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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Marie Sophie Hingst/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 9 November 2023 [1].

Marie Sophie Hingst

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Nominator(s): Vaticidalprophet 07:33, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Marie Sophie Hingst (20 October 1987 – 17 July 2019) was a German historian and blogger living in Ireland who falsely claimed to be descended from Holocaust survivors...and there's your premise, isn't it? But it's not an explanation, and some things, hard as you try, you never know how to explain. Hingst was a successful blogger whose narrative revolved, in part, around her experience as a German Jewish woman and what it meant to grow up raised in part by survivors. The trouble with this narrative is it wasn't hers; she was a pastor's granddaughter from Martin Luther's hometown who sent fabricated records to Yad Vashem. When a journalist at Der Spiegel uncovered her background, he published a biting exposé -- and she was found dead weeks later. The resulting coverage across two countries started a firestorm about journalistic ethics, the intricacies of identity politics, and cultural differences between DACH and Anglosphere societies.

This article took well over a year to write, and might be the most challenging one I've worked on. dewiki had an article since 2019, but I wrote this from scratch and was finally able to mainspace it earlier this year. I'm more than comfortable that it's the most comprehensive Anglophone resource on Hingst's life and the discussions she inspired. This is a complicated article, a 21st-century biography for someone complex and contentious. I think it's as ready to nominate as it'll ever be. I hope it is. Vaticidalprophet 07:33, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Images are appropriately licensed. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:24, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support from PMC

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Putting down a marker for myself here. Should comment within the week. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:05, 30 September 2023 (UTC) Without having read all of Gog's commentary, so forgive any repetitiveness.[reply]

