Template:Did you know nominations/Swedish nuclear weapons program

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by Allen3 ^talk 10:50, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
Insufficient progress toward resolving outstanding issues

Swedish nuclear weapons program

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... that there was a clandestine Swedish nuclear weapons program from 1945 to 1972 with the intention to deter Soviet aggression? (pictured)

Created by DMattis (talk). Self nominated at 03:48, 5 January 2014 (UTC).

Caveat: I edited this page, so apparently I'm counted as one of its creators. I'll just WP:IGNORE the fact that this page is too old by the rules because it's such a well-written piece (and because I didn't bother to nominate it on time myself). The 1966 date is not explicitly sourced, so 1972 seems more appropriate as a finishing date. I think the hook can be paraphrased as "... that Sweden ran a clandestine nuclear weapons program from 1945 to 1972, to protect itself against the Soviet Union?" If the current hook is used, then the lowercase article title should be used. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 22:44, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Since you have been doing copy editing on this article since Dec 26, and it was not nominated until Jan 5, your name should be on this template as one of the creators. Your comment above seems like you might have been the nominator.. — Maile (talk) 01:09, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

I didn't nominate. But I added a caveat to my comment—I wasn't aware that my copy editing would constitute authorship (IIRC I did not contribute any original text, just a picture and corrections for style). QVVERTYVS (hm?) 15:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for clearing that up. — Maile (talk) 23:56, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Note: have fixed the DYKmake template and (per DYK rules) bolded the link to the article and lowercased words that shouldn't be capitalized. I strongly recommend an ALT hook be created; two-sentence hooks are very rare (and I don't think the second sentence adds much at all). The dates will need to be explicitly sourced, whatever they end up being. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:06, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Full review needed by independent reviewer. Hook has been edited; reviewer will need to check whether dates have been explicitly sourced. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:09, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

I've noticed that it was created on 26 December yet was nominated on 5 January. This is outside the 5 day rule so it isn't eligible. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 18:09, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Full review still needed (see above). This was explicitly given leeway—as is not unusual for first-time submissions to DYK when creators might not have been aware of the five-day deadline—by Qwertyus. It would be churlish to suddenly reverse that over two weeks later. (Note: it was nominated five days late, which is well within the exception period granted in similar circumstances in the past.) BlueMoonset (talk) 18:22, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I found several serious problems with the article:

Article makes excessive use of direct quotations in situations where content needs to be rewritten in the contributor's own words. Sections with problematic quotations (in some instances, the quotations are several sentences in length) include: "1950s: The Government favors nuclear program"; "Reasons to abandon nuclear program"; "Disarmament of Swedish nuclear sites"; and "Sweden and non-proliferation movement".
The timeline section at the end of the article is almost completely unsourced.
Use of the harvard reference template for sources that aren't set up as harvard references mean that some reference links don't go anywhere. Harvard references work only if the source is listed in the "Sources" section. I've fixed a few references, but there are others needing to be resolved.
Is the last footnote in the article supposed to point to http://www.stralsakerhetsmyndigheten.se/In-English/About-the-Swedish-Radiation-Safety-Authority1/News1/Swedish-plutonium-to-the-United-States/ ? --Orlady (talk) 21:02, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi Orlady, thanks for pointing out those things. I'm working on re-writing the large citations right now. The timeline section was taken from the Swedish version of the article and translated in English. As for harvard, I used the templates from the Swedish version. The listed link to the last footnote is correct. Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated! DMattis (talk) 04:35, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

I finished the correction of the extended quotations. DMattis (talk) 23:29, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Great! I see definite improvements in the article. I am not finished with reviewing it, but I note two important problems with reference citations:

1. As noted earlier, some of the references that appear to use the "harvard" templates are not properly formatted, so they look like urls, but don't link to anything. I have fixed some of them, mostly by finding the same citation in the Swedish version and substituting the information found there (without using the harvard template). There are several more citations still needing to be fixed. Note that it's not necessary to use a citation template -- standard wikiformat can be used in reference citations.

2. The timeline still needs to be supported by citations. We cannot cite the Swedish Wikipedia as a source, and we cannot assume that the information in Swedish Wikipedia is reliable. --Orlady (talk) 06:03, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Since writing the above comments, I boldly converted the timeline to an infobox to be displayed alongside the article text. Since it is implicitly understood that an infobox summarizes and encapsulates content in the article (and possibly others), I think this format diminishes the need for sourcing for the timeline. --Orlady (talk) 17:26, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

That sounds like a technical (non-)solution to a content issue; did you also check whether the timeline matches the rest of the article? QVVERTYVS (hm?) 18:52, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately, not every item in the timeline matches the article text -- and the article text includes some key dates/actions that aren't in the timeline, but in general the timeline is consistent with the article text -- which is all that DYK would normally ask from an infobox. The dead-end reference links in the article are also still an issue -- and tagging them inline isn't going to help when the underlying problem is unfamiliarity with English Wikipedia citation-template syntax on the part of the article creator(s). Also, I think there are still some passages that are closely paraphrased from the sources. This article isn't ready for DYK approval yet, but I think it's an important and interesting topic that deserves the work it's going to take to get it there. --Orlady (talk) 19:43, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

It's high time to formally propose ALT hook wording, based on Qwertyus' much earlier comment -- and my not-previously-documented concern that we can't verify the real motives for the program:

ALT1 ... that Sweden ran a clandestine nuclear weapons program from 1945 to 1972? --Orlady (talk) 19:55, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

+1! QVVERTYVS (hm?) 21:39, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

While I agree with Orlady that "it's an important and interesting topic that deserves the work" to be a DYK, someone has to do that work, and it should be done a reasonably timely fashion. I appreciate that both Orlady and Quertyus have done some of that work, and DMattis has done some as well, but there are still close paraphrasing concerns and other issues. How much longer should we allow absent further progress? A week? Two? A month? This is the sort of article that could become a Good Article and be eligible for resubmission then if the DYK does not succeed this time around. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:40, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Forget close quoting or cite formatting, this article is a complete shambles. Any real fix is going to be a huge effort. Let's close this and move on. Maury Markowitz (talk) 18:28, 8 March 2014 (UTC)