Talk:2002 Venezuelan coup attempt/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: hamiltonstone (talk) 01:34, 19 January 2011 (UTC) A lot of work has gone into this article, and its coverage is extensive. This is not an area of international politics with which I am familiar, but I am concerned in general about the neutrality of the article and in particular its referencing. Stability and neutrality also appear to be at issue based on history and talk page discussion. This review does not aim to be comprehensive, but identifies a selection of issues and examples of problems.[reply]

The article appears to rely excessively on one biography of Chavez. I'm not familiar with the bio (or its subject), but the heavy reliance on it, when the event should have extensive coverage in other sources (reliable news agencies, IR journals), appears inappropriate. The title of the biography also made me wonder if it was a bit hagiographic, but reviews in reliable sources appear generally to be behind paywalls. This issue is reinforced for me by the extent to which the biography is being relied upon for details that have little to do with Chavez himself (eg. the role of snipers). I think the Jones material needs to be pared back and some other high-quality sources introduced. Otherwise, the article will struggle to meet WP:WIAGA criterion 4, as well as raising questions under criterion 3.
There are what appear, to an outsider, to be extraordinary claims that need careful and close citation - at end of sentence, not at end of para - the one that jumped out at me was: "They also told him that the plan to kill a few people with snipers dated back years, as a way to ensure fewer deaths in the event of a coup." Where those claims do not relate to Chavez himself, I would not be looking to a biography to substantiate them, either. I am also unsure that such claims should be in the article at all unless they are both substantiated fairly extensively (at least widely reported), and are critical to the account of the event.
I support the close citation in the lead - this is a case where that is necessary. I have concerns about the one citation for this sentence: "The United States and Spain quickly acknowledged the de facto pro-US Carmona government, but ended up condemning the coup after it had been defeated" - it looks to me as though it may not be adequate for the claims to which it is cited, but the original page is unavailable, and at present so is the archive, so I can't fully check. I suggest at the very least a second, independent media or scholarly source is needed to support this argument. This looks to me to be a symptom of a potentially broader problem with sources.
Another example: there is what looks to me a pretty contentious para (both wording and the claims it includes) at the end of the article that begins "In April 2009, after a trial that had begun in March 2006..." This entire para has only one cite, which is to a web news source. That source has been called credible by some but, according to two news outlets cited in the WP article about the source in question, is "pro-Chavez". Without getting into a debate about that, it means that that sole source will simply not cut it for such a paragraph.
Related to the previous point: it appears to me an extraorinary bit of POV writing to end the "aftermath" section with this: "A lawyer for the victims of the violence described the Caracas Metropolitan Police on 11 April 2002 as "the armed wing of the opposition"". What one lawyer, acting for one side of a conflict, has to say about it should absolutely not be the last word on the subject. That would be so no matter how good the cited source, but given that there is also a question about source neutrality, it is particularly egregious.
Rely on the scholarly sources as far as possible - Cannon; Parish et al; Cole; Cooper and Legler; Kozloff (i think); possibly Golinger - not sure whether that is a scholarly or independent source; ditto Gott - check the reviews if necessary. Rely on high-quality news outlets for the day-to-day descriptive detail, and books like Gott if they seem sound on the specific points. Basically: a biography is not a good place to start for an account of an event.
On media issues: PBS Newshour article looks good; the use of an article from Le Monde Diplomatique looks sound to me, for example, though I recognise there may also be issues with its perceived neutrality. If another reliable source differs from LMD on the media stuff, that should be addressed. Otherwise, those are the kinds of sources to be going for of the news / news analysis type.
Prose issues, eg. the phrase "had not in fact resigned" is used twice in one para.

More minor items:

The citation format is inconsistent - for example, sometimes Jones, sometimes Bart Jones, sometimes Bart Jones Hugo!.
An early footnote refers to something being cited in Cannon (2004), but the reference itself is missing (i found it eventually - in footnote 73!).
~~Sentence beginning "Bush Administration officials acknowledged meeting with some of the planners..." has an external link at the end, not a reference.~~
I suggest that an article like this that is going to need a lot of footnotes (probably even more than currently present) should have a bibliography listing works cited, following the footnotes.
There are some templates tagging the article - it shouldn't / won't get through GAN with those. The second appears to be tagging some poor POV text that might be able to be removed anyway.