  • "Hingst was found dead in her apartment on 17 July 2019 at the age of 31. Her fraud and suicide..." this phrasing feels odd. First we omit the suicide and then we state it without introduction as if it's already been stated.
    • Getting to this one now I was very busy for a few days, and now have the flu, so responses might be hit-or-miss still, because Gerald Waldo Luis also commented on it. This was previously "committed suicide on date", which caused some dispute. I'm happy to restore the prior phrasing because I agree it was an improvement -- "don't actually mention what cause of death in that sentence" was a proposed compromise (I don't use "died by suicide", and "killed oneself" is IMO improperly blunt for Wikipedia-cadence in ways that actually cause the unfortunate implications some people ascribe to "committed"), though I see UndercoverClassicist also has opinions on this wording, so I've pinged them in the loop here too. Vaticidalprophet 04:57, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It's within MoS, so I'm not going to oppose over it either way. Is there another option, such as "She was found dead in her apartment on 17 July 2019. A coroner [or whoever it was] ruled her death a suicide"? It's the committed word I'm keen to avoid, for both accuracy and ethical reasons. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:08, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think it's worth reading Vati's extensive post on the topic, which he linked above; I tend to agree with his thinking on it. As another point, in natural language, "commit" is not necessarily negative or accusative; you can commit an act of heroism, for example, or commit oneself to a course of action. Neither of those phrasings is seen as negative. "Committed suicide" bluntly acknowledges that it was an act the person undertook, without making a moral judgement or soft-pedalling it. In comparison, "died by suicide" makes it sound like a natural cause of death in the vein of cancer or old age, when it's anything but (try saying "died by murder", for comparison; there's an act there that's being elided). "Ruled a suicide" is even worse, because it implies that there is somehow some doubt and a coroner had to settle the matter. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:04, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    All very fair and reasonable. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:27, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Vati, this is still in its original state - are you leaving it? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:16, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I've restored the original, if it's considered an improvement. Vaticidalprophet 10:54, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think you could split the Dolzeal clause into a separate sentence rather than a semi colon but I won't die on the hill of it
  • This is a minor quibble but the photo of Wittenberg is not the best. How would you feel about subbing something like File:Wittenberg, Blick vom Turm der Schlosskirche auf die Altstadt.jpg or File:Altstadt Wittenberg.JPG (from the German article)
  • Thoughts?
  • "from a Protestant Christian background" reads oddly. "With a", maybe?
  • The entire description of the Holocaust fraud (and her other fraudulent claims) is contained within the "Early life and career" heading, which feels a bit odd and perhaps unduly sympathetic to me. If I was a reader looking at the TOC, I might wonder where the fraud was even mentioned in the article. I would suggest maybe subsections for the fraudulent claims, or at the very least "Early life and career" should be separated from "Blogging and fraudulent claims".
  • Thoughts?
  • "the remainder to not have been persecuted" - I think it's worth noting that not only were the few who existed not persecuted, they weren't even Jewish
  • Might also be worth noting she didn't just contradict history, she contradicted herself - "Second, in the Pages of Testimony, she states that six sons were killed, but in her blog, she claimed that four were murdered." per Doerry
  • The one above this looks like it was actioned, but this one hasn't been responded to.
  • "Teaparties" is usually spelled as two words
  • The sentence about Yucel feels out of place at the end of the para about her fake Holocaust history, especially considering that that activity did not appear to have been part of any deception. Maybe it could be moved up to the end of the first paragraph, and then split that paragraph from "In 2013, she founded...". (This actually then puts you in a better position to section off the fraud stuff as I suggested earlier, as you'd have two paragraphs of "Early life and career" outside of it)
  • Also, we might want to have a year for Yucel's imprisonment
  • If it matters, Doerry says Hingst corresponded with another prisoner in Turkey, but he isn't mentioned here
  • Have any sources (including Sanyal) commented on Sanyal using Hingst in her book? Has Sangal ever retracted or issued an updated edition?
  • Above four outstanding
  • "Hingst was bestowed a winner" I don't think you can be bestowed a winner. You can be named a winner, or bestowed an award.
  • I think the sandwich thing should be its own paragraph, there's enough content just about it that it forms a coherent separate thought.
  • Agree with Gog that the mailing list phrasing is a bit off. How about "Bergner created a mailing list where she worked with other researchers, including a lawyer, an archivist, and a genealogist, to scrutinize the details of Hingst's blog posts."
  • Also, Doerry's two articles actually say that this group independently noticed issues with Hingst and began to communicate. Berger was "one of the first", but not actually the first.
  • Still outstanding
  • "The story chronicled the research on Hingst that found" this clause feels very knotted up into itself, but I'm not entirely sure how I would revise it. Perhaps "The story presented research which indicated that Hingst had falsified her Jewish background, medical work in India, and sex education outreach to refugees in Germany." This version is a bit shorter overall, which may be desirable.
  • "The Der Spiegel piece..." this sentence wants splitting somewhere, you've got three separate ideas going in inside it.
    • Still needs splitting
  • I agree with Gog that DACH needs to be explained in-text as it isn't obvious what it means.
    • I've added some context (I remember the linked article being clearer than it is).
      • I think it would be better to rephrase this in-text as "German-speaking regions of Europe" and not require the footnote at all, since that's what's meant anyway
  • "noting her publication in Die Zeit " maybe revise to "nothing that Hingst had been published in Die Zeit"
  • I have to give the side-eye to the contradiction between "I never falsified anything" and "but my artistic freedom". Did anyone ever call her out on this? It seems ripe for it. (Addendum: I see that Doerry mentions it a bit in his article.)
  • I wonder if we want to mention Doerry's relatives earlier, to give context to the later accusations that this was the source of his displeasure
    • hmm. I read that accusation as too controversial to imply that early, rather than juxtaposing it with the fact a bunch of people went "no, what the hell" at it. Vaticidalprophet 01:07, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • I think my issue is that as currently written, we're both stating the accusation and debunking it at once, which can be jarring.
  • "how Hingst should have been stopped from her fraud" - "how Hingst's fraud should have been stopped" maybe? "stopped from her fraud" is awkward
  • I think the context about Yucel should be included earlier - we don't have the length or year of his imprisonment when he's mentioned before, so we could move it there and trim it here
    • Outstanding
  • Ofrath makes an interesting point in his article that isn't discussed here - the timing on Hingst's instability. Scully argued that Hingst was mentally unstable and should never have been exposed in such a public manner. Doerry pointed out that Scully only met her after Doerry had already exposed her, and says that he found her "confident, combative and determined". I think it's worth getting into this a bit, since there's so much emphasis on the appropriateness of Doerry's reporting given Hingst's mental state.
    • Unaddressed, and I think this is significant.
  • Doerry also argues that Hingst's fraud provides ammunition to Holocaust deniers, which I think is relevant to his reasons for exposing her
    • Is there anything more you want here than the "mockery of survivors" line, Premeditated Chaos? I've been thinking about these last comments -- it's very tricky viz. NPOV, but I get where you're coming from. The timeline on her distress is definitely an element I think some of the sourcing...underdiscusses, and Doerry does discuss it a bit. Tricky to think of a good place to slot it in, but there's probably one. (Might be under ethics.) Vaticidalprophet 10:19, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • I don't think we necessarily need to quote that exact line, but I think it's worth mentioning something about Doerry's thinking re: impact.
  • I notice that her frauds seem to have an element of a superiority complex in them. She calls a random district in India a slum, she says she had to teach young Syrians "how to appropriately interact with the opposite sex" (which reads a lot less neutrally than providing "sex education"), and even makes claims about her "grandmother's heroic resistance to the constraints of Jewish tradition". See what I mean? It's like, I'm helping, but I'm better than you. I'm part of this heritage, but I'm still going to obliquely position myself as superior to it. This is a delicate point that I'm not sure is discussed overtly in any RS, but it would be interesting if it was.

