Template:Did you know nominations/Political prisoners in Poland

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 05:03, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

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Political prisoners in Poland

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Created by Piotrus (talk). Self-nominated at 06:43, 6 August 2021 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems

Hook eligibility:

  • Cited: Yes
  • Interesting: Yes
  • Other problems: Yes
QPQ: Done.

Overall: We're going with Alt3 Mottezen (talk) 08:58, 14 August 2021 (UTC) OG Review: Article is very focused on Poland during the People's Republic period, which causes an imbalance in the article, and major challenges for the coverage of the other periods this article presents. The other period that is given more than three sentences is the late 19th century, but only the Russian part of the country. There is clearly an anti-russian POV in this article. To fix this, the pre-1861 period needs to be included, as well as the political prisoners in Austro-hungarian and German Poland, regions that are outside the scope the article used to discuss the late 19th century.

Mottezen, Thank you for the review. Balance in coverage is not required for a DYK (that's a GA-level problem). I agree that it would be good to expand this more, but I didn't see sources discussing pere-1861 period, nor anything about political prisoners under German and Austrian partitions. And I don't see any anti-Russian POV? If there are some non-neutral wordings, please point them out and we can consider refactoring them. PS. I expanded on the interwar prisoners, this is discussed in the Polish literature a bit, but I am not seeing much about the German/Austrian ones (PPS. I did add a bit on the German partition too), at least not yet. I plan on improving this article over in th future, but please note this is not required for a DYK. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:30, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Both these hooks are inadequate.
  • The first hook is using the term "political prisoner" as defined by the source's author; as a prisoner that "imposes his or her politics onto the prison and uses the institution as an instrument of political activity". This is not the same as the commonly-used definition of political prisoner, which is something the likes of "individuals incarcerated for beliefs or actions against the state or a comparable authority", as the author puts it (but he call it an "imprisoned political"). The author redefines these terms so they fit into his thesis that political prisoners are actually a new phenomenon from the 19th century, which is essentially what this hook is stating. It's a pretty neat and interesting argument when you read that article, but using these terms as the author re-defined them here on Wikipedia will just confuse readers, and so we should avoid this hook.
  • Aside from not being cited in the article, the second hook is also misleading in that it implies a continuity of political prisoner culture throughout polish history that started in the late 1800s, although that is unsupported by the source. Mottezen (talk) 07:50, 14 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Mottezen, All sources read and cited seem to support both hooks, i.e. the (rough) continuity of the culture and traditions of political prisoners in Poland, from 19th century till the end of the communist era. I am afraid I don't understand the problem you are seeing? The sources used are reliable, and talk about political prisoners and the continuity of traditions. It is not our place to dispute this, unless you think the sources are not reliable? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:39, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
  • In fairness to Piotrus and from what my admittedly non-expert but what I reckon to be pretty adequate knowledge of the history of Poland, while there might have been some political prisoners in the Austrian and Prussian/German partitions, it is the Russian one that became the most (in)famous for them, or at least their prisoners were the most numerous/the most prominent. The institution of katorga or Siberian exile did not AFAIK have their analogues (or, even if they had, were not used as extensively) in either Austria/Austro-Hungary or Prussia/Germany (particularly as the Austrian partition by late 19th century was a rather family-friendly place for Poles when it comes to cultural and political freedoms). So at least as regards this alleged anti-Russian stance, I'd personally ask to examine further any information on Prussian/Austrian political prisoners and include it if this is notable enough (and state that the scale was not as large), but whether that creates as large an imbalance as suggested is not clear for me.
I will agree, though, that the interwar Poland's political prisoners are given too little attention in the article (Brest trials and Bereza Kartuska must be elaborated on for sure); however, I'm not really sure if the article's incompleteness alone is a sufficient reason to decline a nomination (POV is one, though). I also largely concur with the assessment of the hooks as presented. I believe, however, that explicit recognition of the category of "political offender" or "political prisoner" in Russian legal acts and internal instructions of Russian Empire's prisons, or their different treatment, could merit a DYK mention, as this is IMHO fairly interesting, especially if Russian Empire was the first country to actually formally codify it. Personally I'd give some time to fix the issues as outlined by Mottezen and me instead of flatly refusing to pass the article.
Note to Mottezen: "sourced" criterion applies to the sourcing of the article as a whole (with which I personally see no issues as it stands now); if there is a problem with the source supporting the hook, use "hookcited". Szmenderowiecki (talk) 22:13, 14 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Szmenderowiecki Thank you for your comments and for the tip. I admit that I am not an expert on polish history either. This was my first DYKR and I recognize I could have made a mistake.
