Talk:Schism of the Russian Church/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Pagliaccious (talk · contribs) 01:33, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Ganesha811 (talk · contribs) 19:55, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I'll be reviewing this article using the template below. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them here. This is a big topic so it may be a complex review - please bear with me if it takes a couple days to make substantive comments, as I need to read up a little. —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:55, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Ganesha811. Please take your time. I am on a trip until the 12th, so I may not be very quick to respond until I return. Kind regards, Pagliaccious (talk) 23:35, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Ganesha811. I've had my eye on this page for a little bit. I am concerned that this GA may fail comprehensiveness and that this will not be immediately apparent to those who do not speak Russian; this page is less than a quarter the size of the Russian-language page (114,288 bytes vs 28,439). Part of that is a (probably excessive) play-by-play timeline on the Russian page, but I believe significant portions may be missing from the English-language article. Given my relative inexperience at GAR, I felt unprepared to adjudicate this, so I did not choose to review. Since you're much more experienced, I figured you could use this information to make a more informed call.

@Pagliaccious: This article is in excellent shape otherwise and should pass if Ganesha judges this to be broad enough for GA. Should it not pass based on comprehensiveness, I'm happy to help build the page further if you need. ThaesOfereode (talk) 12:24, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @ThaesOfereode: I appreciate your comments very much. There is no need to shy away from adjudicating if you feel that the article is unready. What in particular do you think that the English article is missing that it could expand on, based on the Russian article? There are a few things I immediately notice, beyond the play-by-play that you mention. First is a cataloguing of all of the liturgical changes, accompanied by a long section on the origin of rites such as the sign of the cross. I felt that the changes were too minute (besides the book-revisions, sign of the cross, etc) and a detailed background better suited for another article, but for comprehensiveness some of this could certainly be included in the existing "Earlier reforms" section, perhaps renamed to something like "Background". Another change that could be made is a broader description of the geopolitical background. I did not mention the annexation of "Little Russia" as the Russian article does, nor do I go into the background of Nikon to explain his political ambitions. Please let me know what suggestions you have, or if there are any works in Russian that I could refer to. It seems to me that many English sources focus more on the aftermath or political significance of the reforms rather than the liturgical details of the reforms themselves.

On the subject of byte-counts and readable prose: I believe that the English article's prose is roughly half the byte-length of the prose of the Russian article, ignoring the "Chronology" section in the Russian article: on xtools, the Russian article has 34,213 bytes of prose (this tool ignores the bulleted "Chronology" list) and the English article 17,292. However, to my understanding, if both pages are stored in UTF-8 and the English characters are chiefly ASCII, then it should take about 2 bytes to encode every Cyrillic character but only 1 byte to encode a Latin character, meaning the readable (non-chronology) prose sections have roughly the same number of characters. As for information-per-character or other metrics to compare the two language articles, that is even more beyond my ken than character encodings.

Please do not hesitate to comment on whatever is lacking in the article. I would very much appreciate any suggestions you would have to improve the article's comprehensiveness. Kind regards, Pagliaccious (talk) 16:41, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both for your comments - I will take this into account as I begin the review. I do not speak or read Russian, but will do my best to give the article a fair and thorough review nevertheless! —Ganesha811 (talk) 18:51, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to help. Feel free to ping me with any questions or assistance you might need, including Russian source review. ThaesOfereode (talk) 23:40, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your gracious response; I sincerely appreciate it. Re: byte-size, I agree that it's not the best measure, but I wanted to demonstrate the scope of the difference: one of magnitude, not two or three paragraphs. I'm not sure how the calculation works, but I couldn't get the "readable text" function to work on ru.WP, so I went with bytes. In short, it was a dumb way to frame it; I did not mean in any way to minimize your work. As for what I think may be necessary to the page's comprehension, I must admit that my Russian is a little rusty, but it seems like a good contextualization for the reader would be helpful. In particular, I think Nikon's political ambitions/the political climate – especially since they frame the event – and later appraisals and effects. Catherine the Great – to say the least of her, a towering figure in Russian history – called Nikon "личность возбуждающая во мне отвращение" and wrote negatively about the reforms. It seems noteworthy that Hilarion Alfeyev "считает это национальной трагедией" in 2021; it shows a) that the reforms are still relevant to modern Orthodox discourse/ecumenism, b) how they are viewed in the modern context, and c) that there are modern efforts (or the appearance of such) to address the schism. It might be worth digging deeper to see if other metropolitans or patriarchs have commented recently.

If something like background may be better suited to another article, I should still recommend summing the most pertinent parts of it up here, for the ignorant reader (i.e., a reader ignorant of this topic/period/religion/etc.) and placing an appropriate {{main}} or {{further}} tag. You're totally right that it has the potential to begin to creep out of the summary style demanded for GA (or indeed all articles), but I don't think a mention of Little Russia's annexation will violate it so long as it is pertinent to the topic at hand, but I will let you decide what is pertinent enough to add and what should be left out. All the best, ThaesOfereode (talk) 23:39, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).
	2c. it contains no original research.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
	7. Overall assessment.