Talk:Fall of the Berlin Wall

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 21:16, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

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Checkpoint Charlie on the night of 9/10 November 1989

• ... that the Fall of the Berlin Wall began when no-one could be found to authorize the use of lethal force?
• ALT1 ... that the Fall of the Berlin Wall (immediate aftermath pictured) was an accident? Source: [1]

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Great Northumberland Forest
• Comment: 9 November 2019 will be the 30th anniversary of the fall, so a good date for the DYK

Created by Onceinawhile (talk). Self-nominated at 07:04, 30 September 2019 (UTC).

• Starting review --valereee (talk) 15:04, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: valereee (talk) 15:04, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

• I love ALT1, but while I see the fall called an "accident" in the source, I'm not finding the word accident or mistake in the article. What sentence supports the hook? --valereee (talk) 15:06, 1 October 2019 (UTC) ETA: is "mistake" what we want? Sources say "accidental," which is arguably quite different. This hook will likely get much attention, just want to make sure we get it right. --valereee (talk) 16:14, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

• Are you planning to nom this for GA? It would be nice to have it there for the anniversary. --valereee (talk) 16:01, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

• The sentence in the article that supports ALT0, It soon became clear that no one among the East German authorities would take personal responsibility for issuing orders to use lethal force, so the vastly outnumbered soldiers had no way to hold back the huge crowd of East German citizens. does not have a citation. --valereee (talk) 16:06, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Ping me when you have a chance to respond, and also see comments at article talk that are not problematic for DYK purposes but that I think we probably want to address before the hook runs. --valereee (talk) 16:16, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Valereee. I have amended mistake to accident, and struck ALT0. The source is then the title of Sarotte's book. I doubt I'll have time to get this to GA in the next month unfortunately. Onceinawhile (talk) 08:12, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

@Valereee and Onceinawhile: I noticed there are a few unsourced paragraphs and also a {{citation needed}} tag. Therefore it doesn't fit the sourced criterion yet. There also seem to be some {{page needed}} tags. I think ApprenticeFan should also be mentioned as one of the article expanders. epicgenius (talk) 16:20, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Fixed the cn (thanks, EG, I'd missed that) but Onceinawhile I can't find a source for that assertion about Krenz/Stoph in a one-sentence unsourced paragraph. We could add it to the paragraph that's above it, that actually would make sense, but I'm concerned that I'm not easily finding a source for that happening on that date. Our articles on Krenz, Stoph, and the Berlin Wall don't seem to help. Should we remove that sentence? Epicgenius, I don't think the page needed tags are necessarily a problem for DYK? Not that I wouldn't like to see those added, too, but I hadn't planned to fail the nom for that. I checked on the book, and the preview isn't letting me see full pages. --valereee (talk) 18:40, 2 October 2019 (UTC) ETA: I've requested the book from my library, I should be able to get those pagenos if you can't OIAW. --valereee (talk) 18:46, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

@Valereee: I don't personally think the page-needed tags are a big deal. This would have been covered if the page had gone through GAN, but this is not GAN, so we can disregard them for now. However, the missing citations are pretty major, especially seeing as how the now-stricken hook didn't have a citation. epicgenius (talk) 19:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

I've added the material for the current hook, plus citation. I would like to see this go through at least a major review in time for its appearance, though. It could get a ton of views. Is there anyplace to go to ask for semi-urgent help? --valereee (talk) 19:48, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

I don't know anywhere off the top of my head that specializes in citation checking. I asked on Discord for help, so let's see if that works. Do you live in a major city, or near a library with a large collection? I can probably check my college's library or New York Public Library tomorrow. epicgenius (talk) 20:06, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

I do live in a large city with a first-class library system. I'm leaving town for two weeks first thing Saturday, but I've requested the book with all the page-neededs (Revolution 1989) and am hoping it comes in today or tomorrow so I can take it with me as I'll have some time to work while I'm out of town. --valereee (talk) 10:48, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

valereee, have you gotten the relevant pages in the book yet? epicgenius (talk) 13:48, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Epicgenius, yes, it was here when I got home yesterday! Now it's just a matter of matching the page numbers to the assertions! --valereee (talk) 14:12, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

done! Thank goodness for well-indexed books! Passing this! --valereee (talk) 14:41, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

trying again --valereee (talk) 20:48, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

How should (pictured) be inserted into the hook? feminist (talk) 15:27, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Feminist: I have done so above. Onceinawhile (talk) 00:21, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

wut?

How the heck did we not have this article before this? Yow. --valereee (talk) 15:34, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Valereee, this was a redirect (recently deleted) to Berlin_Wall#Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall (or various other section headers) since 2005. We have also had Fall of the inner German border since 2009, when it was split out from Inner German border (currently a FA). —Kusma (t·c) 19:22, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Oh, yes, I know it was covered in other articles, it just was a huge surprise to me that one of the most riveting events of my young adulthood didn't have a standalone article! I was a newlywed, and my husband and I were just transfixed by the news as it happened. When I saw it come up at DYK I assumed this was an article that had just gone through GA, not a new creation. --valereee (talk) 20:40, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

I had the same emotional reaction, which is why I created it. This moment changed the world as we knew it, possibly more than any other single moment in the last few decades.

We didn’t even have a wikidata item on it – I had to manually search for each of the other language articles, which weren’t even connected to each other. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Some comments

I was asked to review this article for neutrality. I have some comments, mostly about what is missing and what is given undue weight:

• The "Background" section focuses a bit too much on events in Berlin. The article Peaceful Revolution gives a much more balanced background to what happened -- there were the border openings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (including the famous symbolic fall of the Iron Curtain when a the border fence between Austria and Hungary was cut by Gyula Horn and Alois Mock) and their effects on East Germany (thousands of people left East Germany via other countries before travel was made impossible), there were the Monday demonstrations, and the big 9 October demonstration in Leipzig where lethal force was not used (unlike the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre just a few months before), and there was the destabilisation of the East German government in October 1989. Try to look at peaceful revolution to improve this section.
• The central sections about the new regulations, the press conference, and the immediate response seem fine to me (although the watching of West German TV was officially not allowed in East Germany...) This is the new bit that sets this article apart from Berlin Wall#Fall of the Berlin Wall (note that the context is presented quite well in that article, better than here).
• Aftermath:
  • Demolition: "Demolition of the Bornholmer Straße" sounds like a road was demolished, not the wall? I would also like to see the East Side Gallery mentioned somewhere.
  • Opposition: well, none of these are in opposition to the fall of the wall, only in opposition to reunification
  • Celebrations: The fall was widely celebrated in Germany, not just by English-speaking bands. I'm not convinced by this part. The controversy about November 9 in German history could mention Schicksalstag.
  • 20th anniversary celebrations: This section is a bit long compared to the rest of the article, and some of it is really trivia (commemorative Cinderella stamps?). I'm not aware that the 20th anniversary (as opposed to the 10th and 25th) really was that important.

Hope that helps a bit, —Kusma (t·c) 20:13, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Kusma, that's great! It doesn't sound like anything that would prevent the average article from passing DYK, but in this case, since this article is likely to get a lot of attention, maybe these are things we should try to get done in the next month. --valereee (talk) 20:36, 1 October 2019 (UTC)