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Edward the Martyr has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Articles are typically reviewed for one week. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here.
Article fails on inaccuracy and bias
Edward was thirteen when he became king in 975 and sixteen when he was murdered, and his reign was marked by conflict between his supporters and those of his younger half brother and successor, Ethelred. A principal cause was Edward's (or his clerical advisers') policy of giving large land holdings to monasteries at the expense of the nobility, and as the article on Ethelred points out, since history was then written in monasteries, there is an inevitable bias in the sources in favour of Edward. The article on Edward almost wholly adopts the view of his supporters, and indeed seems to be partly based on Orthodox and Catholic web sites justifying Edward's designation as a saint, such as [1] The article even uncritically repeats accounts of miracles such as a blind woman miraculously recovering her sight so that she could discover Edward's body.
The article's descriptions of Edward's holy character seem to be based on these religious sources, such as an article in an American Orthodox publication quoting Theodoric Paulus. I have been unable to find anything about who Theodoric was and when and where he lived, and Googling him only finds this quote from him. It is contradicted by the description of Edward (quoted from the article on Ethelred but also cited in the article on Edward) of Edward's "intolerable violence of speech and behaviour".
A prime example of bias is the description of Edward's opponents as "irreligious", a prejudicial comment which has no place in a Wikipedia article, and hardly compatible with the fact, as stated in the article, that the opponents included Saint Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester and a leader of the monastic reform movement.
There are major contradictions between this article and the one on Ethelred. For example, the article on Edward states that Ethelred's mother was present at his murder and probably murdered him herself, whereas the one on Ethelred states that there is no evidence to support the allegation, which first appeared in print a century later, although it was carried out by members of her household.
This is the poorest Wikipedia article on an English King I remember reading, and certainly does not deserve designation as a 'Good Article'.
Dudleymiles ( talk) 20:25, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
- I don't think it's any poorer than Eadwig's is, or Eadred's was before Cavila started working on it. But that's not really the issue. We have started work on expanding and improving the dull historical aspects of the article. Some of the hagiography will need redoing as well. However, I think we probably need rather more than a week. There have been some improvements so far, but obviously more is needed. Angus McLellan (Talk) 23:01, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
- I consulted with the original nominator, User:Dudleymiles, who is now content with the state of the article, so I'm closing the review. Lampman ( talk) 17:00, 12 August 2009 (UTC)