Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1907 Tiflis bank robbery/archive1

1907 Tiflis bank robbery

1907 Tiflis bank robbery (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

• Featured article candidates/1907 Tiflis bank robbery/archive1

Nominator(s): Remember (talk) 13:35, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I am nominating this for featured article because I think it is a great article about a little known but very interesting incident. The article deals with a stagecoach robbery organized by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin where bombs were thrown at a bank stagecoach in a crowded city square resulting in reportedly at least 250,000 rubles stolen (over $3 Million in current USD), forty people killed, and fifty people injured. The article also discusses how one of the robbers feigned insanity for over three years after being captured and eventually escaped from a mental institution. I think it is a fascinating historical topic that has not received much attention. I have never taken an article through the FA process (so please go easy on me), but Wehwalt and BorisG helped edit this article a lot so I believe it is in pretty good shape (plus it has already been through GA and Peer review). Anyways, it has been a goal of mine to get this up to FA status, and I hope I can eventually accomplish that goal. Remember (talk) 13:35, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Source review - spotchecks not done. Welcome to FAC! Nikkimaria (talk) 14:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• " Leonid Krasin initially quit politics after the split from Lenin in 1909, but rejoined the Bolsheviks after the revolution" - source?

I have added Nicolaevsky as a source for this - and amended the sentence in the process. - BorisG (talk) 15:43, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• "Stalin's original Georgian name was "Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili", but at the time of the robbery he mostly went by his revolutionary nom de guerre "Koba." Stalin adopted a variety of nicknames and aliases in his life. Sometime after 1912, he began using the name Stalin, which in Russian means "of steel", as his nom de guerre" - source?
• Check citations to Trotsky and Jones - both are problematic

I am not sure what is problematic about these citations. Could you please let me know more about why these citations are problematic and I will fix them. Remember (talk) 16:48, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

• FN 32: formatting

Fixed. Remember (talk) 16:51, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

• Be consistent in whether ISBNs are hyphenated or not

Revised. Remember (talk) 20:26, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• Use a consistent formatting for page ranges - for example, you have "pp. 236–37" but "pp. 246−247"

Fixed. Remember (talk) 16:02, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• Be consistent in whether you provide locations for book publishers.

I don't think I am missing any book publisher locations that can be found. I checked the citations for the books that do not have a book publisher location and they those locations don't show up in any internet search. If anyone knows where to find this information, let me know and I will add it. Remember (talk) 16:42, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Nikkimaria (talk) 14:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• Support I had a lot to say at the various reviews this article has had, and got my hands dirty by rewriting paragraphs here and there. I've been waiting for Remember to, er, remember that he needed to bring this article to FAC. Well done all.--Wehwalt (talk) 16:06, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

• Comment regarding inflation, source quality: I believe I remember having noted something about inflation in the past in relation to this bank robbery? My recollection is that the inflation used in this article is sourced reliably to a secondary source and I'm satisfied with this—and I checked this. Source quality also looks good, see next users comments. I checked the use of PRIMARIES and am not concerned, they're all double cited or quotations in the context set by a secondary. Fifelfoo (talk) 21:00, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
• Not yet.
  • A certain lack of context; most summaries of the history of the Social Democrats do not skip merrily from 1903 to 1907 without ever mentioning the Revolution of 1905.

Agreed. Added. - BorisG (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• • Over-reliance on a single source; Roman Brackman. Who is he? What is Psychology Press? Does it fact-check? Why is it publishing a history? Matters sourced to him vary from the extremely controversial to the well-known; the record of Stalin's ties to the Okhrana has been known at least since 1940, and is widely discussed. Reading reliable sources on Soviet history would have enabled our editors, and so the readers, to tell which is which.
    • Just been reading about Brackman here. Other pages of that website will no doubt give more information. There is also a page here. Carcharoth (talk) 14:59, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
      • In short, he's a polemicist. The Soviet Union earned his emnity; and he writes for an American fringe publication to express it. Academic secondary sources would be much preferable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:10, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree that Brackman is borderline. However, I emphatically disagree that the article is mostly based on one source. There are plenty of sources listed. Brackman just gives the most detailed and systematic account in English. - BorisG (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• I see that Trotsky is cited twice (speaking of polemics). Did Trotsky say or imply euphemism? Not as far as I can see; and it should be made clear that his objection to Stalin's role is in part that it was inactive and cowardly, unlike Kamo. (I note Trotsky's point that the expropriators were not expelled from the Party; they resigned beforehand, to ensure denialability, and the question was whether to readmit them.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:39, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

