Template:Did you know nominations/Yu Zhou

Yu Zhou

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• ... that in 2008, Chinese folk musician Yu Zhou died in the custody of Chinese authorities 10 days after being arrested for possessing Falun Gong literature?

• Reviewed: Parasola auricoma

Created by TheBlueCanoe (talk). Nominated by Rcej (talk) at 05:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

• Pretty much all online refs rehash the same story, which is summarized by the fairly neutral and interesting hook. The article is long enough and old enough. The only thing that I worry about is the article's neutrality. I fixed some pretty serious violations by closely adhering to the sources—for example, attributing certain claims to practitioners and their families rather than to human rights groups, which gave them a lot more credibility—but the article creator, who is not involved in this nomination, may try to fight to keep some of the advocacy-esque wording. If that happens, I'll pursue dispute resolution and recommend withdrawal of this nomination on grounds of stability. Shrigley (talk) 18:19, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I have analyzed your changes on the talk page in cases where I disagree, and you are welcome to go there if you would like to discuss further. And as long as the parties in disagreement can talk to each other, it seems quite unnecessary to suggest withdrawal of a nomination. It is unclear to me what you mean by "advocacy-esque," though I did note that you deleted most of the information sourced to Amnesty International, so perhaps that's it. I think Amnesty is a reputable and reliable source on human rights issues. Its statement that a person is "at risk of torture" doesn't constitute advocacy in my mind, so I think that content should remain. I do not support your choice to change the article name, but I won't contest it for now TheBlueCanoe 12:33, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I responded to you on the talk page, but I'm afraid a lot of our disagreements revolve around framing and intricate POV issues, which can take up pages of discussion and be inconclusive. (I hope, nonetheless, that our dialogue will prove an exception.) Here are some of the most egregious misrepresentations in the article which I removed, and all of which tilted in the direction of pro-Falun Gong advocacy in my view:

• As mentioned above, saying in Wikipedia's voice that Yu Zhou "was killed", when the only established fact is that he died in custody, officially from diabetic dehydration as a result of a hunger strike (a possibility without blame that is unexamined in this wording).
• The weaseley sentence in lead, "evidence of the Chinese government’s continued use of extralegal detention and torture" when the only mention of torture is AI's generic "urgent appeal!" that he was "at risk" of torture; your wording falsely implies that he was detained extralegally or that he was tortured
• Your stating as fact that Yu was taken "to the Tongzhou detention center" (when the cited sources just say that he "was detained" more generically), as a set up for later when Tongzhou would deny knowledge of him; it was Yu's lawyer who is the source of most of this information, and he is a paid advocate for the man.

This is not mentioning the more subtle issues like your partial quoting of Yu Zhou's sister and constant peppering the article with emotive words like "crusade" and "persecution" on which I could more easily assume good faith. An obvious rule of DYK is that articles must be stable, and if we can't agree on whether certain sentences should be included or not, we cannot feature the article. Shrigley (talk) 16:59, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I did not disagree with you on a single one of the three points you mentioned above. Those were cases where I thought your edits were acceptable, and didn't contest them (even though the CECC source does point to Yu Zhou's case as an example of "torture and abuse in custody"). I'm quite willing to compromise, but you seem to be manufacturing a dispute here, almost as though you want this article to be unstable. Fortunately, stability does not actually seem to be a requirement for DYKs. They're new articles, so it's natural that they would undergo a lot of improvements and changes. TheBlueCanoe 21:14, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Hey, sorry for what might have looked like a defensive tone. I wasn't even sure that you were going to participate in DYK, although now that you have, the article is all the better for it. I had some bad experiences before, although I do recognize and appreciate your ability to compromise. There's no "manufactured" quality to the dispute, since we've altogether written almost 15,000 bytes of debate on the talk page on complex issues relating to neutrality. It's stated on the supplementary rules that "D6: The article is likely to be rejected for unresolved edit-warring or the presence of dispute tags." and "D7: There is a reasonable expectation that an article—even a short one—that is to appear on the front page should appear to be complete and not some sort of work in progress". Try to keep in mind that I'm not trying to sabotage this nomination: I am the one who approved it, after all. Shrigley (talk) 23:36, 14 January 2013 (UTC)