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Template:Did you know nominations/Kingstree jail fire

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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: promoted by Vaticidalprophet (talk) 16:27, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

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Kingstree jail fire

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Created by Jengod (talk). Self-nominated at 18:12, 10 August 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Kingstree jail fire; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

General: Article is new enough and long enough

Policy compliance:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
QPQ: Done.

Overall: This article was a fascinating read about but there are some issues with the scope of the article that I think need to be addressed.

  • Per WP:LEADCITE we want to try and avoid having citations in the lead. References 1, 5, and 6 are only used in the lead and not used to support any information that's within the article itself. Quotations are also used liberally in the lead, but we generally try and avoid that in order to just summarize the article.
  • There are several extremely long blockquotes in the article. These aren't copyright issues because of public domain and I'm not going to act as though they aren't fascinating insights into this tragedy and contemporary reaction to it, but per WP:LONGQUOTE we should be trying to avoid both too many quotations and extremely long quotations like these excerpts. I think it would be better to generally summarize the coverage in a format like "This newspaper's coverage noted THIS and THAT, with a general theme of THIS emerging." There are also quite a bit of other quotations that are integrated into the article text, again a practice discouraged by WP:LONGQUOTE. Many of those quotes can be paraphrased or otherwise more fluidly be incorporated into the article text.
  • In the beginning of the "Fire" section, the W.E.B. DuBois quote doesn't seem to relate to the fire and instead is used to directly criticize the Southerners and their responses - While obviously justified, I'm concerned that this undercuts the encyclopediac tone.
  • The paragraph about R.C. Logan seems out of place as well - It would be good in an article about the Kingstree Star but I'm not sure it's relevant here.
  • In the "Witness and suspects" section, I'm concerned that some of this constitutes original research. Some of the records are okay to cite per WP:PRIMARY, but you've done some original interpretation to a few of them (Joe and William Blakely and Robert H. Flinn especially) that we would need a secondary source to include. I think this section could be trimmed significantly.

Hopefully we're able to crack down and fix these issues! Once the issues are fixed, I prefer the first hook over ALT1. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 02:55, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

ThadeusOfNazereth Thank you for the excellent and comprehensive review! I will address all this to the best of my ability and ping you when done. (I'm going to miss the DuBois quote tho LOL) jengod

  • OK ThadeusOfNazereth please take a look at your convenience. I hope I've addressed the issues raised. Let me know and let me know if you have other concerns. Thanks again. jengod (talk) 17:37, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
  • Thank you! I will take a look tomorrow and hopefully we'll be good to go. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 19:37, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
  • @Jengod: Take two! Some big improvements for sure, but two more minor issues and then I'll be happy to accept. I would remove the direct quotations from the lead so that's a pure summary. So for example, you can cut according to one account, the last words of one of the victims was "it is too late" entirely and replace One southern newspaper reported that "the negroes were not permitted use of fire while a northern paper published a rumor that it was arson. with "Some sources speculated that the prisoners caused the fire, while others contested this claim." MOS:LEADCITE recommends keeping the lead less specific than the article, so cutting the quotes and then shortening it to no more than three paragraphs would be best. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 17:05, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
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