User talk:K.e.coffman

How is this 'streamlining'?

Can you explain why you removed in [1] the paragraph mentioning the stories of Kleinmann, Grzybowski and Kafarski? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:45, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

In fact I came to realize you have removed referenced information on rescuers from a number of other ghetto articles. To me, it seems highly relevant - a part of ghetto history, which should discuss its creation, functioning, victims and survivors. It's one thing if you remove unreferenced content (even through it is hardly a red flag and usually easy to verify and source with a simple google search), but it is disturbing, to me to see referenced content (with Yad Vashem, Jewish Historical Institute, and POLIN Museum sources, etc.) removed. I would appreciate if you could explain your logic for things like [2]. PS. I hope you can restore the content you removed as unsourced in Talk:Białystok Ghetto, I provided a list of references you can double check that should cover most of the facts you removed. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

• @Piotrus: A given statement might be accurate, reliably sourced, relevant to the subject, and yet still not be included in an article because it's of lesser importance or including it would place too much emphasis on one aspect of the topic. I found quite a bit of material related to the Holocaust in Poland to be imbalanced. For example, see my edit here: [3]. The rather extensive article has a lead that devotes a paragraph (out of four) to rescue by ethnic Poles, emphasising their great personal cost, and half a paragraph that's about Soviet crimes. Do you consider this balanced? K.e.coffman (talk) 02:59, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

The issue of WP:UNDUE is certainly relevant, and I agree that some ghetto articles devoted too much time to irrelevant history, primarily related to Soviet invasion and or later annexation of those territories. That said, you seem to remove all and every single mention of those issues, where I'd suggest that rather than dedicated paragraph, a single sentence or at least wikilink should remain. But my concern is not about the Soviet angle, which as I said, does seem to be unduly represented in some articles, but about the discussion of the rescue efforts, which IMHO is very much due and relevant to such topics. An article about Foo-ghetto should discuss, in detail, its history, notable people, organization, resistance, escape and aid efforts. If any section becomes too long, it can be split into a dedicated subarticle, which is why I strongly oppose removal of such content from the article - it should remain until it is split. Do note that this refers to the ghetto articles, as regarding the [4] diff in Holocaust of Poland, I am fine with the removal of this mention from the lead. In my experience, this is about as irrelevant (and would be used as a counterweight) as any attempt to discuss the extent of Polish collaboration with the Holocaust (which is currently not mentioned in the lead). If one of those issues would be mentioned, so should the other. I am unsure, honestly, if the lead would be better if both those issues where mentioned or not.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:48, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Experiment: Sambor Ghetto

@Piotrus: I conducted an experiment using Sambor Ghetto as a test subject. The current version of the article is structured as follows:

• Ghetto history: 273 words
• Deportations: 379 words
• Escape & rescue: 452 words

The "Background" section has several issues, so I'm not counting it, but let's add 75 words. This makes 1180 words total. The portion of the last section dedicated to the rescue (exclusively by Poles, it appears) is 426 words, or 36% of the Ghetto-related content.

I've downloaded Volume II, part A of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos; it's available with free registration from the USHMM's website. The entry on Sambor Ghetto is 2000 words; the portion on the rescue by non-Jews (Poles and Ukrainians) is 110 words:

Attempts at rescue were limited, with a few exceptions. For example, Ivan and Maria Malenkevich, a Ukrainian couple from a village near Sambor, sheltered the siblings Artur and Irina Sandauer for 14 months in their home, where they built a hiding place in the attic.12 (...)

In total, about 160 Jews from Sambor managed to survive, mostly by hiding with Poles and local peasants. For example, in Czukowa near Sambor a peasant hid 18 Jews, who were not betrayed although most of the village knew about them. One of these Jews was, however, murdered by members of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army, AK) after the Soviet forces arrived.13

This makes it about 5% by word count. I'm wondering what your take on my experiment is. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:01, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Actually, 22 out of those 110 are not about saving Jews by Ukrainians and Poles, but about a murder of a Jew by Poles. Excuse me for joining your discussion without an invitation, but the Icewhiz's conflict with VM has drawn my attention to the Jewish-Polish issue.--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:02, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you letting me know this valuable resource is available for download. My take on it is that the article is badly in needs of expansion. Some editors expanded the 'rescue' section so that it is mostly complete. If other sections are not expanded, it may create an impression of undue weight, but the solution is not to gut a well expanded section, but to expand the others. And I'll note that a relevant expansion should also include information on local population, Polish or otherwise, collaborating with the Nazis as well, if it is relevant to the topic.

