Talk:Self-managed social centres in the United Kingdom/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: BlackfullaLinguist (talk · contribs) 12:26, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

Hello! I have started a review of this article, thank you to all contributors who have worked on the page. I must admit, it took me a second to get my head this topic, and thankfully your article did the job in the end! The hyperlinking lead me well. My critique with the lead is perhaps to mention the autonomous social centres are not community centres point earlier and mention more political factors like anarchy and that, as it was hard to figure exactly what this was about at first look. Your lead should summarise the topic well for the average person. Anyway, now that I know what I'm dealing with, here are my points:

1. The table of social centres needs an explaining paragraph, and a date of your list, i.e. as of 2019 there are X social centres in the UK.

2. The article needs a more definitive history section, the activist spaces section has some material that should go into a history section, which needs more historical information about how they came to be, any particularities to the UK ones? Some more information on the political nature of them would be useful. A good article should be broad in its coverage.

3. I believe it is sufficiently illustrated

4. It is neutral, however perhaps too neutral, supplying some political information from across the spectrum would help.

In light of all the above, I am unsure how long it will take to bring this article to GA standard. I am putting the review on hold for 7 days for comments, rebuttal and potential edits. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 12:26, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

Initial reply

Hiya thanks for taking on the review and for your initial comments. It's great to have the perspective of an (engaged but) disinterested observer and the suggestions will certainly help to improve the article. This is just a quick response, I'll endeavour to work through your suggestions later today or over the rest of the weekend. Mujinga (talk) 16:15, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

Reply

What I am taking as your points needing action:

1. Move "autonomous social centres are not community centres" higher up in lead
2. Lead needs more mention of political stance of centres
3. List needs explanatory paragraph and date
4. History section required
5. Needs more on political nature of projects

Mujinga (talk) 18:20, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

@BlackfullaLinguist: I've done some work on the article:

1. Move "autonomous social centres are not community centres" higher up in lead - done
2. Lead needs more mention of political stance of centres - done
3. List needs explanatory paragraph and date - done in brief, although I now realise I'm not sure 100% what you were requesting here, can you tell me what needs explaining?
4. History section required - added
5. Needs more on political nature of projects - done, mainly in activities section

Mujinga (talk) 21:05, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

@Mujinga:, thank you for your patience and work on the article! It reads a lot better now, I'm just going through the sources at the moment for the verifiable criteria, but I was just looked at the network section of the page and noticed it's quite small, is there anything we can add to expand that? A good article needs to be broad in it's coverage, or if there is an article elsewhere we can link as a 'full article'. Also, I think the occasional centres section should be made a subsection or the 'activities' section? I'm still trying to determine what the exactly should come under the scope of this article. Do these social centres play any role in politics or political movements? Have they appeared in the news for something? Are they controversial - I can't imagine the squatting is always appreciated? Can you get a cite for this line as well 'Most UK cities have or have had social centre projects.'? And Perhaps the London section should be a subsection heading under the around the UK section - in saying that, is there any information centres on other areas of the country that could be spun in paragraphs about general regions? e.g. Scottish Social centres, Northern England.. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:17, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

hiya, i'll try to work through your questions now:

network section - yes that's all there is really, the network is very young in historical terms and is not mentioned much in secondary sources yet. i'm sure it will have an article in the future!

occasional centres section .. hmm i'll ponder that, in a way it makes sense to put it at the end of the activities section since it would follow on from the mention of owned centres nicely, on the other hand i feel they are important enough a phenomenon in their own right to have their own section

scope - yes it's always a bit hard to classify self-managed social centres since they are many things all at once. i even found it hard working out what GAN subtopic to place the article in. perhaps clicking through to individual centres would help show how they feature in news, can be controversial etc I don't know if it helps to say but i see this an overview article linking to individual notable projects.

'Most UK cities have or have had social centre projects' was intended as an introduction to the list of centres in different cities. I thought it over and it seems better just to chop it out, it's not really needed.

London - ok yes that makes sense, i moved it under the 'Around the UK' section

regions - no it doesn't work like that really, centres tend to be on their own or grouped nationally at the UK level. although centres it is true that in London the centres are linked together.

