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Wikipedia:Featured article review/Rhodesian mission in Lisbon/archive1

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

The article was delisted by DrKay via FACBot (talk) 6:47, 23 December 2021 (UTC) [1].

Rhodesian mission in Lisbon

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Notified: WP Africa,WP MILHIST, WP International relations, WP UK Politics, WP Portugal, WP Zimbabwe, WP British Empire, WP Former countries, talk page noticed 2020-05-21

Review section

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I am nominating this featured article for review because it is one of the oldest at WP:FARGIVEN, and concerns were mentioned on talk by @Nick-D, Buidhe, and Eisfbnore: including neutrality, sourcing, paraphrasing, and organization/prose (sprawling content). The original author is now vanished. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:33, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Nick-D I'm travelling at the moment, so will start off with some limited comments, mainly reiterating the comments I left on the talk page. These are informed by my recent work on the roughly comparable Rhodesia Information Centre:

  • My main concern is that the article is much too dependent on referencing on what appear to be self-published works (or works published by a small/obscure press) by JRT Wood. Mr Wood has been professionally published on issues relating to Rhodesia, but does not appear to be such a clear cut authority on this topic that this level of dependence is OK, especially for self-published works.
  • As noted on the talk page, the article includes clearly unsuitable references to Ian Smith's memoirs, as well as a couple of other works that appear to be clearly sympathetic to his regime in ways that mean they are probably not reliable.
  • The article sprawls much too much, even allowing for the complexities of the issues relating to Rhodesia's foreign relations.
  • Oddly, there appears to be little coverage of the UN resolutions that targeted Rhodesia's diplomatic network. This is a prominent issue in the literature on the topic. The consensus in the literature is that Rhodesia's independence was illegal under British laws and UN Security Council resolutions, and its diplomatic network was also illegal due to it breaching several UN Security Council Resolutions.
  • Also oddly, the article is focused on the mission before UDI, and not how it operated when Rhodesia was operating as an independent country. As Rhodesia's relations with Portugal were hugely important (Portugal was one of few countries prepared to engage with Rhodesia diplomatically, and Portuguese rule in Mozambique was essential to Rhodesia's survival, with the country trying to prop the Portuguese there up), this balance seems off.
  • A possible solution to this might be to rework the article to be Establishment of the Rhodesian mission in Lisbon with an explicit focus on the role of these events as a step towards Rhodesia's UDI, but it would be better to broaden its scope given the importance of Rhodesian-Portuguese relations
  • There are some academic works on Rhodesia's foreign relations that have been published since this article reached FA status that could be useful. Nick-D (talk) 22:39, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Nick-D: I've looked at some newer journal articles about Rhodesian-Portuguese relations, and worryingly none of them seem to mentioned the diplomatic mission in Lisbon, or only mention it in passing. This might be our best bet. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:31, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Yes, I've had to stitch together several sources to note how the Rhodesian Information Centre in Australia formed part of the Rhodesian diplomatic network, given that sources on Rhodesian missions other than that in the UK are limited. However, there are a fair few recent recent references on Rhodesia's foreign relations and the UN sanctions that provide useful coverage and context for this topic. Nick-D (talk) 03:32, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Some further comments:

