Talk:Zviad Gamsakhurdia

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cleaning up this article

i like being WP:BOLD with my cleanup of crappy articles, but seeing as this one is CTOP-ECP and has had socking issues relatively recently, i thought i'd drop a little note here so no one's blindsided (although it seems the only person who had been maintaining this article has since retired). i've made a dump of sources at User:Sawyer777/Zviad Gamsakhurdia that i'll be using. i also plan on culling a lot of the random old news articles and other stuff in the references and further reading. don't know how long this project will take, but hopefully a green plus sign is in the future. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 01:02, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, the list of sources seems really impressive. Good luck, I'll try to offer my feedback. In your opinion, which parts of the article are in the most need of overhaul? Alaexis_¿question? 06:59, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

thanks! in general, the prose is quite poor and the organization is lacking. for now, i'm starting with expanding a bit about his early life & the context of his father having also been a prominent writer, and general copyediting and cleanup so it's easier to expand from there.
one thing i think is missing is dedicated discussion of his ultranationalist and messianistic ideology; it's kind of scattered around in a few sentences throughout the article, even though it's something discussed fairly extensively in the sourcing (i have to imagine this is related to the aforementioned POV socking from a few months ago). ... sawyer * he/they * talk 20:22, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good! Lmk if you need help, for example with Russian-language sources (though it seems that there are plenty of English ones so that might not be needed). Alaexis_¿question? 20:59, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

forgot to ping @A455bcd9 but you may like to know as well, as #1 author on xtools. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 05:47, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Sawyer777, I saw your initial message. I agree, let's be bold. I wanted to do it in the past but the POV socking conflict was time-consuming and I then moved to other things... Thanks a lot for doing this! Ping me if you need any help. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 07:22, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

sounds good. i'll keep chipping away at this, as i've got the next month pretty much free. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 07:26, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Recent changes

Since I've reverted/re-written some of the recent changes I wanted to explain my reasoning here. A lot of the information added here was about the South Ossetian conflict, a topic well covered by dedicated articles. This article should describe it only to the extent that it's related to Gamsakhurdia. Otherwise, we end up with unnecessary duplication in the best case and with a WP:POVFORK in the worst case.

Even setting aside the scope issues, there were also some NPOV problems in the added content. E.g., the sentence Towards the end of 1990, the situation for ethnic Georgians in the region worsened sharply, with the reports of multiple cases of lootings and beatings was added with this HRW report as a source (with the wrong page number). The report does in fact describe abuses against the Georgian population on p. 22 but it also describes a lot of abuses against the Ossetians on pp. 16-21 and Gamsakhurdia's attitude to Ossetians (p. 6 The notion that Ossetians were ungrateful "guests" of Georgia was part of Gamsakhurdia's anti-Ossetian propaganda campaign). Selective quoting is a breach of WP:NPOV. Alaexis_¿question? 08:43, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I won't reinstate the information to the article. Nivzaq (talk) 09:31, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for improving the article, a lot of the content that you've added is interesting and important.

There is just one passage in the South Ossetia section that is not justified in my opinion. The first sentence now reads In 1989, violent unrest broke out between the Georgian independence-minded population of the region and Ossetians loyal to the Soviet Union in South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast, an ethnic enclave created for the Ossetians within Georgia by Soviets as a reward for their political loyalty during the 1921 Soviet invasion of Georgia. Why do we need the part I've highlighted? Why do we go back to 1921 and not to the Ossetian rebellions of 1918-1920, or to the migrations of Ossetians in the middle ages? The Time article does say this but again, this is not directly related to Gamsakhurdia. There are plenty other articles in which the circumstances of the creation of South Ossetia and the feelings of the Ossetians and Georgians should be described. Alaexis_¿question? 21:29, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]