I will however note that the claim "One of these Jews was, however, murdered by members of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army, AK) after the Soviet forces arrived." is a bit dubious. First, after Soviets arrived AK soldiers where generally arrested and disarmed. Second, I've seen similar accounts which turned out to be cases where a said 'murdered' person died in a crossfire, or joined the Soviets who then got into a firefight with the Polish partisans, while attempting to disarm and arrest them. Of course, without more detail it is hard to know what happened here, and USHMM is generally a reliable source, but even quality sources have errors. Realistically, why would AK soldiers try to murder someone after the Soviets arrived? They shot a random Jew because they were antisemites? Or because they decided to go on a murder spree? Unlikely. Anyway, I tried searching for this incident in Google Books and like and I couldn't find it. The USHMM article sources this to "AYIH, 301/4967, testimony of Meyer Lamet, July 15,1945, in Bucharest." which does not appear online. So all we have to go with is that the (reliable) researchers writing for USHMM decided to include this testimony in the article without any further commentary... acting as a judge and jury, calling a group 'murderers', based on a single testimony. The source is reliable, but I am not sure if I would consider this sentence (their conclusion drawn from it) a high point of it, or of the career of the otherwise reliable scholars who put it in there. All that said, however, I would not remove this claim if it was added to our article, but I would caution anyone who would want to put it there to consider whether a single testimony is sufficient enough as a source for it, per WP:REDFLAG.

On the subject of undue and such, it is also interesting that the writers of this entry chose to dedicate about as much content, word-wise, to the single testimony about Poles killing a Jew as to the stories of Poles saving the other 160. Yad Vashem, for example, has entries for rescuers [5] or [6]. another incident is described here: [7]. Why wouldn't the USHMM Encyclopedia entry include at the very least a mention of those three names? Undue weigh issues indeed.

So, anyway, about the Sambor ghetto - we simply have to expand the other sections of the article to be more comprehensive, and it's great that we have the USHMM source now available for free to aid in this task. It's only a shame that the main editor who actually had time and will to write about the ghettos, Poeticbent, is no longer here to actually do it. I am not aware of anyone who has filled his shoes when it comes to serious content creation and expansion in the ghetto topic areas. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:50, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Piotrus, I am not familiar with the subject, the only thing I know from memoirs (primary sources) that AK soldiers were still active behind the frontline of the advancing Soviet Army at least, initially, so this argument is not working. However, I agree this particular fact hardly deserves mention. My point was that the text devoted to saving Jews by the locals is even shorter than 110 words (about 90), which gives a rough impression of a relative weight this source devoted to this issue.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:13, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

@Paul Siebert: you are always welcome on my Talk page; I’d welcome further thoughts you may have on the matter.

@Piotrus: I would be more sympathetic to the view that the rescue section is “mostly complete” vs the rest of the article, if secondary sources on the rescue efforts by Poles were presented to establish WP:WEIGHT. Or to the view that the rest of the article is simply incomplete. For example, even if we copied Encyclopedia's entry word for word (which we cannot) we’d still be at 2000 words. With the present 485 words on the Polish rescue, this would still be a gross imbalance to how a professional (via the Encyclopedia) presented the topic. Note that at present the Ukrainian rescue is ignored in the article, so 5%is not even for Polish rescue alone.

On a related note, the recent addition here [8] is problematic because of how it connects two stories:

After the ghetto liquidation, Władysław Bońkowski, also later recognized as a Righteous, a restaurant manager, offered shelter to a group of sixteen Jews who escaped from the ghetto, and successfully hid them throughout the remainder of the war. Similarly, around the same time, Alojzy Plewa, also later recognized as a Righteous, and his family rescued several other Jewish individuals.

References

“Similarly” indicates original research being conducted to synthesise a narrative not present in sources. This should be left to secondary sources. We are amateur editors on the internet; it’s not up to us to present a version of history not present in secondary RS. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:47, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

First. Feel free to remove 'similarly', through I don't consider it an SYNTH issue. But removing this word is not going damage the text (through I think the text flows better with it).

