Talk:Schism of the Russian Church/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Pagliaccious (talk · contribs) 01:33, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Ganesha811 (talk · contribs) 19:55, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi! I'll be reviewing this article using the template below. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them here. This is a big topic so it may be a complex review - please bear with me if it takes a couple days to make substantive comments, as I need to read up a little. —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:55, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Hello Ganesha811. Please take your time. I am on a trip until the 12th, so I may not be very quick to respond until I return. Kind regards, Pagliaccious (talk) 23:35, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi, Ganesha811. I've had my eye on this page for a little bit. I am concerned that this GA may fail comprehensiveness and that this will not be immediately apparent to those who do not speak Russian; this page is less than a quarter the size of the Russian-language page (114,288 bytes vs 28,439). Part of that is a (probably excessive) play-by-play timeline on the Russian page, but I believe significant portions may be missing from the English-language article. Given my relative inexperience at GAR, I felt unprepared to adjudicate this, so I did not choose to review. Since you're much more experienced, I figured you could use this information to make a more informed call.

@Pagliaccious: This article is in excellent shape otherwise and should pass if Ganesha judges this to be broad enough for GA. Should it not pass based on comprehensiveness, I'm happy to help build the page further if you need. ThaesOfereode (talk) 12:24, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Hello @ThaesOfereode: I appreciate your comments very much. There is no need to shy away from adjudicating if you feel that the article is unready. What in particular do you think that the English article is missing that it could expand on, based on the Russian article? There are a few things I immediately notice, beyond the play-by-play that you mention. First is a cataloguing of all of the liturgical changes, accompanied by a long section on the origin of rites such as the sign of the cross. I felt that the changes were too minute (besides the book-revisions, sign of the cross, etc) and a detailed background better suited for another article, but for comprehensiveness some of this could certainly be included in the existing "Earlier reforms" section, perhaps renamed to something like "Background". Another change that could be made is a broader description of the geopolitical background. I did not mention the annexation of "Little Russia" as the Russian article does, nor do I go into the background of Nikon to explain his political ambitions. Please let me know what suggestions you have, or if there are any works in Russian that I could refer to. It seems to me that many English sources focus more on the aftermath or political significance of the reforms rather than the liturgical details of the reforms themselves.

On the subject of byte-counts and readable prose: I believe that the English article's prose is roughly half the byte-length of the prose of the Russian article, ignoring the "Chronology" section in the Russian article: on xtools, the Russian article has 34,213 bytes of prose (this tool ignores the bulleted "Chronology" list) and the English article 17,292. However, to my understanding, if both pages are stored in UTF-8 and the English characters are chiefly ASCII, then it should take about 2 bytes to encode every Cyrillic character but only 1 byte to encode a Latin character, meaning the readable (non-chronology) prose sections have roughly the same number of characters. As for information-per-character or other metrics to compare the two language articles, that is even more beyond my ken than character encodings.

Please do not hesitate to comment on whatever is lacking in the article. I would very much appreciate any suggestions you would have to improve the article's comprehensiveness. Kind regards, Pagliaccious (talk) 16:41, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you both for your comments - I will take this into account as I begin the review. I do not speak or read Russian, but will do my best to give the article a fair and thorough review nevertheless! —Ganesha811 (talk) 18:51, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Happy to help. Feel free to ping me with any questions or assistance you might need, including Russian source review. ThaesOfereode (talk) 23:40, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Appreciate it, I will be kicking off the review today. —Ganesha811 (talk) 14:23, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your gracious response; I sincerely appreciate it. Re: byte-size, I agree that it's not the best measure, but I wanted to demonstrate the scope of the difference: one of magnitude, not two or three paragraphs. I'm not sure how the calculation works, but I couldn't get the "readable text" function to work on ru.WP, so I went with bytes. In short, it was a dumb way to frame it; I did not mean in any way to minimize your work. As for what I think may be necessary to the page's comprehension, I must admit that my Russian is a little rusty, but it seems like a good contextualization for the reader would be helpful. In particular, I think Nikon's political ambitions/the political climate – especially since they frame the event – and later appraisals and effects. Catherine the Great – to say the least of her, a towering figure in Russian history – called Nikon "личность возбуждающая во мне отвращение" and wrote negatively about the reforms. It seems noteworthy that Hilarion Alfeyev "считает это национальной трагедией" in 2021; it shows a) that the reforms are still relevant to modern Orthodox discourse/ecumenism, b) how they are viewed in the modern context, and c) that there are modern efforts (or the appearance of such) to address the schism. It might be worth digging deeper to see if other metropolitans or patriarchs have commented recently.

