't in the article, given the Ferrante material that you've worked on!

• If she also does charity work, is a trustee, etc., then a further section should be created for that material. It seems that she gives public lectures so that might be a good place to start.

Links to Elena Ferrante

• The "Links to Elena Ferrante" section needs further development, as it is clearly a major element of the article.

• There should be a "{{further|Elena Ferrante}}" link at the top of that section.

• The section needs some context for readers who haven't heard of Ferrante. I suggest you add a paragraph on her, based on the Elena Ferrante article. Unfortunately its lead doesn't fully summarize the article; you can copy the lead and its citations (with attribution in your edit comment, i.e. "materials adapted from Elena Ferrante, see there for attribution"), but you'll also need to summarize the issue of her anonymity and the (enormous) speculation around her identity, and to cite that.

• The Univ. Padova study mentions Starnone, indeed puts him in the frame as Ferrante (!); this needs to be stated, and tied to the statement about Starnone's denial.

• The section "Feminist outlook" is misplaced, and very curious as it dives straight into assuming Raja=Ferrante at the very start of the main text. Clearly it belongs inside the "Links..." section. Perhaps you were relying on the statements in the lead, which as I've already said are meant only to be a summary of the article. The main text should begin at the beginning, making no assumptions about the reader's knowledge of any part of the article's subject.

• The Feminist outlook material needs some sort of lead-in, along the lines of "If Ferrante is Raja, readers of Ferrante's novels may assume that something of Ferrante's political outlook represents Raja's personal views." Even that is somewhat dangerous in Wikipedia terms, as editors are not allowed to draw conclusions by putting things together (in a policy called Original Research), i.e. you need a citation for any such claim. At the moment, both of the Feminist outlook paragraphs are hinting that the views of Ferrante and Wolf represent those of Raja. Both conclusions are unsafe without citations that explicitly makes those connections.

Translations

Extended content
This section should be the last one in the main text. The list should be in chronological order, not the reverse. I suggest you put the dates first rather than at the end, and do without the parentheses. Book titles should all be in italics, e.g. Quel Che Ho Visto e Udito a Roma. All done.

Images

• The lead image is fine.

great

Sources

• Many of the sources have no date; at the least, you need an access-date for each news item or website.
  • I've done the access-dates now.

• The source check will follow once all the new sources for the additional materials have been added.

Summary

• This article needs a considerable amount of rewriting and development. If you are happy to do that, please say so now and give me an indication of how long that will take; then do the work, ping me when you are ready, and I'll review the article again. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:32, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks so much for these useful guidelines and best practice. Yes I'm happy to do the work and it will take me about a month.

  I will certainly ping you when I'm ready.

  I have a problem RE What Else She Does With Her Time: given that Anita Raja does not want to be known as Elena Ferrante, and yet she is Elena Ferrante, I would like to respect her wishes and do not want to list her novels on this page, only the translations, to which she freely puts the Anita Raja name. There exists another page for Elena Ferrante which is more appropriate for the novels. I hope you understand. Gentle Ink (talk) 12:01, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  Well, the article certainly needs to say something in its Career section, and despite the outing or doxxing or whatever it was, it still isn't certain that AR=EF. I'd hope that you can write something solid about what AR does in terms of lecturing, campaigning, writing non-fiction, whatever. I suggest you rework the article to fill in as many of the gaps as possible, leaving a fuzzy EF-shaped patch which is clearly labelled as conjectural. In the meantime, please reply to each item above when you've completed it, so that I can see what's been done. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  OK. thank you. Gentle Ink (talk) 12:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  Hello Chiswick C,

  I've done as much as I can - not wanting to damage Ferrante's safe writing space (anonymity). Especially as she's so brilliant and her writing so precious. Hope the article stands OK now. Thank you for your help. Gentle Ink (talk) 22:21, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

  Many thanks; I see good progress. I have done a bit of tidying up, namely: straight quotes not curved; authors in last, first format, parameters at start of refs; newspaper names in full, wikilinked; no spaces before refs, no punctuation after or in refs.

  The main thing that plainly needs doing to this article, rather the elephant in the room I'm afraid, is to integrate the Ferrante section into the rest of the article. I fully understand your sensitivity to Raja, but on the other hand the matter has been extremely public for the last 7 years, with repeated articles as you say in the world's most famous newspapers, and nothing we now say will alter that. Since you don't wish to say definitively that she *is* Ferrante — and the matter can still just about be described as "not proven in law", we need to find a graceful way to describe the situation, and to integrate the Ferrante material into the article.

  The situation at the moment, from a Wikipedia standpoint, is that Raja doesn't seem to have done anything much to make herself Notable. Editors could be saying to themselves "Why is this person even notable, all she does is dishes and the odd lecture, how is that worth a Wikipedia article, let's take it to Articles for Deletion!", which isn't a result we specially want to achieve.

  We're basically indicating, somewhat bizarrely, that Raja is a housewife with a lot of time on her hands; she presumably does dishes, dinners, and domestic affairs (and the occasional talk): rather than spending her time writing. Leaving aside the risk of deletion, we really don't want to be giving readers that impression.

  At the moment, then, it's quite opaque why we're writing about Raja at all, and it'll seem to readers utterly bizarre that we're also writing about some other woman in a section titled "Links".

  For my money, the right approach now is for us to say that she has been *plausibly* identified as such. We then say in the *Career* chapter that *if as the newspapers suggest, Ferrante is an alias* (i.e. we do not state in Wikipedia's voice that this is definitely so), then Raja is spending a significant part of her time writing novels, and having success in that activity, since "EF" is a prolific novelist. Then we've got a coherent picture of Raja, even if part of the Career section is a (very well-sourced) conjecture. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:11, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

  The Anita Raja page was created (not by me) in January 2021 so it would be odd to delete it now, but perhaps that would be better.

  When I found it a few weeks ago, the bulk of the page was concerned with lauding the hack who 'unmasked' Anita Raja and that was truly an offence to millions of people like me who value her tremendous achievement. So I've tried to make it more respectful.

  If editors want to delete it, I'm certain Anita Raja/Elena Ferrante would be absolutely delighted and therefore so would I. It's been lovely to work on though, and thanks again for your help. Gentle Ink (talk) 09:18, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

  Please don't take my remarks the wrong way; I'm trying to help you bring the article to Good Article status, since you have nominated it. Nobody has proposed its deletion, and I'm sorry if the mention of that process has confused you at all: I was just explaining the need to reorganise the article (very slightly, I believe) to give it a plain and comprehensible structure. This will not involve saying anything more about the Ferrante link than is already in the article, so I wouldn't have thought there'd be any difficulty there really. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:40, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.