Second. It is a fallacy to assume that another source, even if it is academic or encyclopedia, is comprehensive or balanced. Few years ago I improved biographies of some sociologists like Max Weber and even Karl Marx to Good Article. To do this, I used several quality academic biographies of them (chapters in de-facto sociological encyclopedias like Standord's Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Kenneth's Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. or Ritzer's Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics). A crucial realization I made then is that each of those texts attempting to present a comprehensive analysis of those scholars life and work was, in fact, different from others. Some had sections, big chunks devoted to some dimensions that others did not. So, why is this relevant to our discussion? Simple. The fact that the USHMM source devotes only a x% to this topic is irrelevant. Another source may devote more. Or even less. It is the beauty of Wikipedia that we can combine such accounts and offer a much more comprehensive treatment of the subject than other sources, limited by paper and/or just the fact that they have one author and can't be updated. Our articles can grow and discuss dimensions that some of those authors did not consider. Now, it seems to me like you are effectively arguing that discussions of the rescue attempts at length is WP:UNDUE. As noted, I disagree with this since I find it one of relevant dimensions, just sometimes better developed than some others (frankly, I find it hard to blame people for wanting to write about heroes and the good side of humanity...). There are others, some of them totally not covered in our article(s), like for example, the USHMM paragraph or two about post-war trials of German war criminals operating the ghetto. Rather than removing information on Polish rescuers as 'too long for the current short article', interested editors should expand the article with other information. On Ukrainian rescue, too. Or whatever else can be reliably sourced. Trying to argue that 'rescue' should be no mora than 5% or such is ridiculous, we cannot assign weight to such topics arbitrarily. Length is not an issue, the section should be comprehensive. And if it is too long once the article has been expanded with other sources, we can consider splitting it into its own subarticle. The worst thing we can do is to delete relevant information, without preserving it in an article (since nobody reads talk but us, volunteers). If you have concerns that the ghetto articles are too detailed in their coverage of rescuers, by all means, please expand such articles to be longer, so that the rescuer discussion doesn't dominate them. Build the encyclopedia, don't censor it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:32, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

PS. Still waiting for your response. However, I also have an idea for a compromise. I think we should have a new article, list of rescue attempts by ghetto (name pending). This article should effectively list each rescuer (or group) by ghetto, discussing them in depth where they are not separately notable (not all rescuers are notable). This would allow us to move possibly excessive detail from ghetto articles there. Ghetto articles could then mention a summary, like only names for non-notable rescuers. Once such a list is created and provides a valid target for moving content, I wouldn't generally object to edits like those of yours we are discussing. Until, however, we have a place to split/merge such content, I do not believe it should be removed from the article, per WP:SUMMARY. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:48, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

@Piotrus: To wrap up on Sambor: you've mentioned: "several quality academic biographies" that you've used in another article. Indeed, having several academic sources could help establish relative weight for Polish rescue (or rescue in general) in re: Sambor Ghetto. I presented one, the USHMM Encyclopedia. Can you provide other scholarly sources, specifically those that "may devote more" space to the rescue in the context of the ghetto history? --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:08, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Following up... --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:59, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

I am still looking for sources, and I presented my idea above, to which you haven't replied for two weeks now. Anyway, there is no reason to model our articles on other encyclopedias or such, through they are a useful guide. USHMM book, while obviously useful, is not the last word on the topic, nor is it complete - it omits various details, on rescuers and other topics. Anyway, I've been meaning to ask you; there's a lot of articles with undue content right now like Błonie, Adampol, Lublin Voivodeship, Albigowa, Baranów, Lublin Voivodeship, Biała Niżna and such. It seems certainly unblanced when 50-90% of content of an article about an existing settlement focuses on a single aspect like a history of a single ethnic group living there, or their fate during WWII. What is your solution to improve those articles? I am guessing, by analogy to the ghetto and rescuers topic, you'd be recommend removing/shortening those sections? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:24, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

WP:WEIGHT

@Piotrus: On the locality articles, my position is that if there's no secondary' coverage for the WWII sections, then this material is undue and should be removed. For example, I'm not sure what the value of individual survivor stories is in Adampol#World War II:

Survivors, including Jack (Yankele) Glinzman and his uncles, Jack (Yankel), Israel (Srulka) and Joseph (Yuscha) Glincman and cousins Bob (Bollek) Becker, Pomeranc and others fled into the forest on the Belorussian border and joined up with the Parczew partisans.

Other survivors include Shaul Soroka, his wife Maryam Blima Goldman Soroka, his sons Pesach and Mottel, and his daughters Braindel and Esther.

I removed this. In the Błonie article, I could not make much sense of the section World War II history; it looks like OR / SYNTH, off-topic material, and sources not supporting the content in question. It needs to be rewritten to conform with Wiki policies.

