Talk:Chernobyl disaster/GA2

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Wikipedian12512(alt) (talk · contribs) 01:42, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chao Garden (talk · contribs) 17:41, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Review

To start, I really appreciate MicahelMaggs comments below (see: Special:Diff/1359005324). He has previously done substantial revisions & source reviews for this article, and I think it's pretty telling that he had concerns about the state of this article's sourcing prior to this GA nomination.

To @Wikipedian12512 / @Wikipedian12512(alt) (sorry, I'm tagging both accounts to be thorough, because you edited with both, nominated with the "(alt)" one, and responded from your main account) — Authorship at the time of GA nomination notwithstanding (context: Special:Diff/1358896126), after the many revisions you made in the past ~48 hours: additional sourcing issues have been introduced. I appreciate the WP:GOODFAITH effort you put into trying to address missing citations, but we need to evaluate these revisions.

Of the {{cn}} tags that were replaced with new sources in the past ~48 hours, I found 4 that failed verification:

#	Nominator's revision	Failed verification	Failure reason
1	Special:Diff/1359032002	Special:Diff/1359189018	Figures for Reactor no.4 stating "1,661 individual fuel channels" and "45 million litres of coolant per hour" are not reflected in this source. Source says the "coolant flow" / "re-circulation flow rote" is 42,000 t/h (tonnes per hour). So the mass measurement (tonnes) in source differs from volume measurement (litres) here.
2	Special:Diff/1358776506	Special:Diff/1359168035	Source is not about site cleanup & construction of the sarcophagus in the months immediately after the disaster. Rather, this source is about the health and socio-economic consequences of the disaster, as assessed almost 20 years later, around 2003-2005.
3	Special:Diff/1358788339	Special:Diff/1359130270	Source does not mention the IPHECA, nor does it mention $20 million in funding or Japan.
4	Special:Diff/1358918837	Special:Diff/1359027239	Source is about recovery efforts (as of 2019) in Belarus, specifically. It does not cover CRDP's work in any affected areas in Ukraine. It also does not specifically mention recommendations from Human Consequences of the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident report.

Other issues I noticed from recent changes:

• Photo blog (?) cited Special:Diff/1358797370 (I tagged as a possible self-published source)
• The {{better source needed}} tags were removed Special:Diff/1358775776 without much explanation. (Note: the tags were added by a user who is now banned, so I couldn't ask them why the tags were added in the first place.)
• I added additional {{cn}} tags for mission citations: Special:Diff/1359096082

I will be failing this nomination (which the nominator also requested here: Special:Diff/1359227111). And I think that the source integrity issues need to be addressed.

FYI @Reconrabbit

Thank you — Chao Garden 🌱 ~ say hello 01:16, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

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Review on hold

* I will put this review on hold for now. (See discussion below.) However, I question why the article was nominated for GA when there are so many drastic changes happening to it + planned for it, by someone who doesn't have an established history with the article. In my opinion, it would have been better to resolve content questions, with collaboration with some of the top editors of this article, before nominating this article for GA. cc: @Wikipedian12512: — Chao Garden 🌱 ~ say hello 22:10, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Feel free to fail it; I’ll need more than a week. _{In solidarity} Wikipedian12512 (Talking is fine | contribs) 23:41, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Initial questions

@Wikipedian12512: it doesn't look like you meet the requirements as a "significant" contributor to this article. Based on the edit statistics, you are ranked #30 on the list of editors by contribution. Your contributions currently total 0.6% of the article, and you've made 6 edits to the page (compared to 12k total edits on the page, or compared to 1.3k total edits from the top 10 editors). See authorship stats here.

Requirements for GA nominations states:

Nominators should be familiar with the article's subject and cited sources, and must have contributed significantly to the article: they are either the author of at least 10% of the article, or are ranked in the top five in authorship. (Source: Wikipedia:Good_article_instructions

The reason this requirement exists is to ensure that the nominator is knowledgeable of both the subject-matter and the sources used in the article.

Chao Garden 🌱 ~ say hello 17:41, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

There are also 12 {{citation needed}} tags throughout the article, as of the current revision: Special:Diff/1358859332

The GA criteria states that a nomination is an "immediate failure" if the article has maintenance tags: It has, or needs, cleanup banners that are unquestionably still valid. These include {{cleanup}}, {{POV}}, {{unreferenced}} or large numbers of {{citation needed}}, {{clarify}}, or similar tags (See also {{QF}}). (See: Wikipedia:Good_article_criteria#Immediate failures) — Chao Garden 🌱 ~ say hello 17:59, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Chao Garden, I added those just after the nomination was made to save any potential reviewer the trouble of putting those in themselves. Wikipedian wasn't immediately aware of them and I'd like to give some time to address this problem as they're a first time reviewer. I know I ran into similar problems in my first nominations. I think the more pressing issue is the current merge discussion which has been open since March. I'd be willing to help out with that on a later date. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 19:22, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Oh thank you @Reconrabbit, I didn't check when the CN tags were added, that's my mistake. I'll wait for the nominator to respond & make revisions.

But also, what's your take on the authorship stats in my first comment? (Although authorship percentage & edit count would go up when addressing the CN tags, it would still need to go up quite a bit to meet that 10% / top five editor threshold?) — Chao Garden 🌱 ~ say hello 19:33, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

I would like to see more, but it is difficult to judge without hearing anything from Wikipedian12512 how familiar they are with the text and the sources. This is a very large article and having more authorship would be very difficult. It wouldn't be undue to ask contributors like @MichaelMaggs or @Chris Capoccia what they think. I noticed an "unreliable source" tag also in the text relating to Grigori Medvedev's book, which is derided among some people familiar with the history of the disaster but otherwise effusively praised in reviews. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 19:48, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Just found this, sorry for the wait.

I’m cutting down part of the article, which isn’t really doing wonders for the authorship score. I think it goes by the sum of the edits, which means that the fact that I’ve started to do some removal to account for the consensus to merge isn’t doing wonders for my “score”.

I’m also taking a few editorial decisions (well informed) about whether tags are necessary.

I don’t think that, after the merge-cut down is done, I will be able to reasonably get that number up enough (assuming that’s how the number works) to get that amount. I think I’m reasonably well acquainted with the sources (if you have an issue with any particular one, I’m able to find a different one for that, although it’s hard to do that for every one.

If you have any follow up questions, I will be happy to answer them. _{In solidarity} Wikipedian12512 (Talking is fine | contribs) 20:19, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the mention. I can't pretend to be highly familiar with the sources for this article; my involvement was largely to dig into them just enough to sort out some of the most confused and incomprehensible parts of the technical descriptions. I came away with the strong impression that the technical aspects have been summarised by an editor who has done their best to extract wording from the sources, but without much understanding of what is happening at the physics and engineering level. These aspects are pretty crucial, and I'd be uncomfortable with this article being submitted for GA status without it being vetted quite closely by a competent technical editor. What looks impressive at first sight has a tendency to be obscured by misunderstandings. Although the work would be interesting, and perhaps something I could conceivably tackle later, I am afraid I have too much on to put in the required effort just at the moment. MichaelMaggs (talk) 12:41, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

I went through all of those before nominating, hence my comment on the thing about EARWIG. I think we can ignore those three “problems” because they share long quotes and common phrases (I can’t remember right now, but something like “the Chernobyl disaster” and “the Chernobyl disaster caused”). _{In solidarity} Wikipedian12512 (Talking is fine | contribs) 20:59, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.