If something like background may be better suited to another article, I should still recommend summing the most pertinent parts of it up here, for the ignorant reader (i.e., a reader ignorant of this topic/period/religion/etc.) and placing an appropriate {{main}} or {{further}} tag. You're totally right that it has the potential to begin to creep out of the summary style demanded for GA (or indeed all articles), but I don't think a mention of Little Russia's annexation will violate it so long as it is pertinent to the topic at hand, but I will let you decide what is pertinent enough to add and what should be left out. All the best, ThaesOfereode (talk) 23:39, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

This article is now at the GA standard. Congrats to Pagliaccious and any others who worked on it! —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	As is my usual practice, I've made prose tweaks myself to save us both time. Let me know if there are any changes you object to. No objections. The prose improvements are very welcome.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	No issues, pass.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	Please add publisher locations for those sources without them - or alternately, remove the publisher locations from all sources. If you are able to add ISSN numbers to most sources, that would be an improvement too. I've removed the locations and added ISSN/ISBNs where missing. For two older Russian sources, I was only able to find OCLC numbers. Crummey is given as Robert for one book and Robert O for another - please make sure this is consistent. Done Where book authors have Wikipedia articles, please link them in the Bibliography (such as Nikolay Kapterev)? Done What is the date of the Solovyov source? What page # is being cited here? It's an enormous work. I've added a year and page numbers for the source I have in print. For the online (pageless) source linked, the two paragraphs cited begin "В назначенный день, в пятницу 23 числа..." and "Между тем раскольники не тратили времени...". Pass, issues addressed.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	Could you describe Bolshakoff's work a little more and make the case for its reliability? He seems like an interesting fellow, but not an academic, and something of an ecumenical evangelical. His book is a small work written for an English-speaking audience meant to describe non-mainstream currents in Russian faith. Bolshakoff earned a DPhil in Divinity from Oxford and the book has an extensive bibliography, admittedly only listing "select" works which were expected to be available in American libraries and colleges. Sounds acceptable, thanks. Meyendorff seems like an interesting source as an Orthodox academic and historian based out of a seminary. He is likely reliable, but please ensure that his work is being used neutrally and not to support controversial claims. I don't think that anything in the two sentences which for which it is referenced is particularly controversial. The information can be verified in other sources, so if you feel during a read-through that these claims should be corroborated by additional sources, I can certainly add a few. I'd add another relevant source to back up the same sentences in the article, but generally sounds fine. Is Rumsey the author of the work, or was she the curator of the exhibit at the LoC? What exactly is the Rumsey source? It is a kind of exhibition catalog in which photographs/scans of each item are accompanied by a short description, and each chapter of the catalogue has a short historical preface. The preface of the opening chapter ("Book Culture in Russia") is cited. I believe that Rumsey is simply the author of the source; in some online catalogues V.P. Budaragin is listed as a second author, as he is the member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who was responsible for loaning the materials to the Library of Congress. In any case, I've added a link if you'd like to take a look. I'd add Budaragin as a second author, but otherwise sounds good. Done There are a few 19th-century sources. I appreciate that they are not inherently unreliable, but are there any concerns with using sources this old, which were written in the Tsarist Orthodox context? This is an interesting point. So far as I see it, there are three major periods in Old Believer studies: historical accounts during Tsarist rule, works by émigrés during Communist rule, and works by Russian and foreign scholars after the thaw, when it became feasible for foreigners to access archives and visit Old Believer communities. Robert Crummey describes some of these trends in an article on the subject of Old Believer study. Communists did not normally permit religious studies outside of a materialist context, and (from my limited, foreigner perspective) this church schism seems to have been too obscure to warrant any serious Marxist-permitted study. I've tried to include sources from all of these periods. As far as WP:NPOV concerns about using these Tsarist-era sources, I've tried to restrict these sources to only historical/factual claims rather than broader "impact" or "significance" claims, but perhaps a Russian native or subject expert may be better suited to answer these concerns. Sounds reasonable - I'll keep an eye on this issue as we keep moving forward. One more thing - are there more details available about Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia in 'Further Reading'? The author isn't showing up in the citation for some reason. What connection does it have to the Schism? —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:08, 14 October 2024 (UTC) I believe the dash is a style convention (author mask) meant for works by the same author as the work which precedes the dash (in this case, Zenkovsky), like a ditto mark. This "Further reading" section is a bit of a relic from an older revision of the article, predating inline citations. I moved all of the sources to "Further reading" and added them back to "References" as needed. These sources were previously listed as general references, but had nothing to do with the content of the article, meaning they were left in "Further reading". I've removed this section following Wikipedia:Further reading, as these sources only mentioned the schism in passing, not treating it as a main subject. I'll take another look to see if the Council of Florence can be mentioned in the background section though, since three of the five sources describe it. I've looked at these three sources now, and in fact only one mentions the Russian schism, but not in much connection to the Council of Florence: it discusses the concept of Third Rome, which is already mentioned in the article. Issues addressed / discussed, pass on sourcing.
	2c. it contains no original research.	Pass, none found.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	Spot checked 4 sources with a couple citations each while looking at comprehensiveness. No issues found. Pass.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	Have looked over the comments above, the Russian version of the article, and skim-read a couple of the more accessible parts of a few sources, I think this article is comprehensive enough for GA. It's probably not at FA standard, but it's a good encyclopedic summary of the schism that leaves out nothing major. More detail could always be added, but this is a high-quality summary, as it should be. Pass.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	No significant areas of overdetail, any minor issues can be handled in prose review.
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	A couple of small tweaks during prose review to address slightly non-neutral language - no other issues, pass.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	Pass, no issues.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	Pass, no issues.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	The images are well-chosen and interesting, but some of the captions could be improved. Why are they placed where they are and what are they showing? The caption should give more than title and artist. The lead image and Kivshenko painting both need modified captions. For the others, they are better, but some tweaks to keep the focus could be implemented. If the images are inaccurate in any significant way (as they were all painted hundreds of years later) that should be mentioned. Issue addressed, any small tweaks can be handled in prose review.
	7. Overall assessment.

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.