Talk:Soviet economic blockade of Lithuania

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Joseph2302 (talk) 21:22, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

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• Article history

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• ... that the Soviet economic blockade of Lithuania lasted 75 days? Source: [1], page 292

Improved to Good Article status by Mindaur (talk). Self-nominated at 14:43, 27 June 2021 (UTC).

• Is there nothing more interesting to say about the blockade than just its length? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:06, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Sdkb: Would any of these be more interesting?

• ALT1: ... that during the Soviet economic blockade of Lithuania, queues to petrol stations were observed to reach multiple kilometres? [2]
• ALT2: ... that during the Soviet economic blockade of Lithuania, petrol was rationed to 20 litres per person? [3]

--Mindaur (talk) 20:53, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

IMO, ALT1 is much better! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:57, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Sdkb: OK, what's the correct process here? Should I change the hook above or the reviewer will just pick one? --Mindaur (talk) 11:37, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

The reviewer will pick one, so you're good for now; just wait for someone to come along. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 14:59, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing:
• Neutral:
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:
• Other problems:

Hook eligibility:

• Cited:
• Interesting: - ALT1, not original

QPQ: None required.

Overall: The article has been awarded GA status within 7 days from its appearance, and is long enough (though pretty short for GA standards). The article is also reasonably sourced and is neutral. No plagiarism detected, though a few sources are in Lithuanian, where I assume good faith on behalf of the nominator. The original hook is bland, but ALT1 is fine for me. The editor is QPQ-exempt for now. I'd say alright for the version so far as the DYK nomination goes, so in that context, I am fine with the hook.

However, I have serious doubts about the GA status in this case. Not that I want to nominate it for its revocation right now or that I won't let it go for DYK, but there are several issues which I see as incompatible with GA and should be corrected ASAP. First, the article needs proofreading badly, which I'll do. Bear in mind, though, that I know Russian but not Lithuanian, so if my corrections/best guesses in any way distort what you wanted to say in Lithuanian, let me know. Second, the article in Russian is more expansive than the English version, and I suspect that many more sources can be found in Russian, and probably in Google Scholar/Google Books. This, again, needs a Russian-speaking editor. Even as the "broad coverage" does not necessitate coverage of all aspects of the problem, it should nevertheless be broad, which I don't believe is the case here. I will be of some help there, but it would be best if some Russian-speaking Wikipedian from LT led the effort. I think more hooks could be retrieved from this research, which will probably attract more users to the article.

Long story short: DYK could go, but I strongly believe this GA fails "broad coverage" criterion, therefore I am putting the nomination on hold until these issues are fixed.

Following the discussion on the talk page of the article, I change my vote to the affirmative. The DYK is good to go. 05:09, 2 July 2021 (UTC) Szmenderowiecki (talk) 23:58, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

I responded to you in the talk section of the article (where I believe this discussion belongs to). Mindaur (talk) 11:12, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

On "Broad in its coverage"

Szmenderowiecki: I am responding to your concerns regarding the GA criteria and this article. First, please keep in mind that the article was reviewed by an independent editor. Second, please define the problem clearly.

