Template:Did you know nominations/Coffee production in Martinique

The following 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 BlueMoonset (talk) 22:46, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Withdrawn by nominator.

Coffee production in Martinique

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• ... that coffee production in Martinique, dated to 1723, is credited to the French naval officer Mathew Gabriel de Clieu (pictured) who was certain that coffee would grow in Martinique?

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Jakub Kagan

Created by Rosiestep (talk), Nvvchar (talk), and Dr. Blofeld (talk). Nominated by Rosiestep (talk) at 00:53, 9 June 2015 (UTC).

• The article contradicts itself with differing accounts in the lede and the history section, and de Clieu's role is better covered in his own article. Belle (talk) 01:07, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Oh bore off Belle, you're not welcome here. It's relevant to the history, but the article could do with some contemporary information to balance it out.♦ Dr. Blofeld 06:31, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Don't make me come after you with the horsewhip, Herr Doktor. Either he was given a plant by his chum or he stole a cutting from the king; he can't do both. (Any article with pirates is cool though). Belle (talk) 08:23, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

• I see that there have been a number of edits since the above comments, but the article has some significant DYK issues remaining. One is that while public domain material is perfectly fine for inclusion in Wikipedia articles, such material (copied or paraphrased) does not count toward DYK's 1500 character minimum, since that is supposed to be original prose material. If such material is excluded from the article count (currently 1710 prose characters, including the public domain material), it falls definitively below 1500. Another is the inclusion of the Louis XV story from the Robertson source, which strikes me as a bit shady. Louis XV was all of 13 years old in 1723, and if de Clieu was refused permission, it wouldn't have been by the boy king but by his regents. A credible book about coffee law should surely make that distinction, and DYK also notes (WP:DYKSG#D10) that If your article contradicts an existing article, the contradiction should be resolved one way or the other before your article is approved. In this case, the contradictory accounts of de Clieu stealing vs. being given the coffee plant/cutting should be resolved. Finally, the article makes it sound as if there were 18 million coffee plants by the time of the earthquake, when the source would seem to indicate this was the number after about 50 years. The earthquake is also not at all relevant as written. If I'm understanding the source correctly, the earthquake ended up destroying the cocoa trees. However it doesn't seem to have caused problems with the coffee plants, or they survived better and were planted more widely given that the cocoa plantings had been wiped out and presumably the land could now be planted in coffee ("propitious to coffee cultivation"). BlueMoonset (talk) 18:00, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the review. It appears we didn't manage 1500+ ch of non-PD prose so Char and I are withdrawing this nom. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:36, 3 July 2015 (UTC)