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Goebbels comment

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Gopal has been criticised by many people (including Trevor Phillips, Dan Hodges Kemi Badenoch and reportedly a spokesman for Cambridge University for comparing the black educator Tony Sewell to Joseph Goebbels. It will not do to try to suppress this from Wikipedia because people want to shield her from criticism. NBeale (talk) 20:16, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It was an unwise and excessive response. However, adding a whole section on this issue when the usable sources are limited is undue. Philip Cross (talk) 20:25, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
For me the decision isn’t about how it reflects on the subject or whether it was a good or bad thing to say (WP:NPOV)—only whether we have enough sources to warrant a section. I don’t think basing a whole section on the News-24 source is WP:DUE. Also the university response portion appeared to be unsourced. Innisfree987 (talk) 20:35, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This is ridiculous. It's obviously noteworthy and the University's statement is quoted verbatim in the DM article. Atchom (talk) 21:05, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That source is deprecated: WP:DAILYMAIL. Innisfree987 (talk) 21:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have removed the Cambridge University spokesman bit, since only the DM quotes it. I have however restored the section (WP:BOLD). There are now three Times pieces (one which described the tweet in its headline) which talk about this and a Telegraph column. That is amply sufficient to establish the notability of the incident. Atchom (talk) 21:29, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Obvious to whom? It looks like a Twitter spat, the kind which makes easy reporting but what is the significance of the incident? Richard Nevell (talk) 22:43, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The alleged significance according to the commentators cited is that it shows the unjustified personal attacks that powerful people will make against Black figures who step out of the line that they are "expected" to take. BTW even the Daily Mirror considers this matter newsworthy [1] NBeale (talk) 05:30, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really see what a tabloid has to offer in this instance. If we have a reliable source documenting the university's response, that might help weigh up what is worth including, though if it's essentially a canned response it may not be terribly informative. Richard Nevell (talk) 17:43, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Gopal questioned whether Sewell had a doctorate as opposed to an honorary doctorate, accusing him of having "false research credentials". It's in her Twitter feed. Since the entire discussion is about her allegedly inappropriate comments on Twitter, this is a WP:RS. NBeale (talk) 09:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Twitter is a self-published source, rather than RS, where mistakes by public figures are quite common. The Daily Mirror isn't deprecated, like the Mail, but hardly ideal. Philip Cross (talk) 10:17, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Philip Cross, NBeale, Atchom, Innisfree987, Richard Nevell I was thinking about this discussion and it seems at the crux is Gopal's doubt over the education of the chair of the report and its expression - so perhaps "Criticism of Tony Sewell, Chair of ..." would work as a heading? I don't think the phrasing "sustained attack" meets WP:NPOV, so perhaps that could alter? I wonder rather than saying there's wide criticism, more precision should be used - saying that criticism has been published in commentaries in The Times and The Telegraph, perhaps? Lajmmoore (talk) 16:36, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with these changes if we keep the section, but I share Richard Nevell’s question about the obviousness of the significance. Maybe the specificity would make it clearer. Innisfree987 (talk) 17:50, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If it is to be included, I think it would be useful to frame it within the context of the report and reactions to it rather than the personal aspect. Richard Nevell (talk) 17:53, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Richard Nevell, Lajmmoore, I share your views, though it's still unclear why this is significant or worthy of a section. The tabloids have concocted this furore. Additionally, the wording needs more care. As mentioned, Gopal's tweet pointed out that 'Even Dr Goebbels had a research PhD.' This is a reference to Goebbels, not a comparison. I have updated the section accordingly. (PostcolonialLitNerd (talk) 06:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC))[reply]
Have revised this to make it NPOV. Previous version was almost comically not so: Criticism of Gopal was "in the Times" though in fact it was in many other places including Mail & social media. Whereas criticism of report was "widespread backlash from experts in..." despite only being sourced to Guardian. NBeale (talk) 06:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It might be worth pointing out PostcolonialLitNerd has only edited this article and nothing else since they first began editing Wikipedia in 2019. This might be (I say might) be relevant in relation to their objectivity. Atchom (talk) 20:41, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
To the importance point, very rarely does a single tweet lead to several articles in national newspapers (reference to The Times as a "tabloid" is simply incredible) and condemnation by a minister of the Crown in print. It's certainly more notable than the fact she occasionally writes for The New Humanist, as the lede lovingly states. Atchom (talk) 20:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have repeatedly searched that phrase and found nothing, but having to search itself goes to the point that this is original research even if the tweet has been deleted—if it’s not discussed in the secondary sources, it’s not appropriate for WP editors to be picking Tweets to formulate a narrative on their own. Innisfree987 (talk) 17:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I reverted PostcolonialLitNerd's edit as "Gopal's comments followed criticism of the report for downplaying the extent of racism in Britain" is not a connection made by the cited sources, who cover all sorts of other criticism, not Gopal. Pikavoom (talk) 07:16, 13 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I reverted Pikavoom's edit as there is a clear connection made by the cited sources for downplaying the extent of racism in Britain. See below.
- hundreds of experts on race, education, health and economics joined the criticism of the report for brazenly misrepresenting evidence of racism.
- She said: “It denies the role of racism in racial/ethnic inequalities in Covid, yet goes on to attribute these to deprivation and occupational exposures, which are the very definition of structural racism.
- “The report misrepresents, omits and elides longstanding and nuanced academic debate and evidence about the complex relationship between racism and educational practices, cultures, policies, and systems,” they added.
- The wider 258-page report has been criticised for ignoring or minimising the role of structural factors in disparities between ethnic groups
- said this conclusion missed the point about structural factors.
- Public health experts have condemned an official report on racial disparities in the UK as flawed and misleading for stating there was little evidence of systemic health differences due to ethnicity
- “The introduction’s depiction of the data on ethnic differences in life expectancy is misleading and shows a cherry-picking of studies and sources.”
- Determined to privilege comforting national myths over hard historical truths, they give the impression of being people who would prefer this history to be brushed back under the carpet
- Hakim Adi, professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester, told the Guardian that the report’s foreword failed to make clear that the subjugation of millions of African people was a crime against humanity.
- The British theologian Robert Beckford said it was consistent with the radical and “historical amnesia and vicious historical revisionism” of Caribbean and African history by the far right. Beckford, professor of Black theology at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, said the report had reduced slavery’s racial terror and Britain’s racial capitalism to a simple exchange of cultural ideas.PostcolonialLitNerd (talk) 06:30, 15 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have tried to engage in good faith with you but this is getting ridiculous. You are a single-purpose account which only edits this article and who only edits this article in a way to make Gopal look like a saint. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a place for hagiographies of your academic heroes. Atchom (talk) 23:49, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No, Atchom, you have not engaged in good faith, nor have you made any attempts to understand the legitimate objection I have to your edits. Moreover, it's instructive to note that you repeat The Times and Aaronovitch's slurs ("warrior for racial justice or a professional victim with a persecution complex" & "the Torquemada of the New Woke Inquisition") in your latest revision, which was subsequently removed by another user. You have repeatedly made bad faith changes to this article. I have carefully explained my changes in the edit summary. Your responses have been rude and accusatory - "you only edit this article to make Gopal look like a saint". Maybe it's time you start engaging with the substance of my arguments instead.
Perhaps we need some input from other experienced editors to help resolve this dispute. Richard Nevell, Philip Cross, JuleBor, Lajmmoore - see section on Tony Sewell.PostcolonialLitNerd (talk) 02:16, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
PostcolonialLitNerd, & hello all. I made a few copy edits to the page, but it seems like we are moving closer to a consensus for the time being. I say that advisedly, since:
  • The page now has an increased coverage of criticism of Gopal
  • The page includes reference to the Sewell report - which several editors aren't/weren't of the opinion that it warrants inclusion (see above)
  • Page contents are summaries of sources, and the fact there's several critical sources that readers can follow if they wish is a positive addition.
  • The caste issue has been added and reverted - twice. It needs reliable secondary sourcing - not original research, if it is to be included. If reliable secondary sources haven't discussed it explicitly, then we have to leave it out for now.
Looking forward to working together, further Lajmmoore (talk) 07:46, 20 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you so much for your work on the article and input. I also agree we are closer to achieving a consensus than before. Two further points for discussion:
1) The "BBC Radio 4: Start the Week" doesn't seem to have third-party coverage. I would merge it into the "Empire" subheading insofar this seems to have motivated Gopal to write on the subject, but otherwise it seems a bit transient as a "controversy" for its own section under Undue Weight.
2) I think the lede should have more than one sentence about the controversies, inasmuch the "Controversies" section constitutes a significant part of the article. It will need to be carefully worded, obviously, but I think there is scope for giving the reader a better idea of what's in the article. Atchom (talk) 19:24, 20 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Please see Wikipedia:Canvassing. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:06, 18 April 2021 (UTC).[reply]

