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Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of deaths at the Berlin Wall/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by Giants2008 21:12, 21 October 2011 [1].

List of deaths at the Berlin Wall

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List of deaths at the Berlin Wall (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): violet/riga [talk] 22:58, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A recently created article but I believe it now covers the topic in sufficient depth to meet FL criteria. I can't see any significant gaps in the content.

Regarding the criteria:

  1. Prose: Written by two people and copy-edited by others, I believe it to be of a high enough standard.
  2. Lead: I think that the lead covers the topic well without going into too much detail.
  3. Comprehensiveness: The list is fixed at 136 entries and this covers them all.
  4. Structure: The table is sortable on six of the seven columns.
  5. Style:
    • It looks quite nice and the charts give a good representation of the information. Only list items with articles are linked.
    • Lots of appropriate images throughout the text, all of which should have decent captions. The images used within the list are the only free ones that I know to be available; an agreement with the ZZF to use their images would be nice but difficult to obtain.
  6. Stability: No edit wars; the content is not likely to change significantly.

violet/riga [talk] 22:58, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved comments from PumpkinSky talk 01:04, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support PumpkinSky talk 01:03, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved comments from The Rambling Man (talk) 15:58, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comments
  1. Avoid bold links in the lead.
  2. "before it was opened in" perhaps "before it was demolished"?
  3. "A historic research group" -> "An historic..." and what makes it "historic"?
  4. "Ida Siekmann was the first of 98 people to die while attempting to escape. On 21 August 1961, the entrance and windows of 48 Bernauer Straße were barred." entirely unclear to me what relationship these sentences have with each other.
  5. "apartment before the firefighters were able to open" why were firefighters there? You haven't explained this.
  6. So was Siekmann actually trying to escape a fire or just get over the wall or kill herself? Confused.
  7. I think I would use a para of the lead to explain briefly the significance of the wall and the explain that it divided the city so people wanted to "escape" from east to west..
  8. "were found guilty and" of what?
  9. "Identifying the death toll" section, not a single wikilink.

Let's deal with these issues before going on to review the next few sections. The Rambling Man (talk) 17:35, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Easily fixed, and probably faster than it took for you to write that
  • The lesson would have been obvious from the edit summary. It's nothing personal, it's long been a bugbear of mine when minor things are highlighted that could have been fixed faster than it takes to write about them. violet/riga [talk] 14:40, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, not really. When I review an article I do it (usually) from top to bottom and don't need the distraction of making minor edits. I also want people to gain a better understanding of our requirements to comply with WP:MOS. That's why I noted it. The Rambling Man (talk) 14:42, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Technically it was opened but I've reworded it now
  2. Should really have been "historical", but also reworded
  3. Rearranged and put in a new section
  4. Removed reference to them - irrelevant
  5. Reworded
  6. I've done this in part but really don't want to go into too much detail - that's the point of the several other articles on the topic
  7. Manslaughter, added
  8. Not really that many wikilinks needed but a couple have been added.
violet/riga [talk] 19:39, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Further comments

  1. Any need to abbreviate ZZF when you don't use it.
  2. Similarly ZERV.
  3. Linking. You link Checkpoint Charlie Museum in the lead but not in the first section. However, you link West Berlin in the lead and again (twice) in the second section. Do you have a consistent strategy for relinking?
  4. Do you have a direct ref for the direct quote "death strip"?
  5. "escapers" aren't they usually referred to as escapees?
  6. "were the deadliest inner city districts" could be misleading, you mean the district from which the most fatalities came?
  7. "20% were married men.." avoid starting sentences with a number, perhaps "Married men accounted for 20%..."
  8. Sortable table so everything that's linked should be linked everytime.
  9. "Spree - defective" needs an en-dash not a spaced hyphen per WP:DASH.
  10. What's NVA?

The Rambling Man (talk) 09:38, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. A commonly used abbreviation particulary in sources; included for information
  2. As above
  3. Delinked
  4. One added
  5. It is more correct, yes, and I've changed them so it's now consistent
  6. Corrected
  7. Corrected
  8. Delinked Spree and Havel which I believe were the only two
  9. Corrected
  10. Expanded and linked
  1. While not mandatory, alt text would be good for the images.
  2. Consider the use of the {{lang}} template for your German phrases which you translate to English.
  3. Why are the various victim references on the line below the victim names?
  4. You should use row and col scopes for WP:ACCESS, see MOS:DTT.

The Rambling Man (talk) 15:58, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. The captions are descriptive but some ALTs could be added.
  2. I'll have a look around to find them
  3. The table could be very wide and adding a further column for a reference would not work well. Having them on the same line of the name has a similar ugly effect. Placing the reference in any other column would make it look like only that item of data is being referenced.
    I don't think a single column for them at the end would be a problem. Nor placing them next the names. Right now, I think this is the only article I've seen in all of Wikipedia to use this approach! The Rambling Man (talk) 15:58, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Having tried both options it really does make the table horribly wide and, consequently, horribly word-wrapped on lower resolutions. violet/riga [talk] 16:18, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  4. I've added col scopes - row scopes could be added but I'm considering that at the moment
violet/riga [talk] 14:40, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: Looks very very good and with an interesting introduction.