  • I agree with Sandy's comments below about the overly dense construction of the article's wording. Between this and the excessive detail on pre-UDI issues, it would make the article difficult to unpick and rework to return to FA status I'm afraid.
  • Some of the text is sympathetic to the Rhodesian cause. In particular, it doesn't really grapple with the basic fact that the Rhodesian Government was determined to break the law by declaring independence. Instead, the article often depicts a false equivalence, where the British are portrayed as simply being too slow or too inflexible to respond to the Rhodesian Government's actions and as a result the Rhodesians were more or less in the right. In reality, the Rhodesian Government's actions were illegal, but there was nothing the British could really do about them due to a combination of domestic political pressures and the difficulty of projecting power into southern Africa. For instance:
    • The 'Britain refuses' section plays up supposed delays by the British as excusing the Rhodesian Government's actions. The problem is that the Rhodesian Government simply lacked the legal authority to do what it wanted to do, so it didn't matter if the British didn't react particularly quickly.
    • Similar issues crop up in the 'Rhodesian disillusionment; Britain adopts delaying tactics' section, which also falsely portrays the views of the white minority government as representing the views of all Rhodesians.
  • "The Unilateral Declaration of Independence was signed by the Rhodesian Cabinet on 11 November 1965, to almost unanimous international acrimony" - this is wrong in a couple of different ways. Firstly, no country ever accepted UDI as being legal or officially recognised Rhodesia as independent, so the "almost" is wrong regarding Rhodesia's formal international relations. Secondly, sizeable minorities supported the white Rhodesian cause in the UK, the white settler Commonwealth countries, the US and some European countries. It is likely that there was strong majority support for Rhodesia among white South Africans.
  • "Wilson therefore put all his eggs in the sanctions basket" - this is false. The UK adopted a range of strategies against Rhodesian independence, albeit none that were particularly effective in the short run.
  • The material on the impact of sanctions is flawed, in that it doesn't note that they made Rhodesia dependent on continued support from Portugal and South Africa. The end of Portuguese rule in Mozambique was a total disaster for Rhodesia as a result (the book 'The Rhodesian War: A Military History' that's cited covers this topic fairly well). The role of the mission in maintaining supplies via Portugese Mozambique and providing intelligence to Rhodesia of political developments on Portugal really needs to be covered.
  • The following articles from the Taylor and Francis database look very useful:
  • Deon Geldenhuys book Isolated States: A Comparative Analysis should be consulted as it is one of the main works on Rhodesia's foreign relations
  • To be comprehensive, the following sources do not appear to be reliable for some or all of the content sourced to them:
    • Berlyn, Phillippa (April 1978). The Quiet Man: A Biography of the Hon. Ian Douglas Smith (published in the last years of UDI-era Rhodesia, in which there was considerable political repression and censorship)
    • Binda, Alexandre (May 2008). The Saints: The Rhodesian Light Infantry (unclear why a history of a military unit published by a press of questionable reliability is being used to cite this material)
    • Petter-Bowyer, P J H (November 2005) [2003]. Winds of Destruction: the Autobiography of a Rhodesian Combat Pilot (ditto)
    • Smith, Ian (June 1997). The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (reliable only for Smith's account of his personal views/explanations, but used to reference other material and should be used with care, preferably being cross-checked against other sources)
    • Wessels, Hannes (July 2010). P K van der Byl: African Statesman (no book with a title like this can possibly be reliable: P. K. van der Byl was a notorious white supremacist and incompetent, and historians are scathing about him) Nick-D (talk) 07:28, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments by Indy beetle
    • In addition to what Nick has said, it looks like the section headers could be revised; some of them read like newspaper headlines.
    • I don't necessarily have a problem with so much pre-UDI Rhodesia material, since it was very much Rhodesian diplomacy at play here, though I do think it's incomplete of the article to simply brush aside those years in which Rhodesia was acting as a de facto independent country with Rhodesia's Lisbon mission remained open throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, providing a key link between the Rhodesian and Portuguese governments. More information on this area would probably be needed for this article to count as comprehensive.
    • Between the memoirs and the minutes of the British House of Lords, there seems to be to close a reliance on primary sources. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:50, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • An additional problem, which might explain the at-times confusing prose: There seems to be an element of editorialism in this writing that goes beyond what the sources actually indicate. See this edit, where I removed text which compared Reedmen's radio address to Smith's speech to parliament because the source (Reuters report in a newspaper) made no such comparison. Such editorialism i.e. low level SYNTH can lead to easy departures from NPOV, create UNDUE emphasis, and result in outright editor conjecture and opinion being placed in Wiki voice. This discovery bodes very poorly for this article's FA status. This is why spot-checks are important in the FA process. -Indy beetle (talk) 01:44, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments from SandyGeorgia. I've read the lead three times and can only scratch my head and rub my eyeballs. Sorry, but apparently not being European or British or familiar with Africa, or maybe just uneducated, but for starters, I had to click on Whitehall and Salisbury (and still couldn't figure out what was being said). The writing is just backwards, sentence construction is not straightforward or direct; the lead assumes a level of knowledge rather than explaining what this thing actually is, and rambles all over the place. (This is why we should always have independent, that is, not familiar with the topic area, reviewers.)
    So, after not being able to decipher the lead, I read only one line in the article, and found the same backwards construction and assumption of basics that left me trying to decipher the lead, eg:
    Having been governed and developed by the British South Africa Company since the 1890s, Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony within the British Empire in 1923, when it was granted responsible government by Whitehall.
    How about ... ?
    Southern Rhodesia was developed and governed by the British South Africa Company from the 1890s; it became a self-governing colony within the British Empire in 1923, <after something happened that took it from a company to a country ?) when it was granted responsible government by the Government of the United Kingdom (also known as Whitehall).
    Explain Whitehall (sorry, had never encountered the term). How do we get from a company to part of the Empire? What is the meaning of "responsible government" (jargon). I stopped there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:32, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    I honestly think it's bad form to use place metonymy instead of actually saying what is meant. The point of an encyclopedia is to be concise and straightforward. I'll only use place metonymy when it's a direct quote or when the source is unclear about a specific institution. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:33, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, now I know what Whitehall is, and I know what a metonymy is! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:33, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Funnily enough, I first learned about it in 2016 when Nick reviewed my work on Black Sea raid for GA. -Indy beetle (talk) 14:28, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Indy beetle made some nice improvements, but unless they intend to continue and attempt a save here, we don't have enough progress, and we do have serious concerns, so Move to FARC. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:59, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with Sandy, including regarding Indy beetle's good work, and a FARC is appropriate here. Nick-D (talk) 21:54, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I must concur with a move to FARC. I do not have full access to the Brownell book, and it would take time to integrate all more modern scholarship on this subject into the article. The use of dubious sources that Nick has pointed out, the dense and at times editorializing prose that Sandy and I have found, the tone of portraying the British like incompetent bullies, and the lack of coverage of the mission's activities post-UDI (when they'd arguably be the most important) mean this article is failing 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d of the Wikipedia:Featured article criteria. This requires a complete re-researching and and verifying that the material cited here is actually supported by the sources provided. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:59, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Move to FARC Indy beetle has highlighted the major problems with this article, and these will require much more time than FAR/FARC will allow. I trust their judgement that this requires too much work for our process to save. Z1720 (talk) 01:57, 4 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Move to FARC per above, needs significant rework. Hog Farm Talk 06:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

FARC section

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Issues in the review section include sourcing, comprehensiveness, coverage, prose, and neutrality. DrKay (talk) 12:45, 9 December 2021 (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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