Talk:Zebulon Vance/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Indy beetle (talk · contribs) 02:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Comments

There are some significant challenges to this article becoming a GA, most of them related to focus and sourcing. Some examples:

• Sourcing concerns:
  • Sizeable sources such as the books Life of Zebulon B. Vance, Zeb Vance: champion of personal freedom, and journal articles such as "Zebulon B. Vance and the 'Scattered Nation'", “Zebulon Vance and His Reconstruction of the Civil War in North Carolina.”, and "Zebulon B. Vance: A Confederate Nationalist in the North Carolina Gubernatorial Election of 1864", are not cited by specific page number (only the page ranges are given for these journal articles.) Reference structure requirements for GAs are less stringent than FAs, but an article is required to be verifiable, and without specific page numbers for specific citations, this becomes incredibly difficult to maintain. Life of Zebulon B. Vance is a nearly 500 page book. "Zebulon B. Vance: A Confederate Nationalist" is used to support the incredibly important statement about Vance's reasons for eventually supporting the Confederacy, so we should know which page or specific two or three pages to flip to through if we want to verify that information.
  • "Vance, Zebulon | Encyclopedia.com" (currently ref 40) seems somewhat dubious as a source, especially when better alternatives almost certainly exist for someone of Vance's pedigree. "Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Zebulon Vance" is from a blog which also does not evidence any reliability. "Presidential Proclamation No. 38, May 29, 1865, 13 Stat. 760" (ref 39) is a WP:PRIMARY source and could easily be replaced by a secondary source, not to mention that I doubt the proclamation makes any claims regarding Holden being a former opponent of Vance. Clement Dowd, author of Life of Zebulon B. Vance, was his erstwhile law partner, apparently, so this should not be used so extensively as an authoratative source for his public career. It seems extremely sympathetic to Vance.
  • Instances where the cited source does not support the information it's supposed to be supporting:
    • The statement in the lede Although historians consider Vance progressive for his era, he was also a slave owner and is now regarded a racist. has three supporting refs (6, 7, and 8). All three are reliable, but do not really support this claim. The first one is a news article which reviews one book by historian Gordon B. McKinney. This article does support the claim that Vance was "often remembered as a progressive leader, at least for his times" (by who exactly, historians or the public, is not made clear), and supports the notion that a single historian (McKinney) thinks he should be remembered as a racist. The other two are part of The Washington Post project to document members of Congress who owned slave. Ref 7 is the introductory article to their project, and ref 8 is their database of slaveholding congressmen. Best I can tell, ref 7 does not even mention Vance, and while ref 8 could support the statement that he was a slaveowner, it would mean nothing as far as public or academic perception of Vance or how it has changed over time. The statement and the refs taken together are at best a WP:SYNTH violation.
    • The statement Vance and other former Confederates were banned from returning to public office by the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868. is plainly not supported by ref 42, Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1877 p. 292.
    • Surviving members of Vance's Rough and Ready Guard led a procession of 710 carriages from the church to Riverside Cemetery where nearly 10,000 mourners attended his funeral and burial, including people he formerly enslaved. This is supposedly supported by refs 14, 41, and 6. But ref 41 does not actually appear relevant to this information and should be removed.
    • Modern detractors and some modern biographers claim that Vance was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This is sourced to an Asheville Citizen-Times article which only says of Vance and the Klan, "Community and family historian Sasha Mitchell also found written evidence that he was grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." A single local historian alleging that Vance was a member of the Klan is not the same as "Modern detractors and some modern biographers". She is only one person, and is neither really a "detractor" per se and definitely not a "biographer" of Vance. Thus, the source fails to support the information in the Wikipedia article.
    • The first known source to connect the two is an affidavit to the Congress's Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States from Thomas A. Hope of Lincoln County, North Carolina.[53] In his affidavit, Hope states, "[I] frequently heard it talked among the [KKK] members that Z. B. Vance was the chief of the State; do not know this of my own knowledge, have only heard it talked of."[53] This is sourced directly to a transcript of the testimony. Using this to try and establish a connection that Vance was indeed a Klansman is probably an WP:OR violation. The transcript itself can also not be a source for the statement that it itself was "the first known source" - a secondary source would be needed to make that determination. We would also need a secondary source to affirm any significance to Hope's testimony about rumors.
    • In her 1924 self-published book, Authentic History Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877, Susan Lawrence Davis states that Vance was the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan for North Carolina.[42] Davis had a history of fakery and appears to have plagiarized a 1906 historical romance novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. when writing her nonfiction Klan history.[54][42] Modern experts note other discrepancies in Authentic History, including fabricated descriptions of Klan costumes, giving reason to question any claims she made about Vance.[54] This whole section needs to be removed, textbook WP:OR If Davis' book is unreliable then it is unreliable, and the arguments about that can take place on the talk page. We can probably discount it on the fact that its almost 100 years old and self-published, though she really does seem like a piece of work all and all. That said, I also do not see evidence that Wilhelm Kühner, publishing by way of Medium, is a "modern expert" (and he certainly isn't "modern experts") or that modern experts of any other sort were critiquing her work, as weak as it looks. "giving reason to question any claims she made about Vance" is an original conclusion by the Wikipedia editor who put that there, not something asserted by an reliable source. This would be different if a historian was evaluating Davis' claim about Vance in something like a journal article. But what we have is one modern dubious source broadly critiquing an antiquated, self-published one. None of this should be brought into the Wikipedia article at all unless RS are discussing it.
    • However, Davis's report of Vance's association with the Klan is repeated in many credible books in the 20th century, such as historian Stanly Fitzgerald Horn's Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–187. More original research. Horn's own book cannot be a source for the claim that "many credible books" including his own say Vance was a Klansmen.
  • I've tagged a few instances where statements are not given a supporting citation. Not a major problem but needs to be fixed before a GA pass regardless.
  • A lot of the sources are very old. For a figure such as Vance (about who much as been written), we should not be heavily relying on sources published before 1900, or even really too much on those before 1960, especially when dealing with his public career and figuring out what is important about it. The newspaper articles from the 1800s are basically primary sources. Older sources, especially older news articles also tend to be less neutral on matters such as prominent political figures. The fact that the entirety of the section on his approach towards Reconstruction as a Senator relies on an 1897 book written by his law partner is not good. McKinney's 2004/2005 biography is not cited much, and it is probably the highest quality source we have on Vance. Other newer sources such as Stephanie McCurry Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2012), while not mostly about Vance, might also be good to consult.