Resolved comments from bamse (talk) 23:29, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
#Is it possible (i.e. are there any statistics) to compare the number of Berlin Wall deaths to those on the inner German border?
  1. IMHO, the "deaths by year" statistics would be better as a plot/graph with time on the horizontal axis, since the three tables kind of cut the (continuous) time axis.
  2. Does the map need a date?

bamse (talk) 15:51, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. An interesting idea and there is a lot of information at Escape attempts and victims of the inner German border. However, we would be talking about a different time frame and could run into WP:SYNTHESIS problems.
  2. That could work, perhaps even as a cumulative graph. The current method might be better for WP:ACCESS (thought I've not tried) and does effectively communicate the number of deaths - for me that's the key thing and I worry that a chart alone would reduce the information. Having the table as well as the chart might be an alternative.
  3. No date exists in the image description but it could be figured out - it was basically the same for the duration though.
violet/riga [talk] 16:18, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Sounds reasonable.
  2. OK, just the current method is ok. It was just a suggestion.
  3. So all checkpoints existed from the start?
bamse (talk) 17:01, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've improved the caption. violet/riga [talk] 17:36, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Just a few more questions/comments...

  1. Is "pneumonia" an "event" in the sense of the others?
  2. "Shot with bathing" -> "Shot while bathing"?
  3. "...suffocated in the sand that entered the cab." Could you add where that sand came from?
  4. For those entries where the event predates the date of death, it would be interesting to have a bit more information in my opinion such as "died in hospital",... (if applicable).
  5. "Shot while fleeing" Fleeing from/to where?
  6. Was Hans-Peter Hauptmann shot at the day of the argument (25 April) or later?
  7. Should note "d" be attached to the name rather than to the event?
  8. Does note "e" only apply to those that are marked or to all cases of drowning?
  9. Please check whether "Berlin.de" and "Chronik-der-mauer.de" are indeed publishers or rather "works" (per template documentation of Template:Cite web).
  10. Wikilinking of publishers appears inconsistent. E.g. why is "Deutsche Welle" not linked? Other examples exist.
  11. Non-English reference titles need translations.
  12. Ref 21 has "(in German)" while others have "(German)" in bold.

bamse (talk) 23:29, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Expanded
  2. Corrected
  3. Expanded
  4. All died in the hospital - note added above the table to state this
  5. Clarified
  6. Clarified
  7. Probably better - done
  8. Clarified
  9. Corrected
  10. Corrected (I didn't know there were articles)
  11. Corrected
  12. Corrected
All fixed now, I believe. violet/riga [talk] 21:45, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Better, but did Rudolf Urban "jump" (in table) or "fall" (in footnote)?
  2. OK
  3. I am confused about this. The source says that he hit a "property wall on the West Berlin side" and "Upon impact with the property wall he was buried in sand". Can't imagine really what it looked like, but it appears not to be sand from the death strip, no?
  4. OK
  5. OK
  6. OK
  7. OK
  8. OK
  9. OK
  10. OK
  11. Refs, 9, 10, 11, 12 are still without translation it seems.
  12. OK
One more thing, in ref 6, do you reference the wikipedia article Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung or rather "Chronik-der-mauer.de". If the latter, I believe, that "Chronik-der-mauer.de" should come first. bamse (talk) 22:49, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
1 - Clarified
3 - Sorted - the sand was in the truck
11 - All now done I believe
Ref 6 has been reworked.
violet/riga [talk] 23:08, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support bamse (talk) 00:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Quick comments –

  • Legal cases: "Numerous guards were the same ones who had been awarded a Medal for Exemplary Border Service or an other award for the killing." "an other" → "another"?
  • Deaths: In the table, it would be nice if the blank cells had a dash of some type in them, for a more attractive appearance.
  • Rudolf Urban: Don't think Pnuemonia needs to be capitalized in this entry's note. Giants2008 (27 and counting) 19:44, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The two typos have easily been sorted and the blanks in the table have been filled in except for the images column, where I feel that it wouldn't look particularly good. violet/riga [talk] 23:13, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved comments from Parutakupiu (talk) 21:28, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comments:
  • Try to be consistent in the use of "wall" or "Wall".
  • In the lead section, you render ZZF as "Centre for Contemporary Historical Research", but then in the following sections ("Identifying the death toll" and "Deaths") you have it as "Centre for Research on Contemporary History Potsdam".
  • "... the East German authorities declared that the windows and doors on that side of the building..." – Which building?
  • Place a comma after the year in "In the early morning of 22 August 1961 Ida Siekmann..." and "On 8 March 1989 Winfried Freudenberg...". I'm sure there are other instances like this...
  • Typo in "The deaths of a victim would be stated..." ("East German responses to deaths" section)?
  • "Two other key members of the National Defence Council, chairman Erich Honecker and Stasi leader Erich Mielke, were also investigated along with the others."
  • Could you provide a first column that numbers each deceased person? So one can see, for instance, who was the 50th or 100th person to die in the Wall.
    • Good. I noticed you attributed widths to most columns, but I think you could remove them. I've tested and the default widths are not much different from the ones you chose, so you can let the table's content define its size and accomodate to each user's browser resolution. You could also add something like a hash symbol (#) to the first column header. Parutakupiu (talk) 19:49, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd turn the table notes into a "Footnotes" section proper.
  • I'd strike out Eastern Bloc emigration and defection and Bernauer Straße from the "See also" section, as they've been mentioned in the article before.
  • You have five references from different pages of the 2011 book by Hertle & Nooke, and you give the full bibliographical information in the first citation (ref #2). I think you could provide the complete book information in a separate "Bibliography" section, and reduce that ref. #2 to a format similar to all the other refs from that book. Parutakupiu (talk) 00:24, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support gladly. Good work! Parutakupiu (talk) 21:28, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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