PostcolonialLitNerd, please achieve consensus for your edits on the talk page before making them. Pikavoom (talk) 08:04, 20 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
PostcolonialLitNerd has been ideffed as a sock. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:10, 13 January 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Including Gopal's views based on articles published by Gopal

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Hi @OmegaPiii, I see you reverted my changes because the material came from relevant peer-reviewed publications. I don't think this can be a reason to include: Not every published opinion or finding by an academic need be included in the wiki page about them. It would be more relevant to include it in the wiki pages about the subject of the academic article, rather than the author. There must be hundreds of such examples on wikipedia of prolific and noted academics whose views are not reported (or advocated) in the way seen on the Gopal page. Take Timothy Winter as an example - some of his views are included, but only when 3rd party sources have mentioned them. I think including a list of publications as in the Winter example would be a reasonable alternative to a wiki-editor selected summary of Gopal's views as expressed in her published work. Samuelshraga (talk) 08:08, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that the material is peer-reviewed and cited in academic journals is reason enough to include it. Removing the material and other opinions also strips the article of context. Gopal's published and cited peer-reviewed work is relevant to her public profile because much of her public commentary derives from her academic work. The page does not include all her published work either. Numerous double-blind reviewed journal articles and books are not discussed despite having many journal citations. That some academics don't have published views reported on their wiki page is neither here nor there. OmegaPiii (talk) 06:36, 8 March 2024 (UTC) sock struck by Samuelshraga (talk) 15:17, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My objection is based on Wikipedia:PROPORTION - "An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject." The subject here is Priyamvada Gopal. The sources are not sources that address the question: "What are Priyamvada Gopal's views" - they are sources that are written by Gopal from which we have curated a selection of her views. The subject of this wikipedia page has written an awful lot over the years. It looks like she's regularly written columns in the Guardian and Al-Jazeera, and all of those could be used as Reliable Sources for her views.
The question then is on what basis we have selected these views from these articles - the fact that the essay "On Decolonisation and the University" is in a journal rather than the Guardian is not the issue. For example, she's sort of semi-prominently critical of the royal family (also happens to appear in "On Decolonisation and the University") and we don't cover that. Why? Because the sources for it are Gopal's own writings, and in tabloids which are generally not RS. So one is left wondering why a three paragraph summary of these particular aspects of "On Decolonisation and the University" is necessary for this article. I understand that this essay got a relatively high readership, but unless it received coverage in 3rd party sources, I don't see how this isn't over-coverage? Samuelshraga (talk) 07:02, 10 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion caught my attention because I happened to look at my watchlist and saw that @Samuelshraga had deleted it. Looking back at the edits under discussion, I tend to think that the additional, well-referenced information provided about Gopal's thought was worthwhile and interesting. Readers don't have to read every section of the article if they don't want to. The additions that Samuelshraga deleted were about Gopal's views on race and decolonisation, which are central to her thought and public profile, and detailed coverage of those seems entirely proportionate to me. Alarichall (talk) 14:01, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Alarichall. I deleted the above talk discussion (as I wrote in summary) because it was between me and a sock of @PostcolonialLitNerd. I guess if you want to continue the discussion restoring it would be fine, although a new section without the sock comments might be an alternative?
On the issue itself, the view that her views on race and decolonisation are central to her public profile is a subjective judgement, and I would encourage you to find Reliable Sources to make that point, and/or which summarise her views on race and decolonisation (so that wikipedia editors don't then have to make the independent judgement of which of her writings are salient enough to paraphrase and summarise, or to do what is clearly WP:OR and synthesise her entire corpus). At that point proportionate coverage of her views on these issues on this page will not see objection from me.
For now, given that much of the material was originally added by PLN, and the gatekeeping has been done by PLN socks for years at this point, perhaps we'll leave it off until PLN's next sock re-adds it? Samuelshraga (talk) 15:14, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