• "Broad in its coverage" WP:GACR requires the coverage of the main aspects. Note that it explicitly mentions "without going into unnecessary detail" (and there is even a footnote on comprehensiveness). Can you please specify what main aspects are missing?
• In your last "copyedit" commit, you improved the wording in some cases -- thanks for that. Some seemed to be trivia ("suggested" vs "advised", "demanded" vs "ordered" and similar). Some other editors used "Soviet Union" instead of "USSR", while you changed it back. More importantly, under the "copyedit" commit you sneaked in some changes which I had to revert: you included a claim that the blockade was stopped by a court decision, but did not provide any reference; you changed the sentence about the demonstrations, claiming that they were against the "central government" rather than "Soviet regime", when in fact it was the latter (more specifically, the demonstrations were also broadly against the Soviet occupation); you added extra details about 1940s, but that just falls under the "unnecessary detail" mentioned above.
• You suggested the need for Russian sources. Keep in mind that this is English Wikipedia and we primarily try to rely on the English sources. Other languages are perfectly fine as additional sources too, but a particular subject does not imply the "need" for the sources in a particular language. However, if you are going to push for the "Russian view", then make sure your sources are WP:RELIABLE and WP:NPOV. For instance, while working on the article, I conducted an exhaustive search looking for an economic impact of the blockade, because it's a topic concerning economics and it would be a useful addition in the "Consequences" section. In Russian Wikipedia, the article cites Ria Novosti source which claims that the economic impact was an 11% drop of GDP. However, I could not find a single English or Lithuanian source supporting it; the best I could find was a Lithuanian article in an academic journal which claimed that the impact to GDP could not be accurately measured due to overall economic turmoil in 1990. So, I left that out due to contradictory sources (or the lack thereof). Additions and improvements like this could certainly be made, but keep in mind WP:INDISCRIMINATE. By the way, the Russian Wikipedia article is 17,441 bytes, which doesn't seem to be very significantly more than this article.

--Mindaur (talk) 11:10, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

I will answer on the talk page of the article, OK? Just like you suggested. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 11:24, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I thought it was not in the template but in the article, but never mind.

1. I don't mind the review by the independent editor, and I appreciate his efforts. I also trust that he made what he saw as a good review, but if I were him, I wouldn't have allowed the article through. For example, see 1919 Polish coup d'état attempt in Lithuania and 1926 Lithuanian coup d'état, or the 1979 Salvadoran coup d'état. These are longer and markedly more extensive and detailed. Which leads to the following point.

2. The fact that they say broad coverage = description of main points not getting away from the focus of the article does not mean that they should not be broadly told. It does not mean "comprehensive", either, but I'm not asking for "comprehensiveness".

Let's look and compare the "background". The Russian version does not mention the occupation by USSR (btw, USSR=Soviet Union, and I used it interchangeably to avoid repetition), but when you read the English version, you only see the fact that they declared independence, out of the blue, some time after Perestroika, and that Westerners speculated that the blockade was meant to subdue Lithuania. In Russian, you learn that Moscow was trying to have the USSR not fall apart; that Lithuanians refused to acknowledge amendments to the Soviet constitution, which led to their declaration of independence; that Gorbachov tried to lobby Lithuanians to change their mind via celebrities, and only after that failed that they wrote the ultimatum and enforced it (there actually was a Lithuanian attempt too, but they started too late).

The point is, you have mentioned the main fact - that Moscow issued an ultimatum (we don't know what happened with it in Vilnius from the text - did they ignore it, say NFW or tried to negotiate but that didn't help). These main points have to be presented very reasonably, better than for a B-Class article. I have no such feeling at all. If you read WP:GRADE, it says that a GA-class article is "useful to nearly all readers, with no obvious problems", at the same time a more serious researcher would wonder about a lot of details in the text. And it's not wandering off the topic, it's just making a decent prelude, because otherwise I see no difference between class B and GA, but there should be.

As for the sources, which I said have not been used in full, we have this, this, this and this (some of these are not open-access, but in most cases, that's not a problem for me). The last three links all appeared on the first page of Google Scholar. In fact, that means that an article that is meant to be at least a very reasonable representation of the situation of the time has not even touched a lot of scholarly literature (including any in Russian) pertaining to the article (it did, though, to some extent). How can we say then that it is in any way broad?

As for the rest of the article, it seems to be overreliant on RIA Novosti, but we can check the claims one-by-one as they appear elsewhere (for instance, the formation of a Committee to combat the economic consequences of the crisis is one of the main points not mentioned in the article, but its creation had consequences for the Lithuania's economy.

The Russian article isn't that big, but remember that we are speaking about readable prose.

3. As for my additions: the court one was unfortunate, because for some reason I read "Supreme Council of Lithuania" as "Supreme Court", my bad; I don't contest the revert about central government, because I only wanted to avoid repetition in the sentences and make it stylistically sound.

My task is not to "push" the Russian POV, as I generally agreed that the article was fairly neutral, though I believe that the Russian perspective might be useful and that there are some scholarly resources in Russian that could be also retrieved for the article. I am OK with helping with it, because, as I said, my problem is the "broad" criterion; I'm fine with the rest.

4. As for additions from the Russian article, we can do that selectively. For instance, we can just limit to the "enormous damage" as has been described, because I couldn't find the calculations, either and RIA Novosti is not exactly the best source for that contentious claim, but there are other areas from which we could expand to have a broad coverage of main issues, without wandering into trivia.

Sorry for the excessively long answer and a gap in time, but I had to explain every point and I had to have some time for research into scholarly sources. All of this also does not mean that you, or the reviewer, haven't done a great job - in fact, the article is among the better which I have read on Lithuania, but it doesn't seem to capture all the main points for the topic, which I can help remedy. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 21:35, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Your first argument boils down to "the article is not long enough". However, that is not a criteria for GA. You seem to even agree with that in your second point. You mention Google Scholar search, but: 1) in fact, I don't see those 3 sources in my top 3 results; it might be news to you, but Google may adjust results based on your location, language, previous search history, etc; moreover, they depend on exact phrasing of the search terms 2) while useful, it is your subjective metric which has little relevance to the GA criteria. For a relatively short article, it already has 19 sources; they are by no means worse or less representative than your Google Scholar search. So, I find such argumentation quite arbitrary and not convincing. However, I assume WP:GOODFAITH, so let's try get to the main issues here:

• You seem to argue that the article lacks the background, but it mentions the occupation in 1940s and the liberalization effort in 1980s which lead to Singing Revolution. You mentioned lack of clarity about the ultimatum, but it's clearly written in the background section -- the second paragraph -- explaining what was the Lithuanian position (rejection + appeal to the West) and what was the Soviet strategy. Now, there could be more narrative here (e.g. on state continuity of the Baltic states), perhaps better explaining that the Lithuanians considered the occupation as illegal and saw a chance to restore the country, while USSR was desperately trying to maintain the control (== "trying to have the USSR not fall apart"). However, keep in mind that this is not an article about the independence restoration. It's an article about a subset of the events which happen in the broader context. BBC Russian article you mentioned provides a great overview of that context, but it's just not what this Wikipedia article is about. Note that the economic blockade lasted 75 days i.e. it is a relatively short period we are focusing on. For more background, the reader can always click on Singing Revolution or, for more aftermath, on January Events (Lithuania) (even if both of these articles require improvements, but that is a completely separate issue). So, if you would like to have more background, then I think we should find some balance where we don't go too far out of scope, avoiding repetition of the other articles.
• Some information might be indeed interesting to add, e.g. about the Committee to combat the economic consequences, although I don't see it being essential (== main aspect). On the other hand, "Gorbachov trying to lobby Lithuanians via celebrities" is a quite irrelevant (even if "interesting") detail in the big picture, because the clash was much more fundamental. We don't really need to document every statement or action carried out by each party, with exhaustive timelines (even if some WP articles do that); we stick with the essence and due weight.
• You suggest "enormous damage", but how is that more encyclopedic than "significant economic damage" i.e. the current phrasing in the article? Having said that, I'd like to improve the section on consequences, but I think we will struggle to find reliable sources because: the economic turmoil in 1990 was profound, the institutions were weak (just try to imagine the statistics department at that particular time) and a lot of data was probably just missing.

Having said all this, please don't be discouraged from improving this article, but let's discuss specific improvements and reasons why DYK nomination is on hold. --Mindaur (talk) 16:16, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

I thought it for a while and I decided to do it this way.

