Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Auschwitz concentration camp/1

Auschwitz concentration camp

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Result: Several improvements were made to the article and the discussion was closed on 25 October 2018 — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 11:30, 25 October 2018 (UTC).[reply]
I think this article is generally very good quality for the breadth of the topic that it is expected to cover, and certainly a high B class. However, I think there is some important information that is missing in the article and I am also concerned about the quality of sources. Overall, the USHMM entry on Auschwitz in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos is a good reference for balance and which topics should be covered, and can be downloaded for free on the USHMM website. Specific comments follow. Catrìona (talk) 00:59, 20 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Coverage

The guards and who they were is not explored, especially the large proportion of Volksdeutsche, Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht soldiers assigned to Auschwitz towards the end of the war.
Prisoner hierarchy; the "kapo" vs. regular prisoner was not a one-way distinction, since there were many privileged positions: ie lagerkapo who supervised work details and blockalteste who supervised each barracks, as well as various types of clerks. Y Although some were in fact corrupt and brutal, much of the prisoner hierarchy was involved in the Auschwitz resistance.
Specificity on the selection process: It states children and elderly, but not that the exact age ranges that the doctors were looking for. My understanding is that those younger than 15-16 or older than 40-45 were murdered immediately.
Auschwitz was the first place that Zyklon B was used, and the first prisoners to be gassed were Soviet POWs (USHMM 206) Y
That selection was used on surviving inmates to murder those who were worn out and not able to work, substituting them with new arrivals. Y
Other than the Hungarian Jews, the murder of the prisoners at the Theresienstadt family camp, arrivals from the Lodz ghetto, and arrivals from Theresienstadt in late September-late October 1944 who accounted for most of the last victims in the gas chambers. Y
Survival rates for different types of prisoners, for instance Polish prisoners were allowed to receive food parcels and this greatly improved their survival rate compared to other prisoners, until the fall of 1944 when the postal system was disrupted.
Of inmates registered into the camp, 49% died at Auschwitz, a higher percentage than other concentration camps, even Mauthausen, which was graded more severely. (USHMM 205)
How the policy of keeping the Reich "Judenrein" affected the Auschwitz population; in late 1943 and early 1944 many "Aryan" prisoners were sent west to work in forced labor in concentration camps in Germany. Only in the spring of 1944 did this policy change and Jews began to be sent westwards. During the spring to fall of 1944, Auschwitz was largely a screening/transit camp for new arrivals who were often put through selection and had those chosen for labor sent on to other camps without being registered.
Partly because of this policy, the subcamp population was almost entirely Jewish (USHMM 221)
The inefficiency of the labor regime. According to Yad Vashem, at times almost 50% of prisoners were not working.
Almost no information on the Political Department.
The percentage of Auschwitz guards who were tried for crimes was less than 10%, most of these by Poland. (USHMM 207) Y This is covered in the "Trials of war criminals" section. - Diannaa
"Organizing" as a form of resistance and survival. (p. 212 and elsewhere) Y this is already covered in the section "Escapes, resistance, and the Allies' knowledge of the camps". I have added a bit more. - Diannaa. According to USHMM, the SS guards were so corrupt that prisoners bribed them into allowing them to bring in explosives for the Sonderkommando uprising.
Sabotage, USHMM 217. Y Sabotage is covered, not with a separate section, but here and there. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 23:26, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality and balance

Overreliance on the testimony of Miklos Nyiszli for conditions in the camp. Not only is this a primary source, Nyiszli was only at Auschwitz for the last several months, and he did not see an overview of conditions in other parts of the complex. I think we should reference scholarly sources for things like how much food the prisoners received. N see below. - Diannaa
The "death toll" section gives many estimates, but only a limited idea of which of these numbers are widely accepted today.
In the USHMM encyclopedia, it states that prisoners had only one or two Sundays per month off work (p. 223)

Hi Catrìona. A couple of general comments. It looks like you have access to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and found some good material to improve the article. If you don't mind me asking, is there some reason why you have not improved the article yourself from this source? A second problem is suggesting content that you think needs to be included and then trying to find supporting sources. That's backwards - a better plan is to find out what the available sources have to say and then working on the article using those sources. That's what we did when we re-wrote this article for GA. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 11:58, 20 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A second question: Can you please be specific about which GA criteria is not met? Your heading "Coverage" implies that you think it fails some part of criterion #3, but as far as I can see the present version of the article meets criterion 3A which reads "it addresses the main aspects of the topic"; which main aspects do you think are missing from the current version of the article? — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 12:09, 20 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Catrìona, would you please say which main aspects are missing? Otherwise it's hard to know how to proceed with the review. In case it helps, see the GA criteria and the accompanying essay, WP:GANOT (in particular the "broad in its coverage" section). SarahSV ^(talk) 16:16, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure how you came to the conclusion that I was not working from sources when I came up with the above list. I was also clear about which criteria were not met, namely broadness of coverage. Although I'm happy to help fix the article, many of the issues are non-trivial to solve. I am actually familiar with the GA criteria, and the reason why I believe that it is not met in this case is that, per accepted research practices, the USHMM encyclopedia counts as the type of high quality tertiary source that should be used to determine weight and coverage. Furthermore, the editors note in the introduction that the entries on major camps such as Auschwitz are extremely brief compared to the scholarship on them. So, I think it is reasonable to conclude that any issue (for example, sabotage) which receives significant coverage there could be considered a main aspect of the topic. You can download the encyclopedia for free at the USHMM website if you want to check. Catrìona (talk) 11:45, 26 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Catrìona: there are numerous high-quality Auschwitz sources. There's no need to be guided by just one. In addition, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos entries are long—Auschwitz I by Charles Sydnor, Auschwitz II by Franciszek Piper, and Auschwitz III by Florian Schmaltz, plus the sub-camps—so it isn't realistic to expect a GA to reflect them. What the entries are excellent for is their listing of the key sources. If you want to compare this article to a shorter encyclopaedia entry, you could try Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What's needed for this review is that you list the main aspects that are missing. Or else work to develop them in the article. As WP:GAR says, "the aim is not to delist the article, but to fix it." It would be better to open a talk-page discussion listing what's missing, preferably with a source for each aspect. That would give us something to work with. SarahSV ^(talk) 18:57, 26 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I don't see anywhere in the essay WP:Identifying reliable sources (history) which you linked to where it recommends using tertiary sources to write articles. That said, it is an essay, and cannot supercede the content guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources, part of which (WP:RSPRIMARY) states that Wikipedia articles should be written primarily based on secondary sources, not tertiary sources.

I have downloaded the four available PDF files (Volume 1 Part A, Volume 1 Part B, Volume II part A, Volume II part B). I have looked at page 217 as suggested (page 217 of Volume 1 Part A), and it says that construction of the plant at Monowitz was delayed due to sabotage. Examination of search results on the word "sabotage" gives various other examples of sabotage and suspected sabotage that took place at the main camps and the subcamps. I am going to bring in in inter-library loan the book The Nazi Concentration Camps, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984) which has a chapter by Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz titled “Forced Labor and Sabotage in the Nazi Concentration Camps”, to determine if there's something more in-depth we could add beyond stating that sabotage occurred and listing some examples of where it happened. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 19:50, 26 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have received the book and (similar to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos) it contains some examples of sabotage that occurred, but nothing beyond that. I have added a brief addition.

Nyiszli was in the camp for eight months. I don't think that can be construed as a short stay, considering the 4-yr 8-month history of the camp and the extremely short duration that most people were there. There are 9 citations to his book in the "Life in the camps" section out of the 19 cites. I don't think that's excessive.

I've added tick marks above where I have added information on your suggestions. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 21:11, 16 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As you may have gathered from my remarks so far, I disagree that there's any main aspects of the topic that are not covered by the article (criterion 3a) as it stands right now. Failure to use a specific source, whether tertiary or not, is not a valid reason to de-list, as high quality sources were used throughout. I have added some content based on your above comments, but I found no major defects and hope you will now close this review. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 22:32, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't object to closing this review at this time. Catrìona (talk) 08:30, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]