“White lives don’t matter” comment, why isn't this notable

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In 2020 Gopal commented that “white lives don't matter” and this was heavily covered. This is yet another example of her making controversial and inflammatory statements why hasn't this been included?

It was quite well covered and Cambridge university stood behind her.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/25/cambridge-defends-academic-said-white-lives-dont-matter/

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/cambridge-professor-white-lives-twitter-110355066.html


Helpingtoclarify (talk) 03:26, 22 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, it is notable. It was removed by @Seaweed here.
I pointed out what I think was Seaweed's misunderstanding in the Excessive Detail section of this talk page but didn't receive a reply. Samuelshraga (talk) 12:28, 25 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Prospect magazine in the lede?

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I decided to look if people named one of Prospect's top thinkers tend to have this in their wikipedia page, or in the lede. Going through the 2021 list of 50, just 2 other individuals had Prospect magazine's picking them in 2021 mentioned: Jacob Hanna in the body of the article, and Carlo Rovelli in the lede.

3 others from the 2021 list have mentions that they were selected for earlier iterations composed or published at least partly by Prospect included in the body of their articles, generally as part of a section discussing honours and accolades they've received. So saying, I don't think this mention is justified in our lede, and unless there is objection, I'll move it to the body of the article. Samuelshraga (talk) 14:06, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, I think the article should have an awards and recognition section, but equally, I think the lead should also summarise what is in that section (if it gets added) ... so I guess my answer is both! Lajmmoore (talk) 14:30, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think a good idea. I see that she was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. Do you know of any other awards or honours? Samuelshraga (talk) 14:38, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you help find reviews of Literary Radicalism in India?

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Would anyone be able to help me find reviews of Gopal's first book, Literary Radicalism in India? I haven't found any via the usual routes (general internet searches, scholar.google.com, my university library catalogue, jstor, archive.org). But I guess there might be reviews in Indian publications that aren't available online, and I wonder if anyone here with more specialist expertise than me can help? For example, I have found in 'snippet view' on Google Books Harish Trivedi, review of Literary Radicalism in India in The Book Review, 30 (2006), 89-90, but I can't access it, and I wonder if there might be more reviews like that out there.

The reason why I'm asking is that several times in discussions on Priyamvada Gopal, people have noted the bias towards covering media furores rather than Gopal's scholarly contributions. So I've written articles on her second and third books (The Indian English Novel and Insurgent Empire), partly so that readers of Priyamvada Gopal can more easily find out about her work, partly in the hope that we might be able to feed information from those articles into Priyamvada Gopal. I've synthesised those articles out of reviews, but can't so far do that with Literary Radicalism in India. Moreover, it would be convenient to be able to cite two reviews in order to demonstrate notabiity.

By the way, while I'm here, while I was looking for these reviews, I found that there's now some academic coverage of the media spats discussed in Priyamvada Gopal, so we could try shifting coverage towards academic studies and away from primary-source newspaper articles. These caught my eye:

Thanks for any help anyone can give! Alarichall (talk) 23:52, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You will have to persuade editors that the books are notable enough to qualify for a stand-alone article. Multiple reviews and scholarly citations will be helpful to show this. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:12, 13 January 2025 (UTC).[reply]
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