Talk:Conversations about Important Things

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A fact from Conversations about Important Things appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 27 November 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that students who do not attend Conversations about Important Things lessons face expulsion or police investigation?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Conversations about Important Things.

Wikipedia

Comments

In the Reception section, I think it's important to note that a lot of teachers and parents in Russia aren't happy with the initiative
Re the Christmas lesson, I would simply call it "Christmas Holiday"
Immortal Regiment should be wikilinked
Re the 12 September 2022 class, the criticism is less about the specific phrase about dying for your motherland (which has a long history) but rather about the politicising the school and imposing an ideology there.

Alaexis_¿question? 12:10, 4 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay Alaexis, I've tried my best to add more content to the article. As I take another break from the topic to combat the effects of doomscrolling, what do you think of the draft so far? --Minoa (talk) 20:14, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks very good, I think it can be published already. Just two comments

The course was developed by the Institute for Education Development Strategy. Let's use the same name in the first sentence.
You're relying on the information from Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group for the following statement the lessons continued to actively reference the war in Ukraine, and also considered the meaning of Important Conversations to be superficial, since anyone who questioned the official Russian perspective faced fines, loss of job, or prison. The first part is not controversial but the second part is a bit vague. Does it refer to people who question the official Russian perspective in general, or specifically in the context of Important Conversations lessons? If it's the former it's true but not relevant to this article. If it's the latter it would be good to have more sources confirming that people have indeed been fined, jailed and fired. In general, I would use Ukrainian sources for topics in which they have expertise (e.g., the reception of these lessons in the occupied territories). There are plenty of other sources like international human rights organisations and Russian opposition media that we can use.

Alaexis_¿question? 07:07, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Alaexis:, it refers to people being unable to question the official Russian perspective, making the term "conversations" meaningless. I decided to remove the second part for being unclear. --Minoa (talk) 16:33, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Submission stage

@Alaexis: I am not doing well in RL so I wonder how we can speed up the review of this draft? --Minoa (talk) 11:08, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are 3,400 drafts waiting. If you are confident, AfC is not mandatory and you can move it yourself. Star Mississippi 11:57, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies, I didn't realise you've been waiting for an approval. I'm not part of the Articles for Creation project and so I cannot formally approve the draft. However the AfC is not mandatory and you can move the article to the mainspace yourself (technically, you'll need to create a new article and copy-paste everything from this draft to it). I urge you to do it, your draft is already very good! Alaexis_¿question? 18:05, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was offline, but glad this is sorted. Just for a note for the future, you can skip cut, paste, deletion and just move the article from one namespace to the other. Star Mississippi 20:57, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Destination title

The destination title is Conversations about Important Things. --Minoa (talk) 01:25, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

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 PrimalMustelid talk 19:44, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that one of the lessons in Conversations about Important Things almost taught children as young as nine that it was "not scary to die for the Motherland"? Sources: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-schoolchildren-patriotic-education-ukraine-war/32016144.html, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/02/russian-schoolchildren-return-to-classrooms-changed-by-war-a78706 and https://web.archive.org/web/20220831124525/https://razgovor-cdn.edsoo.ru/media/file/ourcountry-34-script.pdf (in Russian, supplementary source)
- Reviewed:
- Comment: The controversy over the "not scary to die for the Motherland" passage has been in my mind since watching that NFKRZ video. Nevertheless I have tried to provide WP:RS for verification.

Created by Minoa (talk). Self-nominated at 18:50, 15 October 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Conversations about Important Things; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

It looks like this phrase was eventually removed from the curriculum [1]. So the statement is technically true but the word "almost" does a lot of work there. Are there other factoids that can be used for DYK? Alaexis_¿question? 07:07, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
ALT 1: ... that one of the lessons in Conversations about Important Things proposed telling children as young as nine that Russia was "more precious" than life, and that it was "not scary" to die for Russia? Sources: see original submission

Although the passage got a lot of coverage, I also heard something about the lessons not actually being legal because of some law that prohibits political propaganda in schools, but I think I need a better source than https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/20/putin-russia-schools-ukraine. --Minoa (talk) 12:31, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My point is that it's likely that no children were actually taught this. The CS Monitor explicitly says that the Ministry of Education has revised the course material to respond to parents’ objections, to remove ... the honorable nature of dying for Russia. So a more NPOV version would be "... that following a controversy it was decided not to tell children that it's honorable to die for Russia.

So maybe it's better to use something that actually happened, for example

ALT2 "... that Conversations about Important Things were seen as an attempt to introduce propaganda to school and were unpopular with many teachers and parents"

ALT3 "... that Russian parents who didn't want their children to attend Conversations about Important Things got into trouble"

I realise that it's less eye-catching, but I think it's better to mention things that did happen. Just to be clear, I cannot approve this submission since I've offered my own alternatives, someone will review it - it may take some time. Alaexis_¿question? 19:48, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ALT 4: ... that students who did not attend a Conversations about Important Things lesson face expulsion or a police interrogation? Sources: https://www.dw.com/en/mandatory-patriotism-classes-in-russian-schools/a-63687952 and https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/17/russian-tv-airs-wartime-patriotism-lessons-for-schoolchildren-a80253

ALT 5: ... that students who refuse to participate in Conversations about Important Things lessons face being investigated by the police? Source as above

--Minoa (talk) 20:10, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ALT 6 (country clarification): ... that students in Russia can be investigated by the police for not attending Conversations about Important Things lessons? Source as ALT 4

--Minoa (talk) 21:07, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ALT4 is both very hooky and supported by two cites, which directly state the claims. Other than that everything is GTG - new enough, long enough, well cited and overall rather fascinating and topical - looking at a yearly leader here methinks. Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:37, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Nice work

North8000 (talk) 17:48, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Missing week

Can anyone figure out why the official website does not have a theme for 6 November 2023? I do not know if there is a directive that made the theme for 30 October 2023 two weeks long, and there is a gap in the sequence of accessible URLs (i.e. …/topic/67 for 30 October, but …/topic/69 for 13 November 2023). --Minoa (talk) 18:29, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]