Talk:Caste politics/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Piotrus (talk · contribs) 00:39, 2 December 2011 (UTC) GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   Seems fine to this ESL.

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

   1) Per WP:LEAD, lead should provide a comprehensive overview of the rest of the article. It doesn't (for example, the article has a large section on corruption, which is not mentioned in the lead). Also, lead should not introduce new information not covered later; currently it seems to begin with the introduction to the "caste system in India", which instead should have its own subsection. 2) Per WP:BTW, many more blue links are needed. 3) Section titles need to be decapitalized (see WP:CAPITALIZATION). They are also on occasion too "artsy" and not informative enough; for example "Caste Politics: A Trajectory" should likely be just "History". 4) The history section should also be structured more chronologically, why is it that after "By the early 1990s", we see "In the 1951 election" and then again "In the 1990s"? I also don't see how this section is logically different from "Caste Politics in the Post-Independence Period", both seem like a likely candidate for a partial merge and rewrite. There likely needs to be one clear history (of caste politics, not of the caste system) section, at the very least. 5) "colleges across the country" - shouldn't that be universities? I think India system of education is mostly focused on the university type of institution, not the US-centric college.

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   References are not adequately informative. Presumably book references are missing page number; presumably because many refs only have the author and title, which is not enough to be able to distinguish between book or journal. Some references only have titles and urls. One reference is to another Wikipedia article, which is not allowed (Wikipedia cannot be the source for itself). In some parts of text, there are useless ibid notes.

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   Multiple paragraphs and entire subsections are missing references.

   C. No original research:

   Potential fail, as there is much unreferenced content that could be ORish.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   I don't think the article is broad enough. Which parties are associated with each castes, for example? One of the things I'd expect to find here would be an answer to this, perhaps in a nice table / chart format. If some information on which party is related to which caste is present in this article, it is most certainly not found in one place. Worse, untouchables are mentioned once outside the lead; Brahmin's - three times, and other castes like Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras are not even mentioned in the article at all! I frankly cannot phantom how can this article lay any claim to comprehensivness and broadness if three out of five official castes are not mention in name. And no, just adding them to the one introductory sentence does not suffice; I'd expect to see a dedicated paragraph, at least, about the situation of each case in the Indian politics. Some good references were suggested on talk which have not been explored. Bayly has a chapter of welfare, this word is not even present here. Ghanshyam Shah "Caste and democratic politics in India" (2004) seems like an excellent work on the subject. There is a wealth of other easily accessible sources, some of which strive for an overview of the subject and whose analysis would likely suggest how to structure a comprehensive article. Overall much of the content in this article needs to be logically restuctured - at present there is no logical flow, and the article looks like a hodge-podge of random facts about caste politics in India, arranged mostly at random. In other words, what the article tells to the reader (me) is: "caste players a role in Indian politics. Here are some examples, in no particular order. The end." Once the structure is sorted, expansion of certain aspects is needed. On a final note here I note that there have been good suggestions in the past, and many of the issues I raise have been noted by others.

   B. Focused:

   Everything seems to be related to the subject in question, if in an often messy way.

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

   No bias detected.

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

   Check.

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   No images, no problem.

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

   No. At the very least, some images from Caste system in India could be imported. Not that that article has great images, but some effort to improve the imageless state should be undertaken.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

   On hold awaiting responses. Please let me know if anything is not clear; please consider pinging me on my talk page to ensure I am notified ASAP. If something is addressed, please make a clear note of that both here and in the edit summary. If I am not notified of any changes on my talk page, I may not revisit this page before a week or so, when I will assess the progress made based on the comments here, and if no rationale have been presented for extra time, I'll pass or fail the article based on its state at that time. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 01:21, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for all your helpful suggestions. Both my partner and I will try to address all we can in the limited time we have left on this project. We have changed the struture and intro and hopelfuly you find the flow of the article more user friendly. However, if you have time to help us clean up some of the citations you were refering to or know of any images that would help the understanding of our artical, we would really appreciate it.--Meighon (talk) 04:01, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I am sorry, I had a very busy few days and was unable to help you with the citations. If that was the only issue standing between this article and the GA status, I'd have fixed that and passed, sadly, this is not the case. As I see no further comments (requests for extension, questions, etc.), as announced previously, I am re-reviewing the article after a week mark. In particular, I am not seeing any clear response to my question about the broadness of coverage (or lack of therefore). And sadly, while I see more content, it is poorly formatted. This article has no WP:LEAD anymore, and much of the added content is unreferenced. I am afraid I have to fail it. That said, if the students intend to do some last dash editing before the course is due, I would be willing to rereview it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 23:20, 13 December 2011 (UTC)