Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Edmund the Martyr/1

Edmund the Martyr

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Result: There wasn't strong support for the delisting, but there was also no support that this article should be listed: it does not yet meet the criteria for broadness and reliable sources. Hence it remains delisted. Geometry guy 18:50, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article has had its status reviewed once previously. I have listed it here again as User:EdChampion unilaterally delisted it, despite being a major contributor, he also did not make his specifc concerns with GA status clear. I think he believes that it fails criterion 4, as he holds the view that Edmund is still a Patron of England, a view which has not acheived consensus (as a subsidiary of this, criteria 2 and 3 would also be called into doubt). In my own view, this is primarily a content dispute, and not really a reason for delisting the article at the current time, but since I have restored the status quo ante, I feel there should be at least a procedural listing here. David Underdown (talk) 10:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delist. As User:David Underdown has mentioned, there is an outstanding dispute that has been on going since August 2007. The article is certainly not stable. One only has to compare the original GA version with the current one to see the vast number of changes that have been made.

Other major contributors to the article have already highlighted problems and major changes that the article needs here [1] and here [2].

The image of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not appropriate while the image of St. Edmund [3] has been copied from here [4] and is a breach of copyright. Hence the article suffers from a lack of appropriate images.

The article is poorly written. A couple of examples: the death of St. Edmund is given as 869 yet the article provides the date of 870 of his last battle! The online reference to Edmund’s patronage has not been checked and pandemics has wrongly been cited instead of epidemics. The article states: Other accounts state that his father was King Æthelweard but when you follow the reference here [5] there is no mention of King Æthelweard.

The article has tried to be too clever. It tries to explain the date discrepancies in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. As a result it misinforms the reader. They are left with the impression that all dates are inaccurate in the Chronicle whereas the book referenced only lists 4 years. Similarly, it wrongly attributes the flag in the Radio Suffolk campaign to St. Edmund.

The article is certainly not broad in its coverage. It fails to mention the translation of St. Edmunds's body, the building of his cult in England and abroad, miracles attributed to him, etc. As an example, Rev. Mackinlay's Saint Edmund King and Martyr two thirds of his book is given to events after the martyrdom of St. Edmund. There is a mass of information about St. Edmund that is missing from this article.

The article fails on all the good article criteria. It needs a complete overhaul. EdChampion (talk) 21:57, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On the allegation of copyright violation, see http://anglicanhistory.org/about.html documents hosted on the site are (unless otherwise stated) in the public domain. No such statement exists for the image concerned, so it is reasonable to presume that it is now free of copyright (Dearmer certainly died 1936, it is less easy to verify the date for the illustrator directly).
The dating issue is fully explained in the article. David Underdown (talk) 12:43, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. At first blush the article seems up to par. Del-listing issues have been addressed, such as the date of death and last battle. It also appears to be stable, with fewer than a dozen edits in the last month. I'll need to take a closer look at the article to see if some of Ed's other allegations check out. Majoreditor (talk) 03:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. I would rather not put down "delist" or "keep", as I am not a regular here, but I'm interested in this topic and have written articles on other Anglo-Saxon kings, so I thought I would provide some comments about how I see the article. I hope this information will be useful to others here in deciding whether the article should be delisted.

My main concern is that there is too much reliance on sources that I would not regard as reliable for historical facts. For example, Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publishing group, produces the Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Saints, which is the sole source for several assertions in the article, such as the king's ~~age at~~ date of birth, the possibility that Hoxne is the location of a battle, and Edmund's feast day. The last of these could be reasonably sourced from a book like this, but I would not use it for historical facts. There are certainly some reliable sources in the list -- Swanton, Keynes/Lapidge, Whitelock, the Blackwell Encyclopedia, and the British Library. A couple of the others are ones I don't know myself, but which look like they might be reliable. But the Channel 4 documentary shouldn't be used to source Edmund's interment, and the BBC shouldn't be used to source the statement that Edmund was originally the patron saint of England. I'm not asserting these statements are wrong, but the actual primary source data relating to Edmund is extremely scanty, and it is definitely possible to have incorrect statements in tertiary sources. (A recent error in the form of the name of a Gaelic ruler was pointed out to me recently in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is a very respected source; tertiary sources are not the best way to source this period in history.) I am also sceptical of other sources such as the 1904 Little Lives of the Saints.
That leads to the other main concern I have, which is the focus on the hagiographic details. I don't know whether this sort of things matters at GAR, but if this were a FAC I would oppose on the basis that the article covers information such as a lengthy quote from Abbo of Fleury, and many details of the miracles related to Edmund, and a long quote from The Little Lives of the Saints -- but we only get a paragraph in the body about the Danes and practically nothing about the political state of England at the time. Edmund is a historical figure, and we should write an article that presents him in a historical context. His subsequent canonization is certainly a fact about him, but I would expect more history and less miracles in the article. No doubt there are obscure saints for whom there is more to be said about their miracles than their historical lives, but Edmund, though his history is certainly obscure, could at least be placed in context a little better. The hagiographies themselves (i.e. early, near-contemporary lives of saints, usually written by monks of the time) can be valuable primary sources, but are not sources we can use directly unless a reliable source also does so.
I think the points EdChampion makes above in his argument to delist are generally wrong, however. The issue with 869 and 870 is certainly a point that needs explanation, and no doubt the prose at that point could be improved, but I was clear on the issue when I read it and felt no confusion. His point about the accuracy of the online references may be correct; because of my concern about reliable sources above I didn't go to the trouble of verifying his comments about Æthelweard. I didn't check image copyrights so Ed may be right there. The image of the chronicle page isn't totally apt, but the chronicle is mentioned and it does illustrate even if it doesn't illuminate very much. The point about the Chronicle's dating seems wrong, too, without more details on what the issue is, anyway. It is quite clear that the Chronicle's years did not start on January 1, although this certainly does not resolve every date issue. I did not verify Ed's comments about the flag of St. Edmund, though again I'd suggest that using the BBC as a source is a mistake. All the omissions in Ed's last paragraph seem minor to me; it would be harmless to rectify them, but I think without other changes they would lead the article into further imbalance. Hence I suspect that the article I would like to see here is one that EdChampion would not find acceptable as a GA.
For comparison purposes, here are two articles on Anglo-Saxon royal saints that are FA: Æthelberht of Kent and Eardwulf of Northumbria. (I wrote one and helped somewhat on the other.) These aren't strictly comparable, since in each case there is a fair amount of historical detail, and I believe the hagiographical writing on Edmund is more extensive than it is for Æthelberht or Eardwulf. But it gives an idea of what a historically oriented article about these figures can look like.

I hope these are useful notes. Mike Christie (talk) 04:13, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've had a look at the article, and would agree with Mike Christie's comprehensive and independent analysis. There is definitely an issue here with reliable sources (2) and with broadness/balance (3). I noticed some further minor points. First, the conclusion that his birth year is 841 is not obvious to me: it could also have been 840, although if he was still 14 on 25 December 855, that is very unlikely. Second, there is some unsourced speculation about how the Danes might have spent the year 869-870 before invading Wessex. Finally, I found it odd that the last two sentences of the lead are hardly elaborated at all in the article: if they are important, they should be elaborated; if they are not, they should be discussed more briefly (or not at all) in the lead.

There is absolutely no problem with images. The image whose copyright is challenged is clearly in the public domain in the US because it was first published outside the US before 1 July 1909. The image copyright tag reflects this, although it could be refined to use the relatively new {{PD-US-1923-abroad}} template. The image of the chronicle is fine, but in addition to these two images, there are two others, which more than adequately illustrate the article.

In view of Mike's comments, however, I have to recommend delisting. Geometry guy 19:52, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Regarding the dates: Firstly, the article states "the compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dated the start of the year from September". This is false. The reference book cited (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by Michael James Swanton) lists several dates that have been used for the start of the year within the AS Chronicles. These include: 1 September (Roman tax year), 25 March (Feast of the Annunciation), 1 January (Feast of the Circumcision) 25 December (Feast of the Nativity). The reason being that the AS Chronicle is an amalgamation of Chronicles with differing new years not just September. [see pages xv & xvi]. Secondly, the reader is left with the impression that all dates in the AS Chronicles need decrementing by 1 year, but the reference makes it clear that this is limited to only half a dozen dates (which does include 870) and that some years actually need adjusting forward. Finally, most of the dates in the AS Chronicles do not need adjusting but for those that do Michael Swanton, the author, thinks it better to give the original date of the AS Chronicles and provide the adjusted dates in square brackets. [see page xvi]. This is what I meant by the article trying to be too cleaver. In trying to summarise the above it has provided the reader with false information.

Regarding the copyright violation: It is not the fact that the book in question is out of copyright but that the scanned image used is the property of the person (or organization) that scanned it and their permission is required. If the image had been scanned by the "uploader" directly from the book it would have been fine, but that is not what occured, he took someone else's image. The site in question may allow its use if following procedure is followed [6] (and only for “study or religious purposes”), however, it has not been followed, and is therefore a violation of copyright. Further, there is yet another copyright violation. The image here [7] has been copied from here [8] without the required permission from the copyright holder. EdChampion (talk) 20:52, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You probably have a point with the dates: I will leave it to others to comment. As for the copyright of images, you are wrong. A faithful reproduction of an image in the public domain is not copyrighted, because it lacks originality. The creative commons licensing of a reproduction of an image in the public domain has no legal basis. This is well established in US copyright law. Geometry guy 21:14, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]