Okay, I think I'm done. I may give it another read and come back for more. My main point I think is that Doerry seems to be getting a touch of a short shrift here, and I'm not sure that's fair. As always, open to discussion. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:13, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For what it is worth, I agree with PMC re the shrifts that Doerry and Hingst seem to be getting, but obviously you can only go with what the HQ RSs say. Gog the Mild (talk) 12:13, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Aside from the final point, which is very speculative on my part, most of my points are related to what's in the RSs in the article. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:16, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
After mulling for some time over how best to contextualize Doerry's responses, I've added this paragraph -- how do you feel about it? In the section on the Spiegel piece, I've restructured the first paragraph to avoid overcrediting Bergner and split the long sentence into other long sentences. I've also restructured the early life section somewhat to give more detail on what you asked about her claims, and add the bit about Tolu. I'm not super sure about the subsectioning of that section -- if anything, it's possible the section header could be tweaked, if TOC visibility is the concern? (More mobile-friendly that way, too.) I've tentatively rendered it as "early life, blogging, and career", though I'm not fully certain yet. Vaticidalprophet 11:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think generally it's looking better, with much of my commentary addressed. By and large I'm ready to support, however there are a few things not yet done that I think are worth harping on, if only to get responses from you as to why they're not being done: the imprisonment dates for the Turkish journalist (and moving the details about that to be earlier), the DACH explanation, and the timing of Doerry's relatives being mentioned. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:03, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was mulling over how best to implement those three, but they should all be handled now (added "in 2017" in the first section re. Yücel, reworded DACH, expanded the paragraph on Doerry to mention Jahn and Seibert). Vaticidalprophet 15:40, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I'm satisfied. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:24, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support from Gog the Mild

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Recusing to review.

  • References: English language article titles should consistently be in either sentence or title case. (How they appear in their original is irrelevant.
  • "Marie Sophie Hingst (20 October 1987 – 17 July 2019) was a German historian and blogger living in Ireland". I think that the last three words need either tweaking or qualifying.
    • Pre-GAN this was "German-Irish"; Kusma's excellent GA review pointed out that this was probably not her self-identification or legally the case, so I tweaked it to there. It's possible this is also a suboptimal phrasing, but it might be a bit too much in the lead to give the exact dates. Will ponder. Vaticidalprophet 03:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly recommend 'was a German historian and blogger who lived in Ireland from 2XXX' or similar. I consider the additional 10 characters well worth it. (And it is not as if there were not plenty of other material in the lead which could be thinned, if that were considered necessary.) Gog the Mild (talk) 12:15, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Done a little later, but still in the first few sentences -- is this okay? Vaticidalprophet 10:14, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
IMO, no. It is not something on its own that I am going to oppose, but it gives a worrying lack of clarity in the first sentence of the lead.
Sorry for the delay on this reply, Gog the Mild -- was wrapping up other comments. A few days ago when rereading the lead I ended up feeling the relevant clause was superfluous, as Hingst's expatriate status is clarified two sentences down. Have responded to all the rest of these now as well. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "she fabricated a Jewish background". Is it known (approximately) when she first did this?
This doesn't seem to have been addressed, and linked: the paragraph starting "Hingst had no Jewish ancestry on either side of her family", do we have any dates we can add here? Even approximate ones?
  • "the official memorial" → 'the official Holocaust memorial'.
  • I assume that you are deliberately not linking Holocaust?
  • "sparked discussion of the role of identity politics." Optional, as it may be just me, but having read that several times I keep thinking that it is a longer sentence which has somehow lost its last few words.
  • "college-educated". What does "college" mean in this context? Does the word mean the same thing across the English-speaking world. I assume that you are communicating that her family's education level was basic?
  • What is a "high school"? Could it be linked?
    • Responding to both this and the college education one at once -- the German secondary education system is complex, and the English and German Der Spiegel articles give different levels of detail. I've tweaked "high school" to the more international "secondary education"; from the German version of the article it strongly implies to me she attended Gymnasium, but that may or may not be clear enough to put in the article. Similarly, Doerry's English article refers to her family as "college-educated" (here =university rather than =secondary school, which I've clarified -- both Doerry and I are, apparently, rather Americanized here for people whose homelands' education systems don't work that way) while his German article says Akademikerfamilie, which...I am still trying to determine exactly how to translate that ("family of academics" is fairly literal but I don't think the Anglophone implication of "family in academia" is accurate). The implication to me is that both are trying to gesture at a relatively privileged background, but because they speak in terms of education, I'm not comfortable extrapolating that to socioeconomic status. I think another source gives non-overlapping detail and will see what can be used there, and have queried some native speakers on how best to read the original word. Vaticidalprophet 03:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That reads better, IMO.
  • "studied history in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin". At what level. Is this because her family moved?
    • This was as an adult/in tertiary education, have specified. (The source is unclear on the precise timeframe, and in particular what was undergraduate vs graduate study; Wikidata makes a confident call but, as is classic Wikidata, does not source it.) Vaticidalprophet 03:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. It now seems clear. Thanks.
  • "Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that it had 240,000 "regular readers", and Hingst was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by the Die Goldenen Blogger [de] (Golden Bloggers) association." Any chance of this being recast in chronological order?
?
Done. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Link "Gentile". Or, better, replace it with non-jargon. ('non-Jewish'?)
Does gentile have an upper-case g? If so, why?
After further discussion, this was ultimately replaced with "non-Jewish". Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
?
Done. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "a hospital ... that treated patients". Erm ...
  • "consultant". In much of the world "consultant" in medical parlance means Consultant (medicine).
    • You know, I'm not entirely sure what exactly she was supposed to be. I'll check back if Sanyal's book says anything more precise. Vaticidalprophet 03:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • This is all Sanyal's book says. I agree it's a bit of a grand claim for her age around the time she supposedly did it, even in context. Given I couldn't find a clear idea of what she actually claimed to do, have just removed the relevant part, making the phrase "working at a doctor's office in Wittenberg, where she specialized in responding to anonymous sexual education questions from refugees". Vaticidalprophet 10:13, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Good call, nice wording.

Engrossing stuff, well told. More to follow. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:25, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the review, and the compliment! I've responded to a number of these and will look through for others/dot i's and cross t's/etc. Will respond to the next section soon. Vaticidalprophet 03:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "she created a mailing list examining the details". I think this needs tidying up. It reads as if the mailing list did the examining. I am unclear as to who did what and what part the mailing list played.
Sorry, but it still doesn't work. Any reason for not going with a simple 'Working alongside a lawyer, an archivist, and a genealogist, she examined the details of Hingst's blog posts with other researchers'?
That's fair, and has been implemented. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Throughout the first half of 2019, research by Bergner, Doerry, and archivists from the Stadtarchiv Stralsund led to the conclusion ..." How about 'Research by Bergner, Doerry, and archivists from the Stadtarchiv Stralsund through the first half of 2019 led to the conclusion ...'?
  • "on Der Spiegel in German and English." Are we talking about a website?
In which case perhaps 'on Der Spiegel's website in German and English'?
I'm still a little unsure about the potential implication it was never in print, but implemented. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I would prefer 'other news outlets across the German-speaking parts of Europe', but ok.
It ultimately ended up with this wording. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yep.
  • "Deniz Yücel, a Turkish-German journalist who spent 336 days incarcerated in Turkey under suspicion of espionage, was in contact with Hingst via postcards during his imprisonment." We know this, you have just told us. Suggest removing the repetition.
    • hmm. Gog the Mild, I think I've addressed everything at this point, but this one I've been thinking about. I don't have reader navigation data for this specific article, but the fact readers tend to read in chunks/don't necessarily look at every section is a known quantity, and tracing off what I can (clickstream data, anecdata of people I know and readers of similar articles) I'm somewhere around "~every reader looks at 'Death and aftermath', but at least some skip earlier sections". Probably less than the average article, but the average article is extremely skipped-around ("60% of readers read the lead alone, most of the rest read one section" is the classic take-away from it). I'm a bit hesitant to introduce Yücel in this section with no context if I can assume some significant proportion of readers are skimming-at-best his actual introduction. I also agree it's a touch awkward for readers who are actually sitting down top-to-bottom, though. Vaticidalprophet 04:47, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. (I'm not saying I am fully convinced, but you raise solid and defensible points and it is "your" article.)

Gog the Mild (talk) 21:22, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi VP, how are you getting on with my last few comments? In any event, could you give me a ping when you're ready for me to have a look at your responses? Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:17, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Will do! I'll start on the ref-standardizing now, then get to the last handful. I'm still unwell, but trying to get to things reasonably quickly now I'm back home. Vaticidalprophet 03:33, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No worries VP, it was intended as a reminder, not a nag. In your own time. Gog the Mild (talk) 11:18, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Some come backs above. Usually where I have not left a comment I am content with your response and/or action. Gog the Mild (talk) 12:46, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
After wrapping up all the other reviews, I think these are all addressed now. Vaticidalprophet 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GWL

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Saving a space here. GeraldWL 10:40, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Aaand lessgooo! I don't really catch any big issues so most of my comments are just links or specific words. Overall it's pretty well-written! I've put invisible comments to divide my comments based on sections. GeraldWL 04:10, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved comments from GeraldWL 03:38, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
* Alt texts should be brief. "A woman with glasses and greying brown hair looking to the left, in a professional headshot-style photograph" can be "A woman with glasses and greying brown hair looking to the left". Blind readers don't need to know about the technicalities unless it's an article about the photo
  • "German historian and"-- I don't reaallyy see any part in the article that says she's a historian with actual history publications. ROMDRO is a personal blog. Though I see that "she was a fellow at the" institute, it's not detailed what works she did, or if she ever made any publications other than ROMDRO and PhD theses.
    • Well...'historian' is a reasonable title for someone with a PhD in history, in "first sentence of the Wikipedia article" contexts. PhDs are pretty big deals :) She went into industry in a not-obviously-relevant way, but this is not at all uncommon for people with PhDs in the humanities, and many still self-identify with the fields they pursued for a decade. Vaticidalprophet 06:46, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Should probably link Holocaust and Protestant, and New Delhi
  • "Her fraud and suicide" --> "Her fraud and death, which was ruled a suicide"-- since you didn't detail about this the previous sentence
  • "present-day eastern Germany"-- readers (like me) might actually confuse this with the eastern Germany, which is the German Democratic Republic. I think just saying "present-day Germany" is fine
  • "from a Protestant Christian background"-- should prob use the redirect in lieu of piping
    • Eh, you usually shouldn't explicitly bypass redirects that already exist, but there's no reason not to avoid them in the first place, and several reasons to (managing page views correctly, avoiding redirect vandalism, not having the rug pulled out from under you if something changes). "Don't bypass existing redirects" is a statement about the merits of that particular action, not about the merits of not redirecting in the first place. Vaticidalprophet 06:46, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "the genocide"-- link to Holocaust
  • On the other hand, backstory might be unecessary to link
  • Suggest lengthening it to "Auschwitz concentration camp", it is also a town in SW Poland
  • For the redlinks that don't have the interlanguage link or merely has a Wikidata link-- are those notable enough for a redlink?
    • I trimmed a lot of redlinks in GAN; the ones that are retained I'm fairly confident in, at least to "this could reasonably have an ILL, a mention in a list, or some other context" as well as ones that can clearly have articles. (The Sanyal book was redlinked more recently, but NBOOK is not a high standard and it has more than enough reviews.) Vaticidalprophet 05:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "across the DACH countries"-- suggest adding a footnote explaining what DACH is, so readers don't have to click the link just to understand it
  • "A German Wikipedia article was created, describing Hingst as a "blogger and fraudster"." It just feels random that this suddenly appears. Suggest altering to "The exposé also prompted the creation of a German Wikipedia article describing Hingst as a "blogger and fraudster"."
  • "and worried he might be the last person to see her alive." This is chilling to read...
  • Quote box: link Yellow badge and Nuremberg Laws, and ebay
  • Link Anglophone
  • "unable to bear the media "shitstorm"."-- might be useful to add footnotes to all the originally-german quotes like "Original: blabla..."
    • I'll reply to all comments later (across all three of you, Gog, and PMC), but one quick and unexpectedly funny note -- "shitstorm" is the original German (Ihr Herz und ihre Seele haben den shitstorm, der über sie nach den Artikeln im SPIEGEL und im Tagesspiegel hereingebrochen war, nicht ertragen können, for full sentence). It's a loanword, and as I understand it slightly less vulgar than it is in English. Vaticidalprophet 05:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Shouldn't the last sub be more specific, titled "Identity politics"? Identity is pretty ambiguous.
    • Gerald Waldo Luis, thoughts all-around now? I'm trying to go for a relatively broad section header on the last one intentionally -- there are a couple different lenses there amongst the people who wrote about this, so only "Identity politics" would be too narrow -- but I think all of these have been responded to for a few days. Vaticidalprophet 15:44, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

With the amount of comments coming in amid my arrival I initially postponed my support just to have the other comments resolved. I took a last look at the article and it looks all neat; with two (I think?) supports right now I'm happy to support myself. GeraldWL 03:38, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support from UC

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Likewise saving a space: expect to hold off until Gog and Gerald have concluded. A fascinating article and subject. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:41, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Supporting: it's a cracking article. I have disagreed at a few points with the nominator, but every decision made here is reasonable and supported by evidence and good sense: I have no doubt that the article satisfies the criteria fully and does justice to an extremely difficult topic. UndercoverClassicist T·C 11:39, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • German-language titles and words should be in lang templates, to allow the Wiki software to categorise the page properly and screen readers to correctly parse them.
    I tend to put enwiki links into the lang template, but not ILLs (suspect that a template in a template will upset the software somehow). Put the whole link in: {{lang|de|[[Currywurst]]}} UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:45, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think all the langs should be done now (and discovered lang has an italic=no param, so removed the italics on an existing one where they were contextually inappropriate). Vaticidalprophet 19:31, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • A very small nit-pick, but Die Goldenen Blogger means the Golden Bloggers: we should therefore introduce them as such and avoid constructions like "the Die Goldenen Blogger...".
  • I appreciate that the photograph isn't formally dated, but could we say something like (c. 2019 or taken in the late 2010s? The info page gives "late 2010s" and there's no reasonable view that it could be (for example) from the 1990s, going by the rough age of the subject.
    • hm. I uploaded the image and am not sure when it's taken; the date on the image page is mostly "because the image upload wizard really, really wanted an origin". I agree it's certainly what it looks like, but it's a bit OR for wikivoice, I think. Vaticidalprophet 14:13, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Fair enough, though in that case I wonder whether the caption does more harm than good (by suggesting that the date is somehow contentious or unclear, when in reality we just haven't found it). UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:46, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hingst maintained the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, where she wrote about her supposed Jewish background and identity, along with her experiences as a German expatriate in Ireland, where she moved in 2013; the blog received hundreds of thousands of views, and she was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by the Die Goldenen Blogger [de] (Golden Bloggers) association.: long sentence: any reason not to break at the semicolon?
  • leading to the destruction of her reputation: what exactly does this mean, in concrete terms? A bit close to MOS:IDIOM, I worry.
  • German coverage focusing on ... how she should have been stopped earlier: two things here - first, "with X..." phrases are almost always neater and clearer as new sentences ("German coverage focused on ... while Irish coverage ..."). Secondly, "she should have been stopped earlier" is a matter of opinion: we therefore need something like "argued that she should have been stopped...". Was this a universal opinion of the German press?
  • Related to the above, the next sentence start "while Irish coverage focused" is currently grammatical, but would be fixed by removing the with phrase.
    • I think the two of these were an attempt at avoiding or removing a semicolon (I think the clause works better in a connected sentence than a disparate one, just barely). It's now a semicolon and has been cleaned up more in a later diff to fix the broken grammar/too-many-semicolons that caused. Vaticidalprophet 14:15, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Better now. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:10, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • sparked discussion of the role of identity politics.: what do we mean by this - in society or in this case? More precise phrasing would help here.
    An improvement: might still be worth a bit of thought (what were, for instance, the competing claims? It sounds like we're trying to euphemise or talk around a clearer if more controversial point here.) UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:10, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Marie Sophie Hingst was born 20 October 1987: born on, surely?
  • studied history at university in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin, where she moved in 2013. She attended Trinity College Dublin, where she completed a PhD in history; from 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute: I am somewhat confused here:
    • We've already said that she studied history, so PhD in history seems redundant. Might consider replacing university with universities.
    • When was she at Trinity - from 2013? I wonder whether starting a new sentence for everything Dublin-related would be clearer.
    • I don't think it's normal for a PhD student to be a fellow: did she complete her PhD before 2015? That would seem astonishingly fast.
      • "Studied history at university" has been reworded to avoid repetition. I agree the timeline is...strange. She certainly seems to have finished the PhD, and to have moved to Dublin in 2013, and to have been a fellow in that timeframe. I blinked at it myself, but I'm not sure where the break is (starting the degree somewhere else?). Vaticidalprophet 14:15, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that it had 240,000 "regular readers",: the blog or the newspaper?
  • who committed suicide: MoS allows this, but advise died by suicide or killed herself unless extremely strongly attached to the current phrasing: suicide is not a crime, so it cannot be committed, and this phrasing is widely considered unhelpful by suicide-prevention charities. Discussed above. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:35, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hingst reported 22 alleged Holocaust victim relatives: can we rework this a bit to remove the huge pile of modifiers?
  • in Auschwitz: explain what this place was per WP:POPE and MOS:NOFORCELINK.
  • Her grandmother reportedly... who reported this - just Hingst? If so, framing like this creates the misleading impression that this "fact" was more widely known, and perhaps even true. It might seem repetitive, but I would keep banging the drum that all of this existed only in Hingst's mind.
    • It's tricky. I'm trying to be very careful terminology-wise here, because there's definitely a failure mode you see in some articles (it's agonizingly common in pseudoscience) where the author crosses well past writing a reference work into writing an explication of the subject's issues. I think "reportedly" here is enough, given how many adverbs are used throughout this section in general. Vaticidalprophet 15:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • which she was able to give to Yücel after his release: simply gave? (Separately: seems odd to give him copies of postcards she had already sent him, but that might be an oddity of the subject rather than the article).
  • founded a hospital in New Delhi that provided sex education.: unless it also did other things, we probably wouldn't call it a hospital.
  • writing for Die Zeit about her experiences under the pseudonym Sophie Roznblatt: writing under the pseudonym, or about her experiences under the pseudonym?
  • At the time of the Der Spiegel publication in June 2019, she was working at Intel in Dublin as a self-described "disruptor", a role she ascribed to her success on social media: do we know if she had a more official job role, or indeed, given her history, if she worked for them at all?