I give green light for the DYK nomination, because after some thought, I came to the conclusion that that hold based on a potential challenge to the good-faith awarded GA status is dubious at best and hostile towards other editors at worst (sorry if I caused some disruption about that), and could be read as an assumption of bad faith/incompetence on behalf of the reviewer (and you). That's not what I want and I don't want to question editors' capabilities I don't know. Though I still see issues with the article, that will be fixed.

The stuff mentioned should rather be discussed in the article and while actively editing it, so that we don't waste our time discussing potential weaknesses when we can remedy that by editing. As I said, I will try to mine for Russian-language resources (particularly scholarship) and probably some of the English-language ones that were not captured in the article, and in that way, the frail GA status as I see it will become a solid one. In any case, I have tried to outline the potential problems, but I am ready to work on that.

With that, I change my review decision, and I hope to return to the article shortly. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 05:07, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the constructive approach. Let me know if I can be of any help here. --Mindaur (talk) 11:09, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

@Mindaur: I promised to make some expansion on the topic of the Soviet economic blockade; I hope I've delivered (if a little too late). I invite you to review the edit made about the article. If any translations from Russian or Polish are needed, feel free to ask me for them. (PS. No, that's not how I saw a "broad" GA article. I decided to go a little further than that). Szmenderowiecki (talk) 19:44, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Szmenderowiecki: Thanks for working on this. I think you did a great job in collecting a lot of useful information with appropriate sources. I am also pleased to see couple new nice illustrations!

However, I really think a lot of the material doesn't belong to this article. Specifically, I think the lead/intro, "Background" and "Restoration of independence" sections are way too long; "Rising tensions with the minorities" doesn't exactly belong here either, although should be mentioned for the context.

Let me try to explain. If you look at the independence restoration process and chronology, it generally looks as follows:

... Glasnost and Perestroika → mass meetings and protests by Sąjūdis, culminating in Baltic Way → declaration of independence → Soviet pressure and intimidation, which includes the economic blockade and assaults on border posts → attempted military crackdown i.e. January Events → new status quo (further cemented with the collapse of the Soviet Union)

These events are collectively referred to as the Singing Revolution, with its own background (dissident and underground movement; before that, armed resistance, etc) and aftermath. As I hope you can see, the economic blockade is just one piece in the bigger puzzle of history. Having a section on "Rising tensions with the minorities" is a valuable material, but it is not a narrow part of the economic blockade piece. Because the historical cause-consequence relation here is beyond the event of the blockade.

Do you see my point? The good thing is that your material can be moved/incorporated into the Singing Revolution article. --Mindaur (talk) 21:18, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

What you write makes sense (and indeed, my understanding of the sequence of events makes sense), but preserving the necessary background for understanding the processes leading to the blockade will IMHO be hard if the text is shortened or moved. In fact, most of the sources did not give it more than a paragraph or two of attention (surrounding them with the context of Baltic states or some long-term causes in Lithuania), so summarising the sources based on such a jigsaw puzzle was somewhat difficult.

In any case, I don't really know how to do that, so if I could ask you to move what you consider duplicating content to the other articles and rewrite the sections as you see it fit so that the necessary background is not lost? Thank you.

As for the minorities, in fact, the reason it is here is that a) there is a temporal relation to that (I have found no indication of some sort of conspiracy of the Polish leadership to declare it during the blockade so as to exert pressure on Vilnius to reject the independence declaration, but who knows); b) I've found two scholars who have asserted that Poles were helped during the blockade due to the pro-Soviet orientation of at least its leadership (and the scholars' conclusion is made on the basis of two interviews in 1990, one with Ciechanowicz (in Polish) and the other with his fellow Brodowski (in Russian), to neither of which I have access). As in the previous paragraph, I have no idea whatsoever how to shorten it, either. (and I find it rather long for what should be more of an aside topic, not least because the other articles are inadequately developed). At least the articles to which the content could be moved are indicated, therefore so long as the topic is at least contextually covered well, I will be fine. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 21:53, 1 August 2021 (UTC)