Talk:Opposition calls for mass protests in Bahrain

Sources I used:


 * February 14 Youth Coalition calls for gathering in front of houses on Monday.
 * February 14 Youth Coalition plans for protests starting from 12 to 15 February.
 * Nabeel Rajab announces he will be heading to Pearl Roundabout on 12 February.
 * Opposition parties call for night sit in on 12 February.
 * Opposition parties call for march on 13 February afternoon.
 * Opposition parties call protesters to chant "Allah Akbar" for 3 nights preceding 14 February.
 * Tens of thousands participate in opposition parties march on last Friday . —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bahraini Activist (talk • contribs)

Is this original reporting, or just a very large number of sources? (I do regret that I'm unable to do another in-depth review right at this moment; I'm probably able to do about two in-depth reviews a day on average, which is a lot as a workload, but can feel woefully inadequate when I see articles waiting on the review queue.) --Pi zero (talk) 03:52, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion
The lead might be sharpened a bit to show the overall conflict and allow the reader to step into the details; say something along the lines of: "In Bahrain, tension is building between opposition protesters who want to revive last year's marches and government authorities who are trying to maintain control over protest activities." Just a suggestion. Crtew (talk) 15:14, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Category
I'm hesistant to make the following change because I'm not sure if I will mess up the RSS feed on the Category page: Wikipedia changed the article name "2011 Bahraini protests" (currently a redirect) to "2011–2012 Bahraini uprising". Since the protests are still going on, I would suggest that Wikinews also update the category to be up to date and accurate in its categorization. Crtew (talk) 18:20, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Feb 15
I can't find Feb. 15 in any of the articles, but I don't know Arabic and so I'm not sure if the creator of the article meant for that to be a summary of those (original template), and I'm not sure what those articles are the basis for here in the text.Crtew (talk) 23:06, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Rooftop protests
I can't find this fact in any of the articles and so I'm assuming those also came from documents. I can't confirm that because they're in Arabic. Crtew (talk) 23:25, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Problems with verification
The status of this article is very muddled, with issues of what is OR, and how OR should be treated, getting tangled up with issues of dealing with foreign-language sources. So we've got two classes of awkward issues, and the two are awkwardly entangled. This is probably quite significant in the reason this article hasn't been reviewed before now &mdash; because reviewers are understandably discouraged from volunteering their labor to review an article if it raises thorny problems for review.

I don't think this is verifiable in its current state. Because I'm not sure how to write a simple set of instructions on how exactly to fix this problem, I'm going to try to explain the issues involved as best I can (and they are, as I say, thorny issues, so I'm not sure how well I'll explain them). I hope other reviewers can provide input on this; even above and beyond the fate of this particular article, the community needs (imho) to clarify these issues.

Part of reviewing an article is verifying that all information in the article, except really obvious stuff like "Manama is in Bahrain", is confirmed from the sources. --Pi zero (talk) 17:04, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * OR is a possible source for some of the information, but that doesn't let the reviewer or the author off the hook on verification. We require that the author provide 'detailed reporter's notes', and the reviewer uses those to verify.  At stake, then, is both whether the article is accurate in its reporting of information from the reporter's notes, and whether there is any information in the article that is actually not from the OR nor from any non-OR sources listed (and doesn't qualify as obvious).  This is why it is never sufficient for OR notes to say something like "I talked to him on the phone, and anything in the article that isn't from the listed sources is something he told me on the phone" &mdash; we'd never know about either kind of error (mis-reporting, or extraneous material).
 * I'm also not at all sure this qualifies as OR; it looks like a large number of non-English sources.
 * Many sources make for a lot of work for the reviewer (who has to read them all), and so when an article has many sources it is good to leave notes for the reviewer saying what comes from where, either as notes on the article talk page or as &lt;!--comments--&gt; in the article text.
 * Foreign-language sources are a problem we continually wrestle with. We get synthesis articles with foreign sources from time to time.  The trouble is that unless the reviewer can actually read the language of the sources, automatic translation often isn't nearly adequate (we're acutely aware here of just how awful automatic translation really is).  We officially disallow gratuitous non-English sources &mdash; if there are English sources, we say, use them.  I limped through a review a while back with some Czech sources, but they were used only for quotes, and I was able to identify the quotes in the sources and document it all; I didn't have to verify subtleties of meaning from those sources.  The provided translations of the quotes, which were all very plausible based on their poor automatic translations, were in effect a sort of OR-ish input provided by the author.
 * Here, I've got a big pile of facts that I didn't manage to find in the listed English sources (I highlighted less than half the article text when going through them), and there seems to be a lot of detailed information that would have to be extracted from the non-English sources. Without more detailed notes (if not passage translations) to guide me through it, I doubt my ability to figure out what is or isn't verifiable based on automatic translations.
 * Per Pi zero's remarks, non-English sources are really challenging to review. We can put them into various online translation services, but those are by-and-large dreadful. Highlighting what detail is taken from a non-English source, then providing a better translation which the automated translation service mostly verifies is about the best I can suggest on this. --Brian McNeil / talk 17:29, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * 1. Removed the OR tag that had been placed on the article. 2) Deleted paragraphs where I couldn't verify the information based on the sources given. 3) Eliminated one source that seemed irrelevant or had information repeated in the other articles. 4) Updated the story with most recent developments. 5) Documented the changes and references for the reviewer with comment tags.Crtew (talk) 23:44, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

"American"
Just past the halfway mark on copyediting. Few points to raise:
 * Is the photo from Reuters? The inline comment is confusing regarding this.
 * There must be at least a dozen nationalities who can call themselves "American".
 * Who agreed what regarding the six Americans leaving? Were they deported, or what?

I'm bringing these up prior to moving on to reading the sources as they could-well involve sufficient alteration of the article to disqualify me from passing it. --Brian McNeil / talk 17:03, 15 February 2012 (UTC)