Talk:Institute for Research on the Jewish Question

Disputed title; multiple orgs with similar names

The title of this article is incorrect, and has been wrong since it was created in 2011. The correct title is the name given as a bolded synonym: Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. (Update: now, the only bolded term in the lead after dropping the bolded title out of the first sentence.) This is an understandable mistake, as there were several similarly named institutions in France and Germany:

• de:Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage ("Institute for Research on the Jewish Question") – a Nazi party org in Frankfurt under Alfred Rosenberg; founded 1939. (The subject of the content of this article.)
• de:Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage ("Institute for Study of the Jewish Question") – an organization of the German state propaganda ministry under Goebbels; founded 1934. Later changed name to Antisemitische Aktion,^{[de redirect]} and thence to Antijüdische Aktion.^{[de redirect]} En-wiki doesn't have an article for this topic. This article has the *title* for the topic, but the content doesn't match.
• Institut d'étude des questions juives ("Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions"; or, "Jewish Affairs"). Created in France by the Germans; operated under the Gestapo. Includes the redirect Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions.

What these all have in common, is that they were anti-Semitic propaganda organizations created by Germany during World War II. The first and last have articles on en-wiki, the second one does not.

(Other orgs with somewhat similar names but less likely to be confused with these, include Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben and the Institute of Jewish Affairs.)

Normally, I would have just fixed the title by renaming to "Institute for Research on the Jewish Question" as an uncontroversial move, but because of the confusing names, some of the in-links targeting this article may be for the Goebbels propaganda organization instead, so simply changing the name would create confusing or incorrect links from multiple other articles.

Hopefully, the hatnotes on this article and on the others will get readers to the right page, even if the in-link is wrong. But if that's not enough, another possible solution occurs to me: add parenthetical disambiguation to the first two (or all three), and recreate "Institute for Study of the Jewish Question" as a disambiguation page; and maybe same thing for "Institute for Research on the Jewish Question", or maybe that would redirect to the first disambig page.

Maybe a better approach, is to create a stub (even a one-sentence article) for the second one, everybody gets hatnotes, and all the in-links get fixed; although that's a bit tedious. Mathglot (talk) 01:15, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Mathglot, if the second one is definitely notable, create a stub for it just as a placeholder. I think the top priority should be making sure the pages exist at the proper titles with hatnotes disambiguating between them. Incorrect incoming links can hopefully be fixed over time. (Are there a lot of them?) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:39, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb:, yeah that makes sense; like prioritizing articles under correct names first, fix possibly incorrect links after. (About 15; link is above.) Mathglot (talk) 01:45, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I just read through this again, and I realize it's confusing; that reflects the very confusing situation. Let me see if I can distill the problem into one sentence: The *body content* of this article is about the 1939-45 org under Rosenberg et al (top bullet), but the *title* of this article corresponds to the the Goebbels org (middle bullet), and en-wiki lacks an article about the Goebbels org. Hope that helps. Mathglot (talk) 01:42, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

 Partly done  – I've completed the move to Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. That's half the battle; now we need to check articles that link here, to determine, one by one, which organization was intended, in the links in those articles. See Special:WhatLinksHere/Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. Mathglot (talk) 02:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Adding one more confusingly named organ to the pot, this one is the 1936 "Research Department for the Jewish Question" ("Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage"), part of Walter Frank's "Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany" (Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands). Mathglot (talk) 12:06, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

• See related discussion at WT:WPDAB#Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. Mathglot (talk) 06:31, 6 April 2021 (UTC)