Talk:Fall of the Berlin Wall

I added my edit because I felt as if it was beneficial to this articleHrrikard (talk) 19:39, 29 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)