Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Varanasi/1
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- Result pending
There are uncited passages in the article, some of which have had citation needed tags since February 2020. There is no information about this place's history between the 1940s and the 2010s, so this article might not be complete. The climate data seems to stop at 2012. Z1720 (talk) 02:21, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
- Fail, very obviously. This is not rocket science. I rewrote the current version of lead of this article some three years ago. The lead, which has sources with quotes, is an NPOV template for the rewriting of the main body; it is not a summary of the article. I have done this for a number of major South Asia-related articles, such as Sanskrit, Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Ganges, Indus river, Mughal Empire, Himalayas, ... and this has the blessing of SA-administrators. I wasn't aware that the article was a GA. Bluntly put, the main body is nonsense. It is that poorly written and poorly sourced. I will post a list of issues next, but I don't want editors tampering with the lead on the grounds that it doesn't summarize the main body. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 11:48, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
- Here is a short list of issues:
- Etymology: the first paragraph is cited to Cunningham and Sastri. Alexander Cunningham died over a hundred years ago. C&S was written in 1871. The third paragraph is cited to the provincial government web site.
- History
- Mythology begins with a remarkable statement that according to "Hindu mythology, Varanasi was founded by Shiva." Hindu mythology is so varied that there is nothing its many-splendored branches agree upon, source or no source. Obvious failure of due weight
- Ancient History: says, "Further excavations at Aktha and Ramnagar, two sites in the vicinity of the city, unearthed artefacts dating back to 1800 BCE, ..." cited to a web site article. 1800 BCE predated the arrival of Historical Vedic religion, the precursor of Hinduism, to India.
- Medieval: The source, "Waiting for Shiva: unearthing the truth of Kashi's Gyan Vapi. Noida: BluOne Ink Pvt. Ltd. 2024." is very dubious.
- Early Modern, Modern: Chaotically written. E.g. "The Kingdom of Banares was given official status by the Mughals in 1737, and the kingdom started in this way and continued as a dynasty-governed area until Indian independence in 1947, during the reign of Vibhuti Narayan Singh." KoB is Wikilinked to Benares State, which was recognized as a zamindari-estate by the Nawabs of Oudh, who were quasi-independent governors of a region of the waning Mughal Empire. The estate became a princely state in 1911. I rewrote the lead sentence of Banaras State some time ago to reflect the reality.
- Geography and Climate: Geography is mostly a long list of the city's neighborhoods. Climate is probably the only section that is half-way reliable
- All the sections beginning with Notable Landmarks are nothing but a long lists of blue links.
- Overall assessment: I don't know what the article looked like in 2015, when it made GA, but it has suffered much since. It is nowhere near GA class. I don't even need to examine GA-criteria to say this. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:27, 17 January 2025 (UTC)