Template:Did you know nominations/Corruption in Ukraine

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify it. 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 no consensus to promote after 31 days. Cunard (talk) 23:36, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Corruption in Ukraine edit

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... that 10 percent of Ukrainians' incomes are spent on paying bribes?

Created/expanded by Yulia Romero (talk). Self nom at 19:26, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Article review
Length	Newness	Adequate citations	Formatted citations	Reliable sources	Neutrality	Plagiarism
						Issues

ALT1:...Ukrainian students can buy a good exam result?

— Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 19:56, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Paraphrasing needs to be cleaned up before a fuller review can take place. Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:55, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Made a start with that; will continue tomorrow. — Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 20:30, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

The claim that Ukrainian people spend 10% of their incomes on bribes is sourced from a very biased newspaper. It would be a stronger claim if the citation were backed to references to the source the newspaper used. You have to ask the question: how would anyone know the average percentage of income Ukrainians spend on bribes? Certainly you would want the article to say how the information was estimated. I do not think this extremely dubious claim should be in the "did you know section".--Toddy1 (talk) 18:21, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

I added an Alternative hook; this must be true or some Ukrainian students lied to me....

I is glad Toddy is only spending 9.99% of his income on bribes !
— Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 20:07, 21 September 2011

Looks a little better, but still concerned Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:08, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

I could not verify the claim that up to 10 percent of Ukrainians' incomes are spent on paying bribes, from the website of the organisation that the newspaper claimed to get it from. The organisation has published various estimates of the percentage of Ukrainians who have paid any kind of bribe in the past 12 months - there is a lot of uncertainty about these estimates - they range from 21% of households (min) to 49.9% of individuals (max).

Yes it is true that you can use corruption to get better exam results in Ukraine - they can in a lot of English-speaking countries too (for example the USA and the UK).

Reading reports on corruption in Ukraine is depressing - for example 73% of people thought that the previous government's anti-corruption efforts were ineffective. But hang on - in the USA 73% of people thought that their government's anti-corruption efforts were ineffective.

If you want a strap line for DYK, the following one is truthful and unsensational:

Did you know that... corruption in Ukraine is slightly worse than in the USA and the UK.

Or

Did you know that... you are 7-10 times more likely to have to pay a bribe in Ukraine than in the USA and the UK.

--Toddy1 (talk) 08:21, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

The second of the two is the only interesting one, but the fact needs to be stated and cited in the article. Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:26, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

This is standing still a bit; pity since the article is coming nicely together; I came up with a new alternative hook:

ALT4:...corruption is costing the Ukrainians US$400 million per year?
— Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 01:27, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article claimed that USAID said this. But they did not - it was Juhani Grossmann in June 2009.[1] USAID assisted Grossmann's project, but it was Grossmann who made this claim, not USAID.

A year earlier Grossmann claimed that figure was $700m per year.[2] Does this mean that there was a 43% decline in corruption? If so the anti-corruption measures must have been fantastically successful.

I have corrected the error in the article, and put in the second figure. The main conclusion I draw from this, is that these figures are extremely unreliable.

ALT4 - truthful version:...corruption is costing the Ukrainians an unknown amount of money.

There are also issues with placing undue weight on the Kyiv Post, which is an extremely biased newspaper.--Toddy1 (talk) 09:10, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Kyiv Post is not even reliable about the guy's name. The World Bank says that it is "Juhani Grossmann".[3]--Toddy1 (talk) 09:21, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

BTW, if you are interested in what USAID says about corruption in Ukraine, try doing a Google search for "USAID corruption Ukraine". There are lots of USAID documents.--Toddy1 (talk) 09:21, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

If we take Juhani Grossmann's 2009 estimate of more than $400m per year , and divide it by the population of Ukraine 45m - this gives the cost of bribes at $9 per person per year. This is hugely different that the claim that you started with that Ukrainian people spend [up to] 10% of their incomes on bribes. (The words in square brackets were in the source, but not mentioned by you here.]

ALT5 that it is estimated that Ukrainians' spend $9 per year on average on paying bribes?

Of course, a lot of bribes are paid and received by oligarchs and gas princesses. So the figure for normal people will be much smaller than an estimated average of $9 per year.

Incidentally - If a Ukrainian gas princess pays a $50m bribe to someone in Russia, and funds this out of bribes she received from ten oligarchs (each of $10m), do you count this as $100m or $150m? But maybe the oligarchs maybe received bribes from businesses, which they used to bribe the gas princess - suppose each oligarch received twenty bribes of $0.7m. How do you add it up? In this hypothetical example, the ten oligarchs received a total of $140m, and paid out $100m; whilst the gas princess received $100m, and paid out $50m. None of these people declare any of this.--Toddy1 (talk) 10:41, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Ah but should we count children in calculating the estimated average amount spent on bribery per person? I think, yes. In Ukraine, as in other former Soviet countries, it is the custom for children to give their teacher a "present" on the first day of the school year. This present is expected to be a good present, or there could be consequences - the expression English businesses use for this kind of bribe is a "facilitation payment".--Toddy1 (talk) 10:50, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

I do admit that since it is illegal (so this surveys might have been filled in truthfully or might not be representive) we will probably never have a clear picture and any conclusion on this subject will always be highly speculative.... So here is:

ALT6... according to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych corruption has become an immediate threat to constitutional rights and freedoms of Ukrainians?
— Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 18:45, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

There seems to be a bit of instability in this article... Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:33, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

The article has not been edited in a couple of days... Is it stable enough now? I think a subject like corruption should from time-to-time apear in DYK on the mainpage to encourage editors to write about more controversial things like 1980 Garden State Bowl. Next to trivia serious topics should also be handled in Wikipedia. — Yulia Romero • Talk to me! 21:40, 11 October 2011 (UTC)