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Wikipedia:Reactions to... articles

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"WP:REACTIONS" redirects here. For displaying chemical reactions, see WP:MATHCHEM. For formatting chemical reactions, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Chemistry § Reactions.

Wikipedia has several "International reactions to..." articles that detail the international reactions and responses to a particular incident or event. Such articles may be appropriate when the section of the main article covering responses and reactions reaches a size that means the content can no longer all fit into the main article and should be split according to the summary style guidelines.

Several such articles have been deleted or merged following deletion debates, for example due to including indiscriminate information or for promoting reactions to an event beyond the significance indicated by coverage in reliable sources.

Examples

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Articles may be categorised in Category:International reactions or the specific categories Category:International reactions to man-made disasters, Category:International responses to natural disasters, Category:International responses to media-related events and include:

Problems

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These articles (or sections of articles) may suffer from:

  • Too much detail and being directory like (WP:NOTDIR, WP:INDISCRIMINATE)
  • Using routine announcements and news reports - world leaders routinely offer their condolences for tragic events (WP:NOTNEWS)
  • Promoting a particular response, reaction or event beyond its significance in reliable sources (WP:NOTADVOCATE) and other biases (WP:NPOV)
  • Focussing unduly on recent events (WP:RECENTISM)
  • Not themselves covering a notable topic, if multiple reliable sources have not given significant coverage to the reactions (WP:N)
  • Acting as a memorial to victims (WP:MEMORIAL)
  • Being only a collection of quotes (WP:QUOTEFARM), possibly suitable for transwiki to Wikiquote
  • As quotes are the word of others, it potentially conflicts with our non-free content criteria to overuse them (WP:NFCCEG)

Deletion and merge debates

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Some of these articles have been deleted or merged following a debate at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Public reactions to death of Rachel Corrie, since listed four times at deletion review. Examples include:

Kept
Not kept

Possible solutions

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Transfers

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One possible solution to the problem is to transfer the quotes to Wikiquote. See Bacha Khan University attack and wikiquote:Bacha Khan University attack as an example. Afterwards one should add {{wikiquote}} somewhere the main event article and/or the reactions article. The list of quotes can then be removed from the Wikipedia page. Depending on the amount of prose left in the article, a deletion/merge review may be appropriate. The potential harm caused to Wikiquote is hard to determine, since Wikiquote has few guidelines on the matter.

Prose

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Another possible solution is to place all of the quotes into WP:PROSE, and sort the reactions by region. Quotes that say the same things can be merged into one sentence or paragraph. What is left over after that can then be decided on (keep, merge, or delete).

Reduce fluff

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When a notable person dies, it's common to see people posting online about it. When a disaster happens, every politician (or at least their PR team) will be on social media with soft words and platitudes – but posting a message that burnishes their reputation is often the only thing they do. Consider setting selection criteria that favors excluding instances of public relations and slacktivism, and including only those reactions that go beyond words. That makes it easier to omit statements like "Paul Politician tweeted that the dying people were in his thoughts and prayers" and focus on statements like "The neighboring Ruritania government sent disaster relief supplies".

Consider limiting the name-dropping and overuse of primary sources in favor of an encyclopedic summary, such as "Colleagues in her field honored her rigorous technique" or "Fellow musicians remembered the emotional depth of his performances". Leave the laundry list of everything said by every notable person to a fansite. Avoid citing social media posts directly, and instead include only what comes from independent reliable sources. If a notable person posted something, but it doesn't appear even in a primary news source source, then its inclusion is likely undue attention to that person's social media activity.

Expansion

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Articles with the wording "International" to them can suffer from being too narrow in scope. Renaming an article to simply "Reactions to" gives the article more potential to branch out beyond a simple list of quotes. An example of such a case includes Reactions to the Orlando nightclub shooting where a snapshot of two different points in time shows the improvement done: (Before [1], and After [2]).

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