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Wikipedia:Reactions to... articles

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Wikipedia has several "International reactions to..." articles that detail the international reactions and responses to a particular incident or event. Such articles may be appropriate when the section of the main article covering responses and reactions reaches a size that means the content can no longer all fit into the main article and should be split according to the summary style guidelines.

Several such articles have been deleted or merged following deletion debates, for example due to including indiscriminate information or for promoting reactions to an event beyond the significance indicated by coverage in reliable sources.

Examples

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Articles may be categorised in Category:International reactions or the specific categories Category:International reactions to man-made disasters, Category:International responses to natural disasters, Category:International responses to media-related events and include:

Incomplete list of "Reaction to..." articles

Problems

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These articles may suffer from:

  • Too much detail and being directory like (WP:NOTDIR, WP:INDISCRIMINATE)
  • Using routine announcements and news reports - world leaders routinely offer their condolences for tragic events (WP:NOTNEWS)
  • Promoting a particular response, reaction or event beyond its significance in reliable sources (WP:NOTADVOCATE) and other biases (WP:NPOV)
  • Focussing unduly on recent events (WP:RECENTISM)
  • Not themselves covering a notable topic, if multiple reliable sources have not given significant coverage to the reactions (WP:N)
  • Acting as a memorial to victims (WP:MEMORIAL)
  • Being only a collection of quotes (WP:QUOTEFARM), possibly suitable for transwiki to Wikiquote
  • As quotes are the word of others, it potentially conflicts with our non-free content criteria to overuse them (WP:NFCCEG)

Deletion and merge debates

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Some of these articles have been deleted or merged following a debate at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Public reactions to death of Rachel Corrie, since listed four times at deletion review. Examples include:

Kept
Not kept

Possible solutions

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Transfers

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One possible solution to the problem is to transfer the quotes to Wikiquote. See Bacha Khan University attack and wikiquote:Bacha Khan University attack as an example. Afterwards one should add {{wikiquote}} somewhere the main event article and/or the reactions article. The list of quotes can then be removed from the Wikipedia page. Depending on the amount of prose left in the article, a deletion/merge review may be appropriate. The potential harm caused to Wikiquote is hard to determine, since Wikiquote has few guidelines on the matter.

Prose

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Another possible solution is to place all of the quotes into WP:PROSE, and sort the reactions by region. Quotes that say the same things can be merged into one sentence or paragraph. What is left over after that can then be decided on (keep, merge, or delete).

Expansion

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Articles with the wording "International" to them can suffer from being too narrow in scope. Renaming an article to simply "Reactions to" gives the article more potential to branch out beyond a simple list of quotes. An example of such a case includes Reactions to the Orlando nightclub shooting where a snapshot of two different points in time shows the improvement done: (Before [1], and After [2]).