I don't want to lose track of the Sambor ghetto & WEIGHT issue there. I'm specifically interested in secondary coverage that would dedicate more space to rescue as you alluded to. However, if you are still looking for sources, we can discuss the list in the meantime. I have some ideas I can share. --K.e.coffman (talk) 19:09, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Correct me if I am missed something, but what do you think of my idea of splitting some of the possibly excessive (or just not covered outside sources that are possibly primary) rescue stories into a dedicated list subarticle, list of rescuers by ghetto or such? Btw, I am on holidays now so can be AFK for a while. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:42, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

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Transmed

Hello. Can you check if Transmed (distribution company) is a recreation of Transmed holding? You !voted delete at the AfD. More generally, as I made three edits today asking people if article Y is a recreation of article X, I am thinking an administrators' noticeboard dedicated to this question would be useful, for G4, NPP, SPI and COI. What are your thoughts? Thanks and regards, Biwom (talk) 07:06, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

@Biwom: I'm not an admin, so I cannot see the deleted article. You could post to WP:AN for an admin to look. Alternatively, if there's an WP:NCORP failure, the article could be nominated for deletion, apparently again -- these two articles appear to be on the same subject. --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:57, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Hello. Apologies for the bizarre message. Indeed, I was short on time, took a quick glance at that AfD and identified you wrongly as the one active admin... Anyway, if that article ever goes back to AfD, I will let you know. Thanks and regards, Biwom (talk) 06:10, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Dragon's Eye Article

Some people on the Dragon's Eye article are reluctant to remove the White Nationalist references. Since you opposed them in the past, I was hoping you could help me out. Identity Evropa no longer uses the symbol so there's no need to associate the Dragon's Eye with racism anymore. DragonEye616 (talk) 04:53, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

@DragonEye616: I commented on the article's Talk page: Talk:Dragon's_Eye_(symbol)#Move Political Use to "see also". --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:26, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

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Draft:ArtRabbit

Hi there, Thanks for looking over the article I wrote. It was rejected due to insufficient notability. Following this, I've meticulously combed through the relevant pages that explained what qualifies as sufficiently notable sources. I then altered a few of the sources (mostly places where I missed an author's name or a date) and created a chart to see whether the article met with the necessary criteria (see attached image). From as far as I can tell, the article should meet the requirements of having multiple sources that are significant, independent, reliable and secondary.

Would it be possible for you to revisit this and let me know whether this fulfils the criteria following my edits? I believe my initial sources prior to the most recent edit might've been a little messy, thus difficult to check whether or not they fulfilled the criteria for notability.

Thanks again for your time.

Chart demonstrating whether or not each source meets the criteria for sufficient notability of an article.

Sandy Di Yu (talk) 17:16, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

@Sandy Di Yu: In my estimation, the sourcing does not meet WP:CORPDEPTH; it consists of passing mentions and self-promotion. Separately, if you have a conflict of interest and/or are being compensated for your edits, you need to disclose this on your user page. Please see WP:COI & WP:PAID. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:26, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi K.e.coffman, Thanks for responding. I had originally disclosed a COI on the talk page of the page I made without realising that this was necessary on my own page as well. I've now added it to my own page. I'd like to mention that on the page you linked ( WP:COI ), it says "If you want to note the COI on your user page..." which does not dictate necessity. Maybe this should be changed to instead say "it's strongly encouraged to note the COI on your user page". As someone trying to follow instructions as accurately as possible, the differences between what is written on such pages and what I've been told by admin gets frustrating, and I'm still not entirely sure whether it's something I needed to do for the sake of best practice, or simply something I can do.

In regards to passing mentions and self-promotion, there are several sources I used that has neither and fulfils all the other criteria (see chart added previously). I understand your estimation is perhaps better tuned for this than my own, but for the sake of learning, I must ask how you estimate this. Have you for example picked up the book in question and read through the pages that I referred to? Or else read through the articles that I sourced? If so, what about these sources are "passing mentions" and "promotional"? Again, based on what was written on the page you linked to ( WP:CORPDEPTH ), there is very little to indicate how you'd estimate my sources to not fulfil the criteria. I would like to better understand not just for the article I've already written but for the sake of sourcing any other future articles I'd like to attempt.

If it was rejected on the basis of the COI, I would like to know if there's anything I can do about this. Otherwise, as I've seen that you have told others they can ask for a second opinion, is this also an option I can take?

Thanks again for taking the time to read this. Sandy Di Yu (talk) 16:51, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

What is you role?

Are you a neutral administrator or a biased editor?Xx236 (talk) 08:50, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you ...

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