Mujinga (talk) 16:27, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

since things seem to have stalled here I'll request a new reviewer as per the FAQ, if you do want to carry on with it that would be great! Mujinga (talk) 11:21, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

New reviewer

I might pick up this review soon, but my first comment from a quick read would be that it is much shorter than I would expect and lacks coverage in some obvious areas - 8 of the 26 current centres are in Yorkshire, the North East, and Scotland, but there is basically nothing about them in the article. London has 9 current centres and its own section. Being so short, if I were an expert I would probably pick up other glaring gaps, but as it is I can say that it clearly doesn't detail how these centres function, their legal status, or the appropriate socio-economic relations of people that use them. Kingsif (talk) 03:20, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Okay, review starting. Kingsif (talk) 22:37, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

• Top map is outdated - as it is non-free and has no legitimate rationale any more, it needs to go. If no newer map exists, it is possible to create one with a location map and pins.
• Images and table otherwise fine - the logo is too simple for copyright
• Illustration criteria needs attention
• Sources include various pages from Wordpress blogs (socialcentrestories wordpress com; radicalmanchester wordpress com), 'Freedom News' (which anyone can contribute an article to), 'Organise Magazine' (ditto), a dead link to an equally non-RS (Manchester Mule), and there seems to also be primary sps from one or two of the social centres.
• The following text is all attributed to the home page of a now-dead blog:

• There are also many examples of squatted projects which did not last very long, since the owner quickly regained possession, for example the Bloomsbury social centre and the Bank of Ideas, which was connected to Occupy London. In the 2000s, there was a series of projects squatted by people connected to Reclaim the Streets and the WOMBLES, such as the Radical Dairy, Grand Banks and Institute for Autonomy.
• This then continued until 2011 with the Autonomous London blog

• Sourcing needs major work
• Fails verifiability criteria
• Fails coverage - see comments above, I also question if What links these social centre projects together is the anarchist principle of self-management, which means they are self-organised and self-funding. They are anti-authoritarian and aim to show an alternative to capitalist modes of behaviour. is a widespread philosophy shared by all of these - and I question why most of the activities part is about activism when 11 purposes are suggested, none of which is activism. Also, there is little about the occasional centres so I don't really know what they are - they're not in the main table, and I can't tell if they should be or not.
• Little bit of copyvio from here/ here (archive). Check looks fine besides that.
• Fails copyright criteria (see also the top map comment)
• In the second paragraph of Activities, it tries to explain how social centres are connected in "multiple ways" by using a very long quote about activism which has only a fleeting mention of how movements can be spread through places which can include social centres. First, a quote so long needs to be set apart. Second, this is too tenuous to be sourcing the idea that social centres are all connected.
• How is ownership part of 'activities'?
• Style in general is alright, could be improved, but not bad.
• I'll stop here to note that it's failed. While on the surface it's not poorly-written, that would have been an easier fix than all the sourcing issues and the giant gaps in coverage. Kingsif (talk) 22:37, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Comment

@Kingsif: Thanks for the review, I didn’t get any notifications or else I would have replied earlier. I don’t dispute the fail since you seem to be saying you don’t find the coverage comprehensive enough and I’ll have to think about that, but a quickfail seems harsh since I don’t think the article is a "long way" from having broad coverage. I was actually looking forward to working on this with a reviewer and to be honest it’s a bit hard to work out from this review what the "giant gaps in coverage" are. Regarding sources you’ve got a few things gravely wrong (and the other two things were easy to fix):

• https://socialcentrestories.wordpress.com/ may indeed on a quick glance appear to be just a random blog but actually it is very easy to find out (by reading the article) that it was a means of feeding back the results of a four year ESRC funded project called Autonomous Geographies at the University of Leeds. The website was set up specifically to host an edited paper publication called What’s this place? Stories from Radical Social Centres in the UK and Ireland (ISBN 9780853162704). It really was a great idea to put it on wordpress as free hosting in perpetuity, whereas the website for Autonomous Geographies no longer works. (Also the publication is CC BY NC SA and contains a version of the 2006 map, so I can get around to replacing the image quite easily)

• Freedom News is an anarchist newspaper published for over 100 years, now mainly online since 2014. I do know that it does have an editorial collective, as suggested where it says: "Send article submissions, queries or questions about the paper to editor@freedompress.org.uk" This does not mean "anyone can contribute an article" by any stretch of the imagination, I think you must have been going a bit fast at that point.

• Organise magazine is the edited paper publication of of the Anarchist Federation in the UK, again not seeing a problem here especially when it is just being used as a basic source.

• Manchester Mule was an edited local newspaper in Manchester, with a circulation of 10,000. I fixed the deadlink.

• "primary sps from one or two of the social centres" is too much of a vague comment to know how to answer properly and there is if course WP:SELFSOURCE

• "home page of a now-dead blog" - the article appeared in issue 1 of the paper journal Occupied London, I've added a different archive source

Mujinga (talk) 05:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

• @Mujinga: Thanks for the reply - a message should have been sent, that's odd, but not everything always works when taking over a review. I don't like getting back into reviews when I've closed them and don't think there were any mistakes, but if you want to work on coverage and re-nominate, I've left some general comments below. I've gone over coverage again, but it's not more than the notes already given.

I mentioned the biggest gaps in coverage I found above - that there's next to nothing on anything northern, that it doesn't detail how these centres function, their legal status, or the appropriate socio-economic relations of people that use them (so nothing on why they exist beyond being 'anarchist' and who uses them). So when reading, it gave questions that didn't get answers.

On the sources - first note that the publication of Autonomous Geographies may be CC BY NC SA, but 1. the (NC SA) means commons won't take it, because everything on commons is available free for commercial, which is not NC and obviously not sharing under the same license 2. that doesn't necessarily mean the image is, if it's cited to somewhere else. And again, the image is wildly out of date, so shouldn't be at the top of the article.

You can (should) cite the Autonomous Geographies to itself, using the ISBN. In theory, it would be in a journal or have some doi, but always cite to the article and not just where it's being hosted on Wordpress. You can add a note to the ref with the wordpress url if it's the only place to freely access it.

I still find it hard to believe that all these centres are massively anarchist - certainly, I've seen some places that serve the general purpose and are independent that exist only because community funding is really bad in rural areas - and so neutrality to not push this narrative may need work.

I'm still dubious on the sources that you say are far from open to anyone to write for - are they open about their editorial process, or is it just when people send to the 'editor' it gets spellchecked and published?

If you do want more specifics, please ping me :)

Kingsif (talk) 17:06, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

@Kingsif: Hiya thanks for the reply, yes the problem with the notification was that the review was set back to /GA1 from /GA2 after being previously abandoned, which meant i didn’t get notified, but that’s by the by. I understand why you wouldn’t want to return to the failed review, I’ve had the same thoughts in my limited GA review experience, I’m not certainly interested in an acrimonious dingdong, i only want to improve the article.

So I’m not going to bang on about sources, I’m really adamant they are fine. I don’t think I need to investigate the editorial collective for the individual links, since the goalposts have shifted. The social centres stories always did have an ISBN attached.

As regards coverage, the other reason for the quick fail, I view this as problematic because this subject is close to my area of academic expertise and I remain baffled by your statement “it doesn't detail how these centres function, their legal status, or the appropriate socio-economic relations of people that use them”. I would like some clarification/expansion on that if you don’t mind, because i feel that the article does detail how the centres function and their differing legal statuses, so i must be missing something. On the other hand, i am honestly still struggling to understand what the “appropriate socio-economic relations of people that use them” actually means. If this means you want to know the class of the people using the centres then that will vary in every case and I’m pretty sure there have been no surveys or academic work done on that specific point.

“There's next to nothing on anything northern” - well, the 1 in 12 for example is mentioned seven times in the text, including a picture, so i wouldn’t say there’s nothing about that project and people can of course click through to the The 1 in 12 Club. This criticism is better directed at for example the star and shawdow, since i could include more details here before branching it off to its own page. That however can lead to page imbalance, if some social centres have a few lines and the star has its own paragraph. That section is intended to give an overview, nothing more. Most importantly i see this page as whole as an overview of a specific phenomenon, rather than a page listing every social centre.

“I still find it hard to believe that all these centres are massively anarchist” well that’s your viewpoint and you are welcome to it, but the referenced statements are quoting the work of academics like Chatterton, Hodkinson, Lacey and Pusey and they say the centres are linked by things such as anarchist principles of self-organisation. That's nothing to do with what i think.

Anyway, thanks for your comments they have given food for thought. I would appreciate some clarification about coverage but I’m unfussed if you don’t get to it. The problem for me was not the fail since i acknowledge work can be done to improve the page (and it was my first GAN), but rather the quickfail since i would have thought i could have easily answered most of the problems raised. Finally thanks also for the image advice, images are not my specialty, maybe there is not as quick a fix as i thought! Mujinga (talk) 19:38, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments, I guess the note I have (which is also a bit of a response to that coverage question) is that while the article is being an overview, to be a GA it needs to be comprehensive. To cover in appropriate depth everything about the topic, not just some bits and some areas. If you do expand and then nom again, I'd be happy to look at it. Kingsif (talk) 19:50, 8 January 2020 (UTC)