Talk:History of the Jews in Madagascar/GA2

GA Review

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Nominator: Zanahary (talk · contribs) 20:11, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Thebiguglyalien (talk · contribs) 04:23, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Hello! Give me a week or so and I'll look over the article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:23, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Yay! Thanks so much ꧁Zanahary꧂ 04:43, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Zanahary, after looking at the sources, I don't believe that this article is ready for nomination. Of what I was able to verify, there were frequent inconsistencies between the sources and the article, as well as some close paraphrasing and unreliable sources. There are also possible gaps in coverage, though I understand that this might be a more difficult subject to find sources for. I tried to provide a few other general notes, but I didn't comb the article for copyediting issues.

This article can be renominated at any time, though peer review is also an option if you want more general feedback first. WikiProject Judaism seems moderately active and there's a chance someone there may have thoughts on this as well. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:48, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

References:

• CGTN is a deprecated source on Wikipedia, so Faces Of Africa: The Jews of Madagascar cannot be used.
• Global Security is considered unreliable.
• It's not clear what No Small Jew: Stories of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Infinite Value of the Individual is.
• Chabad is a questionable source that should be avoided.
• Citation 65 is simply labeled "US State Dept 2022 report", which isn't specific enough to be any more helpful than a bare link.
• What makes Mayyim Hayyim a reliable source?
• What makes Kulanu a reliable source?
• What makes Israel21c a reliable source?

Spot checks:

• Miles (2017) – Checked the first three uses. The source doesn't mention lowlands, and the source says it's a "compatible" belief, not the same one. Also, is the "10th century Arabs" belief specific to Lucien Razanadrakot? If so, it should be attributed to him.
• Jennings (2017) – Checked the first five uses. It references the Merina and Betsileo peoples, but I don't see that it actually says these two are the two that make "prominent" claims about their descent. There's also close paraphrasing in the ones I checked here, where a lot of the same wording and structure is used from the source. It can still be a copyright violation even if a few words are switched around.
• Lieb (1946) – It's misleading to imply he only attributed to the Jewish people when he said there were several influences. And this is using his own writing as a primary source, which brings into question whether this opinion is important enough to add to the article if no one else has analyzed it.
• Dolsten (2016) – Checked both uses. I don't see where this supports that they were reluctant to become Orthodox because they already considered themselves Jewish.
• Greenspan & Zivotofsky (2017) – Good.

Broad coverage:

• I'm still not entirely sure how widely accepted the Jewish origin theories are or who believes them, which feels to me like it should be the most important detail in the article.
• Were it not for the population count in the infobox, I would have no idea how prominent the Jewish community is in Madagascar.
• I'd like to see an overview of any Jewish practices or traditions in Madagascar. Are there any Malagasy traditions for Purim? That sort of thing.
• Is there antisemitism in Madagascar or discrimination toward any of the Jewish communities, now or historically?
• Does the Jewish community have a voice in local or national politics?

Other notes:

• There are a lot of quotations in this article where the exact wording isn't important, and it would better serve the article to paraphrase them.
• I'd think about rearranging the information throughout the article, as right now it feels like a scattering of details and opinions where you have to dig to figure out the main ideas. This is especially the case with the theories section, where I have no idea how important any of the information is. Articles like this usually have a history section so the reader can understand it chronologically, which is something I had trouble with while reading the article.
• There's some MOS:SANDWICH going on with the images, at least in Vector 2022.
• Avoid one sentence paragraphs per MOS:PARA.

Not directly related to GA but hamper verifiability and should really be fixed:

• A lot of the references lack information or use difficult-to-read formatting, which can make verification a challenge.
• Page numbers make a world of difference for verification if the source has multiple pages. Template:Sfn and Template:Rp are the most convenient ways to add them.
• There are several duplicate citations that should be merged together.

Hi @Thebiguglyalien! Thanks for your feedback. To answer some of your specific inquiries:

1. Chabad is a questionable source that should be avoided. In this case, it's cited to relate a story about a Chabad rabbi in Madagascar. It's corroborated by a South African news story, which is reproduced in No Small Jew. I think it's fine to use, since it's just Chabad's own archive.
2. What makes Mayyim Hayyim a reliable source? That source is a firsthand account of the group conversion of Madagascar's Jewish community.
3. What makes Kulanu a reliable source? They facilitated the conversion; their account should be fine to cite.
4. I'd like to see an overview of any Jewish practices or traditions in Madagascar. Are there any Malagasy traditions for Purim? That sort of thing. There is no source about this. The community had never been studied before 2013, and they didn't really exist before 2011, so the majority of scholarship is about their conversion and their conception as Jews. The only scholars to ever go and document them are Nathan Devir, William F.S. Miles, and Marla Brettschneider, with Tudor Parfitt having gone but never written about them in any depth. None of them talk about specific practices.
5. Is there antisemitism in Madagascar or discrimination toward any of the Jewish communities, now or historically? For the current Jews, there's no source besides the US State Department reports cited. Historically, I think the article explains pretty thoroughly how the Jews were treated in the Vichy period.
6. Does the Jewish community have a voice in local or national politics? No source discusses this; same situation as the Purim question.

I think some of these spot check issues come from the way this article was moved around and reworked, with stray citations ending up where they don't belong. I'll get to work on that. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 03:02, 20 June 2024 (UTC)