• Focus concerns:
  • At the age of six, Vance attended schools operated by M. Woodson, Esq., first at Flat Creek and, later, on the French Broad River.[14][15] Both were far enough from home that he had to board with others.[10] He also was a student at a school in Lapland run by Jane Hughey.[10] Why do we need to know the names of the people who ran these schools?
  • There lots of large quotes in this article, some of which do not seem fully necessary. Namely, Sharyn McCrumb's full explanation for why she decided to write fictional novels involving Vance seems WP:UNDUE, especially when we're citing her personal web page.
  • We do not need a comprehensive listing of every notable politician who attended Vance's two funerals.
• Some problems with prose and neutral wording:
  • His account of the search, published in the Spectator in July 1857, is considered the most complete record of the tragic event. Considered the most complete record by who? Also, "tragic" should not be used in Wikivoice.
  • For this campaign, he went on a fifteen-county speaking tour that "set the mountains on fire". Two issues. One, it is not clear whether this is the quote of a contemporary or of the historian who wrote the journal article this is cited to. Second, without further context, it's not clear if this means Vance's stump speeches were controversial or very well and enthusiastically received by the locals.
  • When North Carolina needed a new governor, his name was immediately mentioned. After reading the source, I can say a much more neutral and precise way of saying this would be "Many newspapers supported Vance as a potential candidate for governor". Phillip Gerard is no pushover, but the tone of his Our State articles seems clearly played up for drama, and that seems to be bleeding over into Wikitext. Same with the preceding statement The Confederates were not victorious, but Vance again showed "unflinching leadership". Without context on what he did in battle, this also is substantively meaningless.
• Problems with being sufficiently broad:
  • His gubernatorial campaigns are glossed over in single sentences.

Per WP:GAFAIL, a good article nomination can be failed if "It is a long way from meeting any one of the six good article criteria". As I have laid out above, I believe there is a lot of ground to cover before this is GA ready. On these grounds I'm going to fail the nomination. I advise the nominator to take the above into consideration before renominating. What I have pointed out is not exhaustive but I have tried to point out the biggest issues or at least things that are representative of potentially larger problems. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Assessment checklist

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail: