Talk:The Thing Around Your Neck

Theme section

The theme section is kind of random - without forewarning, it dives into mostly a single story of the 12 (Headstrong Historian) and mostly compares it to Things Fall Apart. I think that section could just be deleted? Although I would have loved to read more that contextualized the overall work Anair13 (talk) 19:53, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Anair13, this has been taken care of. Thanks for bringing up the issue. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 23:30, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

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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This review is transcluded from Talk:The Thing Around Your Neck/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: SafariScribe (talk · contribs) 08:37, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: LEvalyn (talk · contribs) 04:32, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

I will take on this review! I typically prefer to make smallish prose edits myself and only place comments here when I have questions, though of course as always you should feel free to change or discuss any edits you happen to disagree with. Looking forward to it! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:32, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Comments

Notes

• Appropriate NFUR for the cover, good license for the other image. It might be nice to add an image of the author (and move the book display image down to reception?) since I believe some exist. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Suggestions / questions

• Can you add a clarifying wikilink for the "Hodder" part of her Hodder and MacArthur fellowships? I'm not sure what it refers to. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• The "Background and publication history" is a bit confusing and disjointed -- could you make a pass through it to cluster all the background/composition together in one paragraph, and all the actual-publication in another? ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• It would also be good to name some of the magazines that the stories were originally published in, if possible. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• I can't work out what this means: In "The Arrangers of Marriage", a newly married woman arrives in New York City with her husband but is unwilling to accept his husband rejecting being a Nigerian -- who is "his husband"? ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
• Hm, I'm noticing several places where the article is much, much too close in wording to the source:
  • uses diverse narrative techniques to tell her stories which includes infusion of the first person and omniscient devices is much, much too close to the source's deploys diverse narrative techniques, including an infusion of the first person and omniscient devices
  • Ditto Jane Shilling wrote that family and exile are recurrent themes in the book since the characters are often far from home or alienated from the comforting familiarity of place and culture by either violence or fear or the hope of a better life. and Family and exile are recurrent themes in this collection: by compulsion or choice Adichie’s subjects are often far from home; alienated from the comforting familiarity of place and culture by violence, fear or the hope of a better life.
  • Chukwuma Ajakah of Vanguard wrote that the stories are thematically connected as most of them explore socio-cultural and economic issues relating to Africans living in either Nigeria or the United States. Although the stories differ, they are thematically connected as most of them explore socio-cultural and economic issues relating to Africans living in either Nigeria or the United States.
  • Earwig is picking up a lot of other similar bits of copying.

I also notice that there's a wonderful amount of research in this article but the "reception" section makes for challenging reading because it just goes from source to source rather than clustering together thematically similar sets of observation (e.g, putting all the comments on the characters in one paragraph, all the comments on presenting Nigeria to an American audience in another, etc). WP:Copyediting reception sections has some good advice on this topic.

I think a serious rewrite of the interpretive material (style/themes and reception) is necessary to address what appears to be persistent WP:CLOP-verging-on-copyvio, and to improve clarity. Is that something you'd want to tackle? If so, I can put the GA review on hold while you do. If not, I wouldn't mind failing the GA for now and rolling up my own sleeves for a rewrite, and we could co-nominate in future. Just let me know. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

On reflection, I guess a faster solution would be to just put all these borrowed words into quote marks so they're properly attributed. But I think that will leave us with an article that is much too quotation-heavy and it would be better served by focusing more on summarizing the sources. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:10, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

@LEvalyn, thank you for taking this up. I fully support your comments above and I look forward to co-nominating with you in the nearest future. It's part of learning and for me, there's always room for improvement. Cheers! Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 09:42, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm glad you are open to an in-depth collaboration. I will fail this nomination now and start in on a rewriting pass for the interpretive sections. You've built a great foundation of research for it! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 00:27, 27 October 2025 (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.

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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This review is transcluded from Talk:The Thing Around Your Neck/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: SafariScribe (talk · contribs) 01:33, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: MCE89 (talk · contribs) 04:43, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi SafariScribe, I'll take this review. I have a few general comments to start with:

• The reception section is currently very, very quote-heavy. I'd point towards Wikipedia:Copyediting reception sections which is an essay that I think gives useful guidance. Ideally a reception section should be written as a thematic summary of what reviewers have said about a work, summarised largely in your own words. At the moment this section is ~80% quotes by word count or almost 1000 words of quotations, which makes for quite a tough read. To meet GA criteria 1 and 2d, I think the level of quotation needs to be cut down substantially and much more original prose added summarising the book's reception
• The article doesn't currently draw on any of the large body of scholarly literature about this collection. You have a section on the book's style and themes, but only drawn from newspaper reviews. In order to meet the GA criteria for breadth, I think there needs to be at least some engagement with what's been written about the collection's themes and style. I haven't looked closely at all of these, but some examples of the type of sources you could draw on might include: . There's also lots more on Google Scholar and TWL that you could look to include
• The article makes quite heavy use of a piece by Constance Lam, including for much of the themes and style section. Given that this article is a piece by a college student from a student media outlet, I don't think this is a suitably reliable source for the information it's being used to support

Overall I think you've done a great job with this article, but there's still a fair bit of work needed for this to meet the GA criteria. I'm happy to put this on hold if you think that these points can addressed in a reasonable timeframe and you can ping me when you're ready for me to take another look, or if you'd prefer I can fail this for now to give you time to work on the article and you can renominate when ready. MCE89 (talk) 04:43, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

@MCE89, thank you for taking this. I will prefer you hold while I fix these things. Thank you. SafariScribe^{Edits! Talk!} 14:47, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

@SafariScribe: Just wanted to check how you're going with this? No major rush, but just give me a ping when you're ready for me to take another look. MCE89 (talk) 09:31, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

@MCE89, I have fixed the article, however for the scholarly articles inclusion, I had only done one. Yes I am aware of so many book and articles about the book, but I also think it's not a criteria for GA but FA. I plan to add all those should this go for FA in the future. SafariScribe^{Edits! Talk!} 22:34, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on the article, it's definitely looking much better. I do think there are some new issues though:

• There's now some very close paraphrasing of the Sebola piece. For instance, take this sentence (overlap with the source bolded): She uses characters like Amaka and Nwamgba to urge black women to protest the notion of baptismal names, especially when they are suggested as superior replacements of African names. Luckily this source is compatibly licensed, but you need to provide attribution to comply with copyright policy
• The Lam piece is still being used in a few places — per my previous comments, I don't think this is a reliable source
• I think that the article is now in need of a pretty thorough copyedit. To give a couple of examples (not an exhaustive list):
  • British writer Bernardine Evaristo pointed out Adichie's use of unpredictable and suspenseful ending which asks the readers to figure out the outcome, for example, the unsettling descriptions in "A Private Experience" — Missing plural on "endings", and the link between "unpredictable and suspenseful ending" and "unsettling descriptions" is unclear (i.e. why is the latter an example of the former?)
  • She points out how meaningful and beautiful the Igbo names appear as well as glorify God as some English names do — The grammar of this sentence is not correct
  • Her female characters are given power as an active resistance portrayal to the worldview of patriarchy, hence in The Thing Around Your Neck, they were actively involved in the Biafra war, religious and ethnic wars, respectively — "Active resistance portrayal" is not correct here, I'm not sure what "respectively" is referencing
  • The paragraph beginning Saul Austerlitz of the Boston Globe compared... is hard to follow, as it starts with Austerlitz as the subject but then cites an additional six critics and lists things that they mentioned, without providing context about how these things were received

The main issue I see at this point is that I don't think the article's prose meets the criteria of being clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct. I think you've done a good job of reducing the level of overquotation, but you might want to ask the GOCE for a second pair of eyes in going over it and copyediting the prose. MCE89 (talk) 03:14, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank You. I have sent the article to GOCE and I hope they will respond soon. SafariScribe^{Edits! Talk!} 09:30, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

@MCE89, we are done with the copyedit. SafariScribe^{Edits! Talk!} 23:29, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

I hate to do this, but I think further work is still needed outside of the GA review to meet the criteria. You've done a good job resolving the overquoting issues, and the copyedit has definitely helped with the prose, but so much content has been removed in the process that I don't think this meets the breadth criteria anymore. For instance, the reception section now says very little about how the book was actually received - it lists a few examples of reviewers who praised the book and then discusses the "occasional structural weaknesses" one reviewer commented on, but doesn't really say anything else about what reviewers liked or disliked about the book. Lots of the sources that were originally in the article have been removed entirely or are now used only to support the claim that the reviews were positive, rather than the contents of those reviews being summarised.

As a secondary point, there are also some minor source-text integrity issues in the spot-checks that should be fixed:

• - Doesn't say that Adichie was 31
• - Says that the publication date was 2018, not 2017, and doesn't verify the information about her previous books
• - The source says that she uses both first-person and omniscient perspective, whereas the article says that the stories are written in the first-person

There's also still some (slightly milder) close paraphrasing, particularly of :

−

All of the stories in Adichie's collection originate from tales she heard from friends and family. "A Private Experience" is based loosely on an experience of Adichie's aunt.

+

Additionally, each story originated from tales Adichie heard from friends and family, for example, "A Private Experience" is based loosely on an experience of her aunt.

−

Adichie says most of the Americans she encountered viewed Africa as a monolithic place, and their mix of ignorance and arrogance shocked her.

+

She observed that most of the Americans saw Africa as a monolith, and displayed a mix of ignorance and arrogance to the inhabitants.

I think you've made some good improvements to the article, but given that this has been open for a month and there are still new issues emerging, I think it's best to close this review for now. Feel free to ping me to take another look if you decide to renominate and I'm happy to give further suggestions. MCE89 (talk) 10:10, 6 March 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.