  • My objection to the first hook also concerns the rest of the article because this same statement is repeated in the two first sentences of the article: "Political prisoners in Poland and Polish territories (under administration of other states) have existed throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries." and "In Poland, the concept and even traditions of political prisoners emerged around the second half of the 19th century in the Russian partition in the era of partitions of Poland." In my reading of the source, this statement in at best very misleading, and at worse outright false.
  • This is because the author, Padraic Kenney, doesn't use the common definition of the "political prisoner" in his text. Kenney creates a new definition of "political prisoners": an organized political unit with agency that leverages its status of prisoners as praxis. However, we are used to think of political prisoners as victims who have been imprisoned because of their views, and so their ability to do politics have been every restricted. The rest of the "Political prisoners in Poland" article uses this definition, and so do the rest of its sources. Kenney acknowledges this, and calls these people "imprisoned politicals". He says that "The history of incarceration of individuals for beliefs or actions against the state or a comparable authority stretches well before the period explored here." As such, political prisoners existed in Poland well before 1861, when a "political offender" was recognized by Russian authorities.
  • Additionally, Kenney never makes the claim of the first hook in his text. Kenney tries to show that the experience of political prisoners from 1865 to 1910 was fundamentally different than those of periods that came before, so much so that we shouldn't even use the term "political prisoners" to describe the experiences of the "imprisoned politicals" before the late 19th century. For this, he uses two examples: Ireland and Russian Poland. Therefore, when Kenney says that political prisoners (as a political unit) emerged in the second half of the 19th century, he is not saying that this phenomenon didn't exist in other parts of Poland before that. His article just doesn't cover other parts of Poland. And indeed, I'd argue they did exist before that, and that they played an important part in the Greater Poland uprising (1848). This is using Kenney's definition, mind you. So maybe it is ok to focus more on Russian Poland in this article than the others partitioned part due to the scale of the phenomenon, but this is not my point.
  • Now for the POV problem. Reading Kenney's article, I think its impossible to come to the conclusion that "that political prisoners in Poland came into existence during the 19th-century era of Russian Partition of Poland", as the hook claims, without a distinctively anti-Russia POV. Right now, the article says that repressive policies such as political imprisonment was introduced into Poland by the Russian occupation, and then made worse in the People's Republic period when Poland was politically dominated by the Soviet Union. This is textbook polish nationalism. It's not just the unbalance that's the problem. It's that the imbalance is caused by anti-russian assumptions that leads Piotrus to include a false statement that is unsupported by the source at the beginning of the article, and in the first hook (the only valid hook presented per the basic DYK guidelines). Mottezen (talk) 00:18, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
  • I largely agree with the reasoning you provide here, including with Kenney's creation of "imprisoned politicals" category, whom we would normally name "political prisoners" (a somewhat idiosyncratic substitution IMHO). I also agree that the source does not support the hook - it simply states there existed such a phenomenon but not that the Russian Empire was the first, or the only one, to do that; the reason I've included the sort of rebuttal is that I can understand the reasons why the German/Austrian political prisoners aren't in the article, as there are probably not that much sources that elaborate on the issue (I would have to independently research the problem to evaluate the exact scale, but I don't believe the issue to have been non-existent in other partitions).
Re anti-Russian bias: I will agree with the notion that the article as is portrays the history of political prisoners is misguided, at the very least due to a glaring omission of the political prisoners in the Sanation years, and it might create the impression you describe in your argument, so the POV worries, at least from my standpoint, seem quite legitimate. But I don't believe it was done due to some anti-Russian sentiment on behalf of Piotrus; employing Hanlon's razor, I would attribute the irrelevant citation to a simple misreading or over-stretching the content of the source (and please don't make such outright accusations of Russophobia, as they could potentially lead to a quarrel on Wikipedia, of which there's more than enough). That said, the omission of the 1930s is much harder to understand for me.
As a final note, let's wait until the issues are addressed or reasonably argued to be irrelevant. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 01:20, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
Szmenderowiecki, As I said above, I didn't see any sources for the interwar period. I would be very happy if someone were to point me to one or better, expand the article further. As I said above, I fully agree there are many missing aspects, I am just not sure if the sources about them even exist. And I'd also like to remind people that DYKs are not required to be comprehensive (quick reminder: Wikipedia:Did you know/Onepage: DYKs only require "at least 1,500 characters of prose", neutrality, citations, and not being an obvious work-in-progress (empty headers, etc.). In other words (I had written probably 2k DYKs and reviewed at least as many), most DYKs are start-class or C-class.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:42, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