The amount of work involved here indicates to me that this would normally be failed, since I can't imagine it being adressed in several weeks, let alone one, particularly as I am aware there are neutrality debates that will spring from significant revisions to the text. But i will leave this on hold to give an opportunity for discussion prior to closing. Regards. hamiltonstone (talk) 01:34, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the minor issues could be dealt with, and we can discuss those later. Stability is not a problem (the article is not much changed since October) and issues about neutrality appear in the past, and certainly predate the largescale expansion/improvement I did in October, which ought to obviate them.

I didn't feel that the expansion in October obviated neutrality issues. However I have no issue with stability for GA provided the revision process does not itself trigger a new round of instability. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:49, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So let's focus on the main issue that comes up in your review: sourcing. The reason Jones (2008) is heavily relied on is that it is by far the most detailed treatment of the subject (in a large central chapter of the book) by a serious source. I'm not quite sure what your bugbear is with biographies (it's not unusual for them to be the most detailed sources on historical events); this particular one is published by Random House, and Jones is a respected journalist who was active at the time, so it is not greatly surprising that his biography of Chavez deals with this critical episode in great detail (the book is pretty thick and deals with plenty of other stuff in great detail too). Scholarly sources are used in the article as much as possible; the existing ones don't provide any more detail and there just aren't any more, at least at the moment, and there's no reason to expect more. Similarly mainstream media isn't much of an option because it generally doesn't deal with the episode in sufficient detail. With some effort some of the material currently cited to Jones alone could be cited additionally to other good sources, but most of it is detail simply not available elsewhere. The sniper claim, for example, obviously is critical to understanding the event.

I don't dispute most of the facts set out above, but disagree with how they are being used to argue the case for Jones. Jones was a respected journalist - as far as I can tell, yes, that is true in general, however he was also granted repeated one-on-one interviews with Chavez and reported for a long period of time, so there are risks (I am not calling it more than that) as to whether he has remained fully neutral. Jones is also a journalist, not a scholar. Random House is a reliable publisher, but it isn't the International Political Science Review or the Bulletin of Latin American Research. We are not dealing with threshold RS issues here, but quality, neutrality, comprehensiveness, and the reliability of individual facts, within the realm of sources that are reliable.

Beyond that issue, it appears simply untrue that the other sources cannot help with the detail. I am not going to spend huge amounts of time on this. I went to the first Jones footnote, number 14, which supports the sentence "The strike was organised by the country's most powerful business group and largest trade union federation... acting together". Richard Gott also has this, pp 213 onward. Gott was the very first alternative source I tried.

Then I turned to footnote 25, which is the use of Jones to substantiate the events of the strikes from about 5 April. I found this covered (in less detail) on p.218 of Randall et al 2007. Worryingly, however, the Randall article's detail doesn't quite square with the way Jones is quoted in WP (the broader picture is consistent). WP, citing Jones, says on 6 April a strike was called for 9 April; Randall says a general strike was called for 6 April and then, because of its success, prolonged through to the 9th, and then beyond, by the strike's leaders. Which is right? I know Jones was on the ground, but I would normally back a scholarly journal article against a journalist's book. This is why this must be done with a broader foundation in the scholarly sources.

A little later: Jones is again footnoted on aspects of the Miraflores confrontation: WP, citing Jones, says 19 dead. Randall et al say 17, Cannon (probably sensibly) says "up to 20". But all cover this point.

Jones is also the only source cited for the whole para on who was responsible for the Miraflores confrontation. Yet this appears widely regarded as critical to the coup and Jones is not alone in saying it is an ongoing issue in Venezuelan politics (eg. Gott says the same thing). Jones is also relied on in odd ways here. The WP article says at one point "El Nacional reported that the presidential honour guard arrested three snipers, while other reports claim seven arrests at the Hotel Ausonia of men later freed in the chaos of the coup, and empty shells found at the Hotel Edén." We are then given a cite for El Nacional, but the "other reports" turn out to be cited solely to Jones. Should it not read "while Jones claimed..."? Or if there are other reports, can they not be cited?

