A fact from The Hand That Signed the Paper appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 30 June 2025 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that despite winning Australia's top literary prize, The Hand That Signed the Paper has since been labelled a hoax?
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.NovelsWikipedia:WikiProject NovelsTemplate:WikiProject Novelsnovel
The Hand That Signed the Paper is within the scope of WikiProject Australia, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Australia and Australia-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.AustraliaWikipedia:WikiProject AustraliaTemplate:WikiProject AustraliaAustralia
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women writers, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of women writers on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women writersWikipedia:WikiProject Women writersTemplate:WikiProject Women writersWomen writers
The Hand That Signed the Paper is a book written by Helen Dale; "The Hand That Signed the Paper" is a poem written by Dylan Thomas. Given that these titles are the same (with the exception of italics versus quotation marks), this page likely should be a disambiguation page rather than a redirect page.2600:1700:9B40:3BF0:887E:C4B1:F6AB:4C6A (talk) 18:45, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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.
Overall: Article moved to mainspace. QPQ done. Well-written and engaging hook, properly cited. Meets all criteria with prep from GA status. GTG. Toadboy123 (talk) 02:48, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A note for any admin reviewing this while it is in a quo or prep, Earwig shows 41.2%, however this is as a result of proper nouns and quotes. TarnishedPathtalk11:39, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I will take on this review! For prose, I prefer to make small changes myself (to save us both time), and only comment here if I have a question, but of course as always if you dislike any of my changes you should feel free to discuss or revert. The article looks very thorough, I look forward to learning more about this book. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:08, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I tried out some bold re-organization of the headers to address some of my concerns below, which I hope will be a useful starting point for thinking about the organization/flow of the article. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:56, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks so much @LEvalyn! All very helpful comments, and thanks for the new headers and making the organisation much clearer. Have left some replies below. MCE89 (talk) 14:43, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your work on this article! I concluded my source review, and then since the only thing left was an image with slightly ambiguous licensing, I boldly made a swap so the GA review can conclude more expeditiously. The article was a fascinating read and I enjoyed getting to poke in to all the sources too -- great work! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:46, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No red flags vis-a-vis RS. What an exquisite references section -- this looks like an article on its way to FA. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Book cover has an appropriate fair use rationale. It's a shame in such a long article to have so little illustration, though the quote from the report is a nice idea to have something. It doesn't look like there are photos available of the author, but are there images of key critics, important locations, historical events (within reason), the prize award itself...? ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a few images — to be honest I'm pretty sure I just got frustrated after failing to find any directly relevant images and gave up, but it should look a bit nicer now with some slightly more indirectly relevant images throughout. MCE89 (talk) 14:43, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These are great! I definitely sympathize with the lack of more directly relevant images, but all of these are clearly related to the sections where you've placed them, with very helpful captions.
However, I see that the photo of John Demjanjuk is tagged as "License review needed", and I can't confirm on the source page myself that it really was released as creative commons. How about substituting this one for now, which does have a solid license? All the other licenses look good. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:27, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not a requirement, but the "Analysis" section reads more like a "Later reception" section, since it just picks up analysis chronologically from where the previous sections left off. Maybe re-name it? ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, thank you for suggesting the new headers! I did split back out two paragraphs though, since I think it might be clearer to separate the social/cultural analysis of the whole episode from the "later reception" of the book itself. Open to a better name for this section though, let me know what you think. MCE89 (talk) 14:43, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think the split out section works great. It's possible that the current last two paragraphs of "later reception" could also be framed as "analysis", as a thought for the future. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:27, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relatedly, it might be nice to split out some "Style" or "Major themes", since almost the whole article is focused on various aspects of the reception. It's plenty broad enough for GA (so, not a requirement here), but if you are thinking of FA, that kind of analysis would be good to include for comprehensiveness. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hm, good suggestion, might ponder this one for a bit. The sources are all very heavily focused on the reaction to the author's identity and on debating whether or not the book is anti-semitic, but I think there's probably enough that I could split out a section on style and themes if I had another read of a few of the sources. Not sure I'm going to have time to add this right away, but might keep this one in mind if I do end up trying to take this to FA. MCE89 (talk) 14:43, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I think there's lots of material for a section headed "Postmodernism" here! And there's lots of comments about the unemotional style sprinkled throughout. Just an idea for future refinements. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:42, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I pondered the "focus" criteria for a bit. There's definitely no WP:COATRACK problem here, but the article gives a very extensive and detailed blow-by-blow of everything, which could probably be distilled more concisely. It might help to introduce sub-sections in long sections, like the "Background". Would you be game to give it a "concision" editing pass? The whole article is extremely interesting, but also intimidatingly hefty. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, definitely a fair point. I've gone through and cut about 1000 words — how does it look now? I've never been any good at forcing myself to be concise, so let me know if there are any sections that you think still need to be slimmed down further. MCE89 (talk)
For my source check of 10% of the sources, I'll look at cites 14, 21, 41, 45, 46, 49, 51, 55, 56, 60, 87, 110, 118, 126, 142, 149, 166, and 178 as numbered in this diff. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't able to access 13 (Gunew 1996a, p. 3) so I checked 14 (Alba 2019, p. 285), which entirely supports the preceding two sentences. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For 21 (Smith 2019, p. 65), I can't find any of the cited information in the source. The information does appear in 20 (Manne 1996, p. 14) so I suggest cutting the cite to Smith and just using Manne. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For 56 (Ryan 2003, p. 170) I see this information on p 218 of Ryan, not p 170, though this may just be a matter of differing editions. You may want to update or double check the page number. But since specific page numbers are not required at GA and the information itself verifies, this is just a suggestion. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For 142 (Vice 2000, pp. 140–141) I see the material on p 183 but again this may just be editions varying in pagination and is not a problem. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:42, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I did make some small edits myself since both Manne 1996, p. 112 and Manne 1996, pp. 185–186 were pretty close paraphrase, which might be something for you to be on the lookout for in future. Close paraphrase and concision are probably two "areas of future growth" that will help solve each other -- the more you're extracting simple events rather than whole detailed phrases from the sources, the less risk there is of close paraphrase. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:42, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Another possible section for the future would be one on publication. For example, chapter 6 of Vice says that the book is not available in the US or UK for legal reasons, which is worth noting. And it would be useful to spell out the publication date for the first version and the modified one under the name Darville. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:42, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.