Talk:Conversion therapy/GA1

GA Reassessment

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In order to uphold the quality of Wikipedia:Good articles, all articles listed as Good articles are being reviewed against the GA criteria as part of the GA project quality task force. While all the hard work that has gone into this article is appreciated, unfortunately, as of February 15, 2009, this article fails to satisfy the criteria, as detailed below. For that reason, the article has been delisted from WP:GA. However, if improvements are made bringing the article up to standards, the article may be nominated at WP:GAN. If you feel this decision has been made in error, you may seek remediation at WP:GAR.

• The article fails to provide the broad coverage of its subject required by the good article criteria. The majority of the History section is concerned with the situation only in the United States. Why is a nationalistic persective required to understand the history of conversion therapy?

• The article also fails to focus on its topic. What is the relevance of the long quote from Freud to conversion therapy. for instance?

• There are many unaddressed requests for additional citations, expansion of certain sections, or pov warnings.

• "In 1952, the British government subjected Alan Turing to hormonal treatment after he was arrested for having sex with a man." What is particularly significant about Turing's treatment that it deserves to be singled out? Turing wasn't "arrested for having sex with a man" in any event, as there was no such charge; he was arrested for gross indecency with another man, the same charge that Oscar Wilde had faced.

• There are five dead links.[1]

• The list in Criticism of conversion therapists should be converted to prose. Why is this a criticism of "therapists" when the article is about therapy, not therapists? I'd expect if anything to see a Criticism of conversion therapy section, but criticism sections are generally deprecated in favour of distributing the criticism at the appropriate points throughout the article, to give a more balanced narrative.

• The External links section needs to be pruned. Please refer to WP:EL.

• Citations need to be formatted consistently, with full details including publisher and last access date for online references. See refs #117 and #120, for instance.

• "... may cause high levels of emotional stress for LGB people." What does LGB stand for? It is not explained anywhere in the article.

• The lead is too short to provide an adequate overview of the article.

--Malleus Fatuorum 16:14, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I am sorry to see that this article no longer counts as a good article. I disagree with some of the reasons you give - the quote from Freud discusses conversion therapy, pointing out its limitations, so it seems clearly relevant. Also, criticism of conversion therapists seems proper in an article about conversion therapy.

I am not sure what the difference is between "gross indecency" and having sex with another man; I agree that this part should be changed if it is not correct. I have tried to fix some of the article's problems. Born Gay (talk) 21:58, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If the article was about therapists rather than the therapy then I might be inclined to agree. "Gross indecency" covers a multitude of sins; it doesn't specifically or uniquely refer to penetrative sex. The point I was making was that the actual charge against Turing ought to be accurate, and it wasn't. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:07, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I honestly don't understand what meaningful difference there is between criticism of conversion therapy and criticism of conversion therapists, at least if the criticism of the conversion therapists is about how they conduct or try to justify conversion therapy. Born Gay (talk) 22:10, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Think of it this way. What is the subject of this article? The more important point you ought to be considering though is whether or not the article is balanced and presents a neutral pov with the criticism hived off into a separate section. My judgement is that it is not. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:14, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Well how would you change it? Born Gay (talk) 22:19, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Several months have passed. Are there any plans to address the changes which led to this article's loss of its GA status? If nothing is done to restore the GA status of this article, perhaps we should consider reverting the article to the GA version. Whatever404 (talk) 23:39, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I have been doing what I can to address these problems. I believe that I have dealt with some of the issues Malleus Fatuorum mentioned, including the requests for additional citations and the POV warnings, I have corrected the information about Alan Turing, I have fixed the dead links or removed them, converted "criticism of conversion therapists" into prose and integrated it into the rest of the article, pruned the external links, and rebuilt the lead. That leaves expanding the coverage of conversion therapy in other countries. I have done a small amount of work on this, and hope to be able to do more in future. Please don't revert the article back to the way it was when it was last listed as a GA. There are a large number of problems involved with doing this - it would break many links, among other things. Born Gay (talk) 23:49, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Rather than reverting the article back to the last version listed as a GA, I have taken a close look at older versions of the article and restored content that was removed from them to the current version when that seems appropriate. That seems to me a much better way of doing things than wholesale reversion, which would mean the loss of many changes that may have been improvements. Born Gay (talk) 23:52, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I have no plans to engage in wholesale reversion. I would just like to know how to go about restoring the GA status. Is the article ready for that? What is the process? If it is not ready, how long will it be, or how much work will it be? Whatever404 (talk) 00:58, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

The article is clearly not ready for restoration of GA status at the moment. It needs expansion of information about conversion therapy in countries outside the US, and probably some formatting and similar kinds of changes. How long will this take? I have no idea - but it's Wikipedia and there is no deadline. Born Gay (talk) 01:11, 6 May 2009 (UTC)