Talk:Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia

Something to fix

This is leftover from content copied from elsewhere (and I should fix it in the article it originated from as well) but "Leaders of various denominations have also spoken out against Russia's decision to ban the denomination" is kind of synthy so I'm going to remove it. I don't want to lose the sources so I'm going to keep them here if I do want to reuse them after taking a closer look.

• Catholic Register
• BP news
• Orthodox Russian priest
• Russian priest part 2

Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:20, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Neutrality, structure, more context needed

The article fails to report the exact reasoning of the Russian government in outlawing initially specific pieces of JW literature and then the JW church as a whole under the charge of extremism. The explanation of what constitutes extremism under the current Russian laws would be relevant to include, since the article does not link to a separate article on this topic. In the absence of detailed information on the subject of the extremism laws, the reader cannot form an opinion not only about the logic of Russia's persecution of the Jehovah's Witnesses, but also see clearly why the term "persecution" is justified. For each of the key trials, the basic arguments of prosecution and defence should be included for information. Otherwise the article is potentially doing the Jehovah's Witnesses' case a disservice by leaving the reader in the dark about the details.

The allegations of torture should be reported as "alleged" torture, since they were not proven by any independent body. Judging by the article in The Independent, this is a claim that the defendant and defence have made, but which the court has rejected, so regardless of our sympathies the claim must be regarded as pending confirmation.

While it may be interesting to learn that the first female member of the church was imprisoned in 2021, it would be far more important to know how many people have been sentenced to prison or held in arrest without conviction overall as a result of this persecution campaign.

Lastly, the article might benefit from a clearer structure and more subdivisions, because at the moment statements of major developments, commentary from certain quarters, and individual examples of persecution are all combined to form rather lengthy paragraphs. In one instance, events from 2015 are grouped with those from 2009. VampaVampa (talk) 19:35, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

@VampaVampa: You're free to boldly edit the article yourself, you don't need my permission. If you think you can improve it, please do so! I agree that there needs to be more overall context and background. To be quite honest, I've been procastinating reading through this book. There's a million things I wish to accomplish on Wikipedia and because it's a hobby, I tend to bounce around when my interest in any particular subject wanes. It's also really depressing to read about all this stuff sometimes, hence why I've not done much content work in regards to Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany yet, even though I have books about that subject as well. A lot of stuff in the JW topic area could be greatly improved. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:57, 15 December 2023 (UTC)