User:Bs092356/Fritz Platten/Alpenschatz Peer Review

General info

Whose work are you reviewing?

Bs092356

Link to draft you're reviewing

User:Bs092356/Fritz Platten

Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)

Fritz Platten

Evaluate the drafted changes

(Compose a detailed peer review here, considering each of the key aspects listed above if it is relevant. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what feedback looks like.)

Note: As you have been building off of a snapshot of an existing article, I am going to operate under the assumption that the struck-through sentences are not sentences that you intend to delete, but are just struck-through to distinguish them from the sentences you have added.

Lead

As the Lead is the content that is usually the first thing readers see when reading through an article, it's important that it is concise, but contains important core details of Platten's life and what distinguishes him as a noteworthy person.

Fritz Platten (8 July 1883 – 22 April 1942) was a Swiss Communist and one of the founders of the Communist International, born in the Canton of St. Gallen to an Old Catholic family [1]. Fritz was known for his extreme leftist-views and being one the founders of the Comintern. Fritz is mainly known for his friendship with Lenin as they were very close. he arranged Lenin's trip back home to Russia and also saved his life from asassination in 1917.

The facts contained in your addition to this section are important for understanding Platten's relationship with international communist politics, but a possible option for you to better expand upon Platten's significance could be:

Fritz Platten (8 July 1883 – 22 April 1942) was a Swiss Communist and one of the founders of the Communist International, born in the Canton of St. Gallen to an Old Catholic family. A lifelong Communist, Platten was a close associate of several major communist figures of his time, in particular Vladimir Lenin, with whom Platten maintained a close friendship. Platten was one of the leading figures responsible for arranging Lenin's return to Petrograd by train from Switzerland after the February Revolution in 1917, as well as shielding Lenin during an unsuccessful assassination attempt by SR member Fanny Kaplan in the same year.^{[citation needed]} After Lenin's death in 1924 and Josef Stalin's ascendancy to power in the newly-founded Soviet Union, Platten was pushed to the periphery of Comintern politics, and eventually fell victim to the Great Purges of Stalin's reign.

This re-organisation of the facts you presented is something I'll get into a bit more detail on in the Organisation section, but otherwise I think that the Lead section as you have written it is on the right track.

Content

There is definitely a lot more room for information about Platten's life to be provided in your draft as a whole so far, but in particular I would recommend focusing on trying to establish a section on Platten's early years and what got him initially involved in the communist movement, as well as a section on the legacy he had on Soviet politics, Swiss politics, and/or the Comintern. Of course, all of that is contingent on whether you are able to find reliable sources for that information, but regardless it would be fantastic for expanding the article into a more fleshed out form.

Tone/Balance and Organisation

It would be better to be cautious regarding the way in which certain sentences are written. In regard to specific examples of possible tonal issues, sentences like:

Fritz was known for his extreme leftist-views...

and

Platten has been arrested plenty of times throughout his career.

might be outside the bounds of what could be considered neutral writing. If a source that you are using specifically claims that "X was known for his extreme Y-views" or uses emphatic language such as "plenty of times", be sure to frame it as a direct quotation, ideally mentioning the specific author who has stated this claim first before proceeding with the quote. Otherwise, these sorts of claims are generally not within the purview of a Wikipedia article, which is ideally meant to be a sum of unbiased factual statements.. If Platten explicitly endorsed a political position that contextually within the time period in which he lived would have been perceived as "extreme" by his contemporaries, cite where you found this information, if you can find it being directly mentioned.

Bear in mind too that because Platten was marked for elimination by Stalin during the Purges, which would have necessitated the complete destruction of his reputation and his universal condemnation lest anyone who defended his reputation also be arrested or silenced, information that is sourced from testimonies by Platten's fellow party members after his arrest could suffer from serious reliability problems, and the inclusion of that information may jeopardise the perceived reliability of the article as a whole for some readers.

Emphatic language may also be perceived as a sign of bias, even if it is entirely unintentional. In the example of:

Platten has been arrested plenty of times throughout his career. One being on April 10th of 1919, members of the National council including Platten and other members were sentenced six months inlight of the rebellion in Switzerland.

you may want to substitute it with more neutral wording, such as:

Throughout his career, Platten was arrested on several occasions, such as his arrest along with several other Swiss National Council members on April 10th, 1919 and subsequent six month prison sentence in response to their role in the Swiss general strike the previous year.

With the current structure of the draft being effectively identical to the current live version of the article, there isn't a lot to comment on directly regarding its organisation so far. Generally speaking, though, maintaining the sections on his Career, Personal Life, and Death. Usually on biographical Wikipedia pages, the general structure is "Early Life", "Career", "Later years/Death", "Personal life", and "Legacy", but if you are unable to find enough information on his life outside of his career, there is always room to play around with this structure.

Lastly, be sure to capitalise all proper nouns, e.g. Swiss, Lenin, Russia, etc. Common nouns like "communism" (not referring to a specific movement or party in a country, but to communism in general) should not be capitalised. When you refer to individuals, particularly in the case of your subject in question, always use their surname (e.g. Platten, Lenin). Only mention their given name (e.g. Fritz, Vladimir) in the first instance of the individual in question being mentioned, and only as part of their full name, not on its own.

Sources and References

At the moment, it appears that you have yet to include citations for the material you have added to the article. While this may be acceptable at the moment due to the rough nature of this draft, it would be better to get into the habit of including hyperlinks (like this as an example) and citations early on to avoid having to spend large amounts of time going back over previously written material to find sentences in need of citation and then inserting the relevant citation.

Although the References section is already present on the current live version of the article, I'll include this recommendation for redundancy. Including both a Bibliography and a References section (the References section being only followed with the Insert --> References list, which will automatically log all citations you have created) is absolutely essential. Below are examples of how both sections are usually composed at the end of Wikipedia articles.

Bibliography

Last Name, First Name (2021). Book Title. Location: Book Publisher. pp. 1–999. ISBN 12-34567-890

Last Name, First Name (2021). "Webpage Title". Name of Website. Retrieved 12 March 2021.

References

As for hyperlinks, the example Lead section earlier in this review is a good litmus test for what to include hyperlinks for and what not to. It is best to avoid having hyperlinks more than once for a particular term within any given section or set of sections. As an example, including a hyperlink for Vladimir Lenin when he is first mentioned in the Lead section and in your first section of material is ideal so that readers can be easily directed towards the main articles about specific events, organisations, or people if they wish to learn more about them independently of your article, but you do not want to include hyperlinks every time Lenin is mentioned afterward. Including hyperlinks has the added benefit of also making the article more polished, but of course hyperlinks cannot be substitutions for citations. Nonetheless, including hyperlinks for specific events, concepts, organisations, people, etc. that are mentioned in a quote or a citation that are not previously mentioned in the article is a very good idea.

Overall Impressions

Considering how much involvement Platten had in the birth of the Comintern and his relationship with major figures in the movement, I am honestly surprised that the current live article is so brief. I think this article has a lot of potential room for growth, and with the right resources to use for references, it can absolutely be made into a very strong article. The subject matter is helped by the fact that it's legitimately an interesting topic, and if fleshed out and given the right references, I think it definitely would have a fitting place amongst the host of other articles that discuss the history of Communism.