    • Oh, she definitely did (keeping her job/it trying to accommodate her through the media firestorm was part of the Irish Times article). I think the official title is something like "project manager". Vaticidalprophet 15:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • on Der Spiegel : things are usually published in magazines or on their websites.
  • her claims of providing medical treatment in India: this seems to have changed: she was previously only providing education.
  • There's an RFC somewhere (I forget where, but it came up during one of my nominations) that we shouldn't make ILL links to Wikidata, as the information there is not considered reliable.
    • I've read the RfC -- there's a bit of a telephone game here. ILLs were specifically carved out as an exemption from the general consensus-against, in that the closer considered there to be no clear conclusion about them either way (I've heard even this disputed by a few who think it found active supporting consensus; they were discussed fairly little compared to Wikidata links in general). Vaticidalprophet 15:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • that had granted her platforms: is this (and "outing") still considered slightly slang-y in English? Would "published her work" be accurate?
  • criticising Anglophone writers who attacked the severity of the German coverage for not realizing how offensive her claims were in Germany: this is a matter of opinion, so we should frame it as such: "criticising them for..." implies that it's a fact.
  • Meier and Schneider justified these reports in the public interest: not sure this is quite idiomatic: "argued that these reports were justified as in the public interest"?
  • Schneider noted that due to the extent of the fraud, it would not have been possible to anonymize the fraudster: MOS:SAID would advise a more subjective word than noted, which implies that this was absolutely true: we'll never know, as nobody ever tried it.
  • n. Claas Relotius had then-recently been fired from the publication: awkward phrasing: could we give a date, and perhaps something like "two years/three months/five minutes before the publication of their article on Hingst"?
    • Have clarified this as occurring in 2018.
  • critics accused the focus on Hingst of being an attempt to launder the magazine's image: they probably made their accusations against the magazine, rather than the focus, so I would frame as such: "accused the magazine of trying to launder its image..."
  • the prior researchers who had also uncovered her fraud: who were these?
  • was in contact with Hingst via postcards: I knew that he received postcards from her; this reads as if he sent them, too.
  • In a column for Süddeutsche Zeitung: the Süddeutsche Zeitung
  • I'm a little concerned that the article goes into too much depth on some of the responses to this issue, particularly when it's citing an article's view of the matter to that article itself. There's no inherent problem with doing so, but it raises difficulties with WP:DUEWEIGHT: we cover things in proportion to their prominence in secondary sources, but it's difficult to do that when we don't have e.g. a third researcher commenting on Emcke's view of the situation. I would encourage cutting these summaries down to the absolute bare essentials.
    • Circling back to this one, because I've been dwelling on it. UndercoverClassicist, are there any particular ones you feel are overdetail? I've generally aimed for what comes across as representative of "next-level-up" analysis (e.g. Emcke's inclusion is primarily because Rosh considered her one of the major sympathetic journalists, giving only one example of the "Irish vs German perspective", etc). This is the one remaining query, and I'm not entirely sure about it or how to address it. Vaticidalprophet 03:45, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sure there are major problems, as such, but what catches my eye: the entire paragraph on Deniz Yücel is cited to Deniz Yücel, and he gets a slightly but definitely greater amount of space than any of the journalists that preceded him and were cited to secondary sources. The same is true of the last paragraph in that section on Doerry: I can see the argument that he's important to the story, and so deserves more space, but that also opens up the point that he's involved in the story, and so it would really be better to have the facts filtered through independent reliable sources. What do you think? UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    ​The Doerry paragraph was added after other FAC commentary felt his perspective was very underweighed. I feel that paragraph is in a fairly complex place -- it's a little less one-level-up covered than some other aspects of the situation, but it's also meaningful from a neutrality perspective and from the perspective of not misinterpreting Doerry's very delicate role in the situation. I tend to land in inclusion from what's at least arguably a BLP perspective as well as an NPOV one (it'd be easy to fall into unintentionally being more negative towards Doerry than may be indicated). For Yücel I feel the coverage of the postcards themselves make his opinion relevant, even if it's a little more primary -- this was added during the GAN-FAC interregnum, and I felt after reading his article that it was a significant enough element for its absence to be retrospectively a significant gap. I'm less confident about the latter than the former, though. Vaticidalprophet 08:17, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Happy to fall in with that judgement: very reasonable and eminently sensible. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:50, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Following this, I've made a few more tweaks for some miscellaneous comments (here and here); otherwise, I think I've addressed the lot of this. Is there anything else that comes to mind? Vaticidalprophet 09:24, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ofrath too compared Hingst and Dolezal, but more cuttingly: not sure the word cuttingly is neutral enough for Wikipedia's voice.
    • It's a very cutting comparison (and arguably an unexpected defense of Dolezal). To quote: Her invented biography as she narrated it (all traces of which have now been taken offline) was offensive not only because of the act of misappropriation, but because it was wrought with clichés and basic inconsistencies that suggest little genuine interest in the experience of being Jewish [...] Having misappropriated a family history of persecution and suffering, she then used it for her own purposes. This, of course, suggests a rather sinister perception of how Jews in Germany engage with their past – as if Jews were seeking to take advantage of history for their own ends. I certainly want to get across the "tell us what you really think" impression it gives off. I'm happy to consider another way to put it, though. Vaticidalprophet 03:45, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd suggest we quote part of it, then: perhaps described Dolezal's story as "wrought with clichés and basic inconsistencies that suggest little genuine interest in the experience of being Jewish". Show, don't tell is my thinking here: if we simply tell the reader it's "cutting", that's a completely subjective judgement and they have no particular reason to believe us; if we show it by quoting the material that brought us to that judgement, however, it gives the reader more credence, and is both more engaging and more convincing. UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Done. Vaticidalprophet 08:18, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Micha Brumlik ... juxtaposed Hingst with fraudsters: suggest compared with or contrasted with, as he probably didn't physically place her next to them.
  • contemporary to the Holocaust contemporary with.
  • Should Ebay in the quote box be MOS:CONFORMed to eBay?

Source review - pass

edit

Source review - spotchecks not done

  • FN5 appears to be a republication - is it authorized?

caeciliusinhorto

edit

A very interesting article. Only a few nitpicky comments from me.

  • The image of Wittenberg at the top of the early life section looks badly tilted off of level to me. A look at commons suggests this as a higher-quality alternative.
  • "Hingst attended secondary education at the Liborius-Gymnasium in Dessau" reads awkwardly to me.
  • "Gentile": though Gentile can be capitalised in English, MOS:CAPS says that "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia" and I don't think "gentile" meets that bar.
    (Butting in) As I read all of those guides, they all say it can be capitalised or at most that it's usually capitalised: that's lower than consistently (=almost always). With my Latin/grammar pedant hat on, "Jews" is capitalised because it's a proper noun for a group of people; there's no group called the "Gentiles" (just as we don't capitalise the N of "non-Jews"), and the word comes from the Latin common noun gentes ('peoples'). UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I've re-rendered this as "non-Jewish" to sidestep the capitalization question entirely. Vaticidalprophet 15:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The book was described as commercially successful": I don't have access to the source so I can't check what it says, but do we have reason to doubt that the book was commercially successful? Why don't we just say "the book was commercially successful"?
    • I'm not sure in absolute terms how it did; only Yücel and Doerry really refer to its commercial performance, and don't discuss specifics. Doerry in English calls it "a surprising hit", so I've tweaked this to quote him directly. Vaticidalprophet 15:31, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Suspicions were raised about Hingst's claims by readers, who noticed "inconsistencies" in her claims": avoid repetition of "claims" here?
  • "Bergner contacted Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry": in other cases the article avoids the false title in this construction. (Including in the lead, where we have "In June 2019, the Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry..."
    • My view on the false title debate is "valid in moderation, but awkward if overused". I think the use here is defensible; I've avoided false titles when referring to the active participant of a sentence, but here that's Bergner, not Doerry, and intentionally avoiding the construct feels to me that it lengthens the sentence without providing additional value. These things are very subjective, of course. Vaticidalprophet 15:31, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 10:44, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments, Caeciliusinhorto! Replied to all of these, enacted most, queried two. Vaticidalprophet 15:31, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with UndercoverClassicist above about the letter of MOS:CAPS re. "gentiles", but I really don't care that much about the letter of the law here; other than that all your changes look good and I'm happy to support Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 09:49, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
SC

What a fascinating and rather sad story. Beautifully put together too. Just a couple of niggles from me

  • "Dublin, where she moved in 2013": As the sentence is currently written, she made a physical movement while being in Dublin, which I know is not what you mean. Grammatically she moved to Dublin, or "where she settled in 2013", which would mean less framing.
  • "the Auschwitz concentration camp": I'm not sure you need the definite article here, although I don't push the point.
  • "The book was "a surprising hit": says who? (I think you need to identify the speaker/writer here)
  • 'focused on "exposing" Hingst's fraud': is there any need for the scare quotes?

That's it. Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 12:46, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for the comments, SchroCat! Made tweaks here. I felt "exposing" in quotes expressed that Yücel was skeptical about the value of such a focus, but it could go either way, so have tweaked. Vaticidalprophet 13:51, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support Happy with those. I've not heard about this woman or her story before, so thank you - fascinating stuff. Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 13:57, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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