Talk:Black people and Mormonism/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: Katolophyromai (talk · contribs) 01:54, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

I am sorry, but this article is clearly nowhere even close to GA level quality. It has numerous major problems which will take much longer than a few days to correct. The article is not neutral and has been tagged as such since July. Some parts of the article seem to be overtly apologetic.

The article is not even consistently biased; it flat-out contradicts itself in multiple places. For instance, in the first paragraph, it says, "From the mid-1800s until 1978, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) had a policy which prevented most men of black African descent from being ordained to the church's lay priesthood.[1]:213 Black members were also not permitted to participate in most temple ordinances." Yet, this statement is seemingly flat-out contradicted in the first section, which claims, "During the early years of the Latter Day Saint movement, black people were admitted to the church, and there was no record of any racial policies on denying priesthood privileges to worthy Latter Day Saint men. This is especially evident because at least two black men became priests: Elijah Abel and Walker Lewis.[21] Church leaders supported and opposed slavery at different points in time. See this page's section on slavery for more details." Which one is it? Were people with dark skin admitted to the priesthood, or were they not? Even if these statements are not necessarily mutually contradictory, they need to be put in appropriate contexts within the article so they can be properly understood.

Next, we come to the second major issue, which is the fact that the article relies heavily on citations to various religious scriptures. The article needs to cite reliable, secondary sources. The "primary sources" problem was tagged only six days ago (after the article was nominated) and, yet, no major revisions have taken place since then. There are even statements in this article that are not cited at all, such as those in the final paragraph of the "Proselytization" section.

There are also organization issues here; paragraphs frequently crop up unexpectantly in sections where they plainly do not belong.

Finally, I looked at the article history, and the nominator appears to have immediately nominated this article following its previous failure on July 30 of this year, without making any changes whatsoever to the article. The original reviewer's comments regarding this article's level of completeness still remain relevant. The article is not neutral, relies too heavily on primary sources, is organized in a confusing manner, does not provide a thorough description of the subject. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:54, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing the article. I am trying to work on the article, but as you can tell it needs a lot of work. The user who re-nominated the article did so because they believed the original review was not done in good faith, but I agree that this article doesn't meet GA criteria yet, and may be a while before it does. Several other editors have been adding sections that contain factual information but as a whole can be overly detailed and rely too much on primary sources, like you and other users have noted. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 02:13, 12 August 2017 (UTC)