While the articles nominated here are start- or C-class (including one I've reviewed), my point here is shared with the reviewer that the lack of the period when Poland was truly independent and its political prisoners might create what one could see as unnecessary slant.
I'll provide some academic sources here (some might be in Polish); see links: [1], [2], Ukrainian scholarship, (access via shadow library), p. 425-; (sort of academic; hist-pop), [3]. You've also mentioned Machcewicz, who suggested continuity between the Tsarist and Interwar Poland's system - another source for that.
And some non-academic sources: Polskie Radio, Rzeczpospolita
As relates to the arrests during the Brest trials, referring to this as a "political process" (therefore making the convicted political prisoners): Rzeczpospolita, PWN, [4], (1932), (Myśl Polska)
Other interwar political prisoners: p. 20-, (treat with a grain of salt), (in Ukrainian). Szmenderowiecki (talk) 03:24, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
@Mottezen: Your critique of Kenney is interesting but I think it does not belong on Wikipedia, as in - he is a reliable source, and he talks about political prisoners and notes that My purpose is to embed the political prisoner firmly within the modern age, with origins in the half-century before World War I.. So he clearly argues that political prisoners, in the modern sense, originated in mid-19th century, and one of the cases studied is that of the Polish political prisoners (under Russian partition). That he has a definition that may be a bit different from other scholars is not a major issue for us, he is a reliable source (and if you look at the political prisoner article, which I was recently expanding, you can see that the issue of defining this concept is quite contested). Also, regarding the culture and such, note that Machcewicz states the same: The sentenced were bound by the specific rules of inmate coexistence and methods of defending the political prisoners’ rights by their unincarcerated comrades. The rules had been worked out for decades, especially in the Russian Partition before 1914; the tradition was followed up in interwar Poland, particularly in the communist milieu. So we have at least two reliable sources that make the same claim. If you think they are wrong, the correct venue is to (on Wikipedia) find scholars who clearly say something opposite or even better, say that Kenney or Machcewicz are wrong, or publish your own academic article saying so. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:00, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
Also, I will ask you, as Szmenderowiecki did, to remove or WP:REFACTOR claims like "the imbalance is caused by anti-russian assumptions that leads Piotrus to include a false statement". It violates WP:AGF and WP:NPA and could even be sanctionable, but with AGF in mind I am happy to assume you are new to Wikipedia and discussions in this context and did not realize that speculating about other editor motivations like this is a very, very bad form. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:00, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Comment. I expanded the article with some info on the German partition and interwar era prisoners. There is scope for more expansion, but please note DYKs don't have to be fully comprehensive. The article is over the DYK requirement of 1,500 characters of prose, and that's all we should care here. The expansion should also address the issues of 'lack of neutrality' and 'undue focus on the Russians', I hope? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:34, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
    The changes have been implemented. I essentially agreed with Mottezen that omission of interwar Poland/other partitions may be reasonably seen as selective inclusion of info, and though the section about Communist Poland is a tad too large in comparison with the rest, I think that my concerns about neutrality have been addressed adequately for the purposes of DYK.
    Now, returning to the hooks: ALT1 seems not to be true based on the descriptions of living conditions and treatment of political prisoners incarcerated pre-Brześć/Brest trial or in Bereza Kartuska, which breaks the continuity suggested in the hook (see sources provided). ALT0 still doesn't seem to be supported by the source. While you've gone at lengths arguing Kenney is reliable (he is) and that the political prisoner as a class emerged in mid-19th century (I'll take his word), he still doesn't establish that temporal relation that says: yeah, the first (modern) political prisoners in Poland were incarcerated in Modlin/Warsaw Citadel/whatever, and that later it spread to Germany Prussia, because that's how I read the sentence. I might be overinterpreting the sentence. I would say that the category of "political prisoner" recognised officially is something less dubious and probably more interesting. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 04:00, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
    While the official recognition of political prisoners is indeed interesting, it is not unique to Poland or Russia. Indeed, this designation was widespread at the time. Quoting from Kenney: As in France, Britain, and Germany, Russian jurisprudence found political crime a useful concept. If I were to propose a hook myself, it would be: " ... that some political prisoners in Poland published a newspaper and organized strikes from prison?". It's mentioned by Kenney but it's not included in the article yet. Mottezen (talk) 07:08, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
    Mottezen, You are welcome to add that to the article, it's a collaborative effort anyway, and I would be fine with this as ALT2 hook. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:48, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Comment: Here are some phrases from the Greater Poland uprising (1848) article with sourced statements about political prisoners (thus contradicting ALT0):