There are other, related, deficiences. Cannon's analysis of the competing explanation of the coup focusses on the common factor of class, and the importance of class in explaining both social divisions and their denial. Class is mentioned just once in the whole article, and Cannon's explanation gets no coverage. This is part of a broader problem with the article, that I should have identified yesterday: there is essentially nothing in the WP article about analysis of the coup: either the kinds of observations made by Cannon, regarding class, or Randall et al's argument about the broader role of the OAS, just to take two examples. In fact, the tone of the one para mentioning the OAS appears to contradict Randall's argument, and the argument of Cooper and Legler, even though C & L is the cited source! The para shows evidence of POV pushing, and needs fixing on that front too.

That is enough - it took me about an hour to put the above together, suggesting serious issues with the text: over-reliance on Jones; presentation of facts that are not as clear as the article makes them out to be; a lack of reporting of analysis; possible POV text; incorrect interpretation of the sources. To me it is now an open-and-shut case that this article is not at GA - clearer now than yesterday, because I've read some of the source material. I hope this gives editors some leads to work with, and I appreciate Rd232's efforts to improve the article and respond to concerns. hamiltonstone (talk) 01:26, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing point: yes, the general facts, including the example you give, are surely sourceable from many other places. (I wouldn't choose Gott, because too many editors would consider him a worse source than Jones.) That can of course be done, though adding additional verification for non-contentious points doesn't seem a priority.

OK, first factual point: it's not hard to confirm that Jones is correct, the strike began on 9 April [1] [2]. Parish et al have simply got muddled (proof: they write "Tuesday 6 April", when 6 April 2002 was a Saturday, and it was 9 April which was Tuesday).

Second factual point: looking through Google News, 19 appears the most accepted figure for deaths (45 hits, v 7 for 17 people and 8 for 18 people). (es.wiki has 19, unsourced.) In the absence of a definitive source, it probably merits a footnote that there remains some disagreement about the exact total.

Third point: the "other reports" is probably just poor phrasing aimed at keeping a balance of "we don't really know" NPOV; those factual claims are from Jones, and not attributed by him to any sources. It could be attributed to him explicitly, or treated as a fact.

Fourth point, about OAS - I don't see any contradiction of the sources; you'll have to explain that. Basically the OAS role during the coup was minimal, because it was over by the time it met on 13 April. The "Aftermath" section covers the OAS' subsequent role; it could perhaps have more detail, and I've expanded it slightly.

Fifth point: Cannon's thesis about class is of course interesting analysis, but my concern has been to focus on the facts. I'm not immediately sure how to incorporate Cannon's thesis, plus doing so would surely require adding other analyses for NPOV. Perhaps you have some suggestions.

In sum, thanks for these comments; it's the sort of detailed critical input which the article needs. If you were willing to keep at it I'm sure we could get to GA, but it's a ton of work and I really shouldn't attempt it at the moment with my RL issues, so I guess we'll call it a day; but if you want to contribute to the article's development, you're more than welcome. Rd232 ^talk 19:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think we better call it a day - RL is calling us both. I do think the article needs some analysis of the coup in context - interpretations of its causes etc. It is potentially possible to integrate this into "Background", but it might work as a section near the end. Further suggestions for broadening the literature base:

Steve Ellner, Daniel Hellinger: Venezuelan politics in the Chávez era: class, polarization, and conflict
Brian A. Nelson: The silence and the scorpion: the coup against Chávez and the making of modern Venezuela
(Gnerally for analysis in international context): the works of Brian Loveman.

Kudos to Rd232 for having taken this on. hamiltonstone (talk) 01:05, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Much the same applies to Venezuelanalysis.com; there was a heated WP:RSN debate about a year ago, and the arguments in favour of accepting it as a reliable source are vastly stronger than the opposite. It is accepted in academia as a source, for example. Rd232 ^talk 20:58, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I was not meaning to suggest that Venezuelanalysis does not meet the minimum threshold for RS, but that there are questions about its neutrality that mean it is not a suitable source to stand alone in support of important, remarkable or strong claims in the article. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:49, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mmm. Well I'll just point out that Parish et al [Randall Parish, ....] uses it as a source. Rd232 ^talk 19:04, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

PS the "documentaries" section was added in late November, some time after the GA nomination, and it clearly needs a bit of work. Since the relevant articles aren't too bad, that shouldn't be a big problem. Rd232 ^talk 21:16, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I thought something like that might be the case. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:49, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]