This would be original research. I do not think we should judge Trotsky's motives. Sorry. - BorisG (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

PMAnderson, IMO, these days FAC has kind of a high bar for attributing states of mind, such as motives or emotions, in articles that are basically historical narrative. It's doable ... but the sources have to make it clear that the state of mind was both obvious and important, the sources have to be unusually trustworthy, and even then, we don't do it much. Do you set the bar somewhere else, and do you think these conditions are met in this case? - Dank (push to talk) 17:10, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• As a point of detail, it would be nice to mention that Djugashvili has had a large variety of spellings in Western languages.

Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:58, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

This would be appropriate for an article on Stalin, not here. - BorisG (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• Comment - reviewed at the peer review stage, but the response there was delayed and I never returned to check what had been done. Will try and find the time over the next few days to do that, and read through the whole article again. Carcharoth (talk) 14:59, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

• Comment. Most images on this page may be deleted from commons as either "Author unknown - cannot establish PD-70" (post-1917 portraits of Kamo and Litvinov), or "Place and year of first publication unknown - cannot establish eligibility for PD-RusEmpire" (Lenin and Stalin's mugshot), or "Phoney author info" (portrait of Litvinov - McBride authored the book, not the photo), or even "No FOP in Georgia" (present-day photo - modern statue too prominent to qualify for de minimis defense). Consider moving images to wikipedia. NVO (talk) 05:26, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
  • sources Like some reviewers above, I sense an indiscriminate approach to sourcing. I haven't had a chance to examine your main sources (Sebag, Brackmann, Shub) at length, but certain statements credited to them ring the bell. Example: "One source, P. A. Pavlenko, claimed that Stalin ..." (ref 14 to Sebag). Very well. Pavlenko (ru:Павленко, Пётр Андреевич) was seven years old when it all happened. He was not a historian, but a writer for Stalin's propaganda machine. Dig deeper into the sources, and you will find that the statement was actually published by Edvard Radzinsky in his Stalin and it goes like "Pavlenko told my father that Stalin injured his arm in one of the exes [expropriations], he was nimble and brave. He was one of the men who attacked the stagecoach during the Tiflis money robbery." Period. (Template:Lang-ru). Even if you take it a fact, Sebag distorted it by blending two statements together and inventing "bomb fragments". But it's not a fact, it's an anecdote retold by a propagandist. Go to Googlebooks, search "Pavlenko Stalin Kamo" - and compare Radzinsky's text (English imprint) with Sebag's interpretation. NVO (talk) 06:01, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is about verifyability, not truth. There is no doubt that Sebag is a relaible source. He is an well known British historian and his Young Stalin is an award winning book. The problematic statement above is properly attributed as claimed by Pavlenko, implying that it is problematic.

WP:V is no excuse for reproducing "verifiable" errors. Certified errors. "Award winning" and "well known" authors, or their copywriters, or their translators turn out sloppy writing all the time. It happens. NVO (talk) 17:35, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• Support after some possible improvements recommended above. When Remember was writing this article, he and Wehwalt suggested I may be interested. I helped Remember with some details and with Russian sources. This is the first time I am commenting on an FA review, so please excuse me if display ignorance. I will provide some replies to comments above, but I have some difficulty with formatting. Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. Please check the edit summaries. - Dank (push to talk) 17:10, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

• Anyone else have thoughts on whether Brackman is overused? - Dank (push to talk) 17:10, 16 December 2011 (UTC)