Mottezen (talk) 07:08, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

  • Mottezen, Maybe I am tired, but I don't see how anything here contradicts ALT0. Anyway, if you'd like to propose ALT2 be my guest, I'll be happy to opine it then, but for now, can you remove the NPOV tags you added from the article since it was expanded and Szmendrowiecki thinks, sufficiently? And again, feel free to propose your own hooks, I am not super attached to the ones above. But I have no idea what you want me to do with the article/hooks; and again, it is expanded beyond what DYK requires. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:46, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

New reviewer requested, no comments for a while. Desertarun (talk) 11:13, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

No need for new reviewers, I was just going to submit the post, but ran into an edit conflict. Thanks for a reminder though. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 15:41, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Revisiting the article, I see no issues quality-wise, but we aren't really able to agree on the hooks. I would suggest looking into other sources than the Cambridge essay and mine some from there. From what I could see and propose, ALT3-ALT5 could be discussed (ALT0 and ALT1, as I said, are not acceptable for me, while ALT2 is not interesting at all).

Pinging @Mottezen and Piotrus: to get the discussion out of hibernation. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 15:41, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

I like ALT4 best.Mottezen (talk) 15:47, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
Mottezen, Szmenderowiecki, I was going to say ALT3 and ALT5 are the best. ALT4 is ok-ish but it suggests that this wasn't true for other eras, whereas the works cited to suggest that the traditions continued into the era of communist Poland (although during that time the authorities were much less tolerant of the political prisoners, who received harsher treatment, a total reversal of what happened in the past). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:10, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
My understanding of the sources suggests that at least they did not have the privileges (though they had their own culture and traditions at least up to Interwar Poland), as you seem to acknowledge here. If you want to strike the "privileges" part, I will be ready to uphold ALT1, in fact, because that is actually supported by the sources, though not necessarily the Cambridge essay (the privileges, as Machcewicz says, were gone in 1932, probably just in time for Bereza Kartuska).
Let's decide on one hook then and move on. I personally side with Piotrus in the choice of hooks among the latter three. Since I was the proposer, someone else would have to approve it, apart from the nominator, and I believe Mottezen is the one who should do that. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 04:23, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
In light of this discussion I think i'm gonna go with ALT3. Mottezen (talk) 04:30, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
Szmenderowiecki, You make a valid point about privileges (also ping User:Mottezen). Please see ALT1a/b below: --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:00, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
@Szmenderowiecki, Mottezen, and Piotrus: are we about ready to wrap this up? theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 10:21, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
I apologise to Piotrus for not having answered his question about ALT1a-b. ALT1a is the better among the two, ALT3, which I humbly devised, is also very good. Since I pledged support for amended ALT1, ALT1a, or ALT3, are both fine for me. I think that the opener is Mottezen, so it's for him to close this one, and I can't decide for him which hook is the one which will go to DYK. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 11:12, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
@Szmenderowiecki: ALT3 does not appear in the article, I couldn't promote that. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 07:02, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
@Theleekycauldron: In fact, it does, at least it seems so to me. The Berlin Trial of 1864 [pl] took place following the January Uprising in the Russian partition. Following the trial, a number of Polish activists from the German partition who supported the insurgents were imprisoned in the Magdeburg Fortress [de] and the Grudziądz Fortress [pl], and were subsequently described by Polish scholars as political prisoners. Grudziądz is the Polish name for Graudenz, as the city was called then. So the only part that does not explicitly appear in text is that the January Uprising never crossed the border. The definition of the January Uprising goes: The January Uprising was an insurrection principally in Russia's Kingdom of Poland aimed at the restoration of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some other battles happened in the Russian partition outside of what was the Kingdom of Poland at the time, but no, there haven't been any battles in the Prussian partition. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 07:42, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
@Szmenderowiecki: fair enough, but I'd like to see the part that they never crossed the border—just to appeal to the broad audience. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 18:43, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
Theleekycauldron Szczecin govt archive article, quote: Wybuch powstania (22 stycznia) zaskoczył nie tylko władze rosyjskie, ale również pozostałych dwóch zaborców – Prusy i Austrię. Choć tereny tych dwóch ostatnich państw zaborczych nie zostały objęte bezpośrednim działaniami powstańczymi, to na ich terytoriach podejmowane były działania prewencyjne, skierowane przeciwko polskiemu ruchowi niepodległościowemu i polskim działaczom patriotycznym. Translation: The beginning of the uprising (22 January) did not only take Russian authorities by surprise, but also [those in] the other two partitions - Prussia and Austria. Even though the territories of the latter two countries were not affected by direct actions of those in the uprising, some preventative actions, which were targeted against the Polish independentionalist movements and Polish patriots, have been made on their territories.
@Szmenderowiecki: I'm not understanding, sorry theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 05:38, 18 September 2021 (UTC)
In other words, that means that the battles and the partisan fight occurred in the Russian partition only, but Austrians and Germans were both alarmed and were supportive of Russian efforts, which i.a. saw those participating in the uprising arrested. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 09:36, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Szmenderowiecki: ah, i gotcha. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/them) 05:03, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
ALT3 to T:DYK/P6