Talk:Anita Raja/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Gentle Ink (talk · contribs) 09:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 09:07, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Lead

• The lead (summary) section currently contains 11 citations, none of which are repeated in the article body. Wikipedia leads are meant only as summaries of existing fully-cited material, so all the citations (and much of the text) need to be moved to the article body. You are permitted to repeat citations in the lead, but many editors dislike the practice as it makes it look as if "new" material is being introduced up there, rather than summarized. Best will be to move all the material to the article body, and to redraft the entire lead in summary form to cover all the material in the article body, briefly.

• The lead paragraph "In a much published lecture ... intense involvement." is not a summary of anything, is unsourced, and contains a direct quotation. The whole paragraph must be moved to the article body, and sourced.

• In addition, the specific claim about the lecture, that it is "much published", must be sourced independently, as that can't be proven just by citing the lecture itself.

• You may like to note that wikilinks are normally provided once in the lead and once at first occurrence in the article body, e.g. you link Elena Ferrante once in both places.

Article structure

• It is conventional to begin biography articles with "==Early life==" (or similar); then to move on to "Career". This can be divided into subsections, e.g. "===As translator===", "===As xyz===".

• You haven't said what else she does with her time, but since she says translation was on the side, it must have been on the side of something ... in short, the Career section needs development.

• It is conventional to provide a section "==Personal life==" to cover where she lives, family, and other activities. You can obviously add here that Starnone is her husband; it is remarkable that this isn't in the article, given the Ferrante material that you've worked on!

• If she also does charity work, is a trustee, etc., then a further section should be created for that material. It seems that she gives public lectures so that might be a good place to start.

Links to Elena Ferrante

• The "Links to Elena Ferrante" section needs further development, as it is clearly a major element of the article.

• There should be a "{{further|Elena Ferrante}}" link at the top of that section.

• The section needs some context for readers who haven't heard of Ferrante. I suggest you add a paragraph on her, based on the Elena Ferrante article. Unfortunately its lead doesn't fully summarize the article; you can copy the lead and its citations (with attribution in your edit comment, i.e. "materials adapted from Elena Ferrante, see there for attribution"), but you'll also need to summarize the issue of her anonymity and the (enormous) speculation around her identity, and to cite that.

• The Univ. Padova study mentions Starnone, indeed puts him in the frame as Ferrante (!); this needs to be stated, and tied to the statement about Starnone's denial.

• The section "Feminist outlook" is misplaced, and very curious as it dives straight into assuming Raja=Ferrante at the very start of the main text. Clearly it belongs inside the "Links..." section. Perhaps you were relying on the statements in the lead, which as I've already said are meant only to be a summary of the article. The main text should begin at the beginning, making no assumptions about the reader's knowledge of any part of the article's subject.

• The Feminist outlook material needs some sort of lead-in, along the lines of "If Ferrante is Raja, readers of Ferrante's novels may assume that something of Ferrante's political outlook represents Raja's personal views." Even that is somewhat dangerous in Wikipedia terms, as editors are not allowed to draw conclusions by putting things together (in a policy called Original Research), i.e. you need a citation for any such claim. At the moment, both of the Feminist outlook paragraphs are hinting that the views of Ferrante and Wolf represent those of Raja. Both conclusions are unsafe without citations that explicitly makes those connections.

Action needed

The main thing that plainly needs doing to this article is to integrate the Ferrante section in the Career chapter. Since you don't wish to say she is Ferrante, we must say that she has been plausibly identified as such, and then say in the Career chapter that if Ferrante is an alias, then Raja is spending a significant part of her time writing novels, and having success in that activity, as "EF" is a prolific novelist. I'd have thought this an absolute precondition for the article to make progress, because otherwise it's quite opaque why we're writing about her at all, and utterly bizarre that we're also writing about some other woman in a section titled "Links...", which really makes no sense. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:18, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Translations

Extended content
This section should be the last one in the main text. The list should be in chronological order, not the reverse. I suggest you put the dates first rather than at the end, and do without the parentheses. Book titles should all be in italics, e.g. Quel Che Ho Visto e Udito a Roma. All done.

Images

• The lead image is fine.

great

Sources

• Many of the sources have no date; at the least, you need an access-date for each news item or website.
  • I've done the access-dates now.

• The source check will follow once all the new sources for the additional materials have been added.

Summary

• This article needs a considerable amount of rewriting and development. If you are happy to do that, please say so now and give me an indication of how long that will take; then do the work, ping me when you are ready, and I'll review the article again. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:32, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks so much for these useful guidelines and best practice. Yes I'm happy to do the work and it will take me about a month.

  I will certainly ping you when I'm ready.

  I have a problem RE What Else She Does With Her Time: given that Anita Raja does not want to be known as Elena Ferrante, and yet she is Elena Ferrante, I would like to respect her wishes and do not want to list her novels on this page, only the translations, to which she freely puts the Anita Raja name. There exists another page for Elena Ferrante which is more appropriate for the novels. I hope you understand. Gentle Ink (talk) 12:01, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  Well, the article certainly needs to say something in its Career section, and despite the outing or doxxing or whatever it was, it still isn't certain that AR=EF. I'd hope that you can write something solid about what AR does in terms of lecturing, campaigning, writing non-fiction, whatever. I suggest you rework the article to fill in as many of the gaps as possible, leaving a fuzzy EF-shaped patch which is clearly labelled as conjectural. In the meantime, please reply to each item above when you've completed it, so that I can see what's been done. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  OK. thank you. Gentle Ink (talk) 12:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

  Hello Chiswick C,

  I've done as much as I can - not wanting to damage Ferrante's safe writing space (anonymity). Especially as she's so brilliant and her writing so precious. Hope the article stands OK now. Thank you for your help. Gentle Ink (talk) 22:21